Join us for the opening of POSTCART at Pico Pico Cafe in Kichijoji! The exhibition features over 100 postcard-sized programs by various artists, each producing an animation in less than 300 characters of PICO-8 code. Works are presented as physical cards with source code printed on the back, and visitors are invited to insert them into a custom cart-reading machine for viewing in animated form.
Pico Pico Cafe is a 3-minute walk from Kichijoji Station, 15 minutes by train from Shinjuku or Shibuya [map] The cafe / bar is also open during exhibition hours:
| 2026-11-20 (Fri) | 14:00 ~ 22:00 OPENING PARTY 7pm~ |
| 2026-11-21 (Sat) | 14:00 ~ 21:00 |
| 2026-11-22 (Sun) | 14:00 ~ 22:00 PICOTACHI 7pm~ |
| 2026-11-23 (Mon) | 14:00 ~ 21:00 |
| 2026-11-24 (Tue) | 16:00 ~ 20:00 |
| 2026-11-25 (Wed) | 16:00 ~ 20:00 |
| 2026-11-26 (Thu) | 16:00 ~ 20:00 |
| 2026-11-27 (Fri) | 14:00 ~ 21:00 |
| 2026-11-28 (Sat) | 14:00 ~ 21:00 |
The opening party (no RSVP required) starts at 19:00 on Friday the 20th, with a short presentation and live postcard coding demo from 20:00. The cafe is also open from 14:00 beforehand.
Post-sized cartridges (or "postcarts") are a descendant of the "tweetcart" scene that sprang into existence with Adam Saltsman's Tweetjam thread in 2016, inviting participants to write programs that fit in a single 140-character tweet.
With Twitter's character limit expansion to 280 characters, the tweetcart format evolved with it and ushered in a new era of creativity shared by the Twitter community under the #tweetcart hashtag. This golden era of tweetcarts faded after the social media landscape began to reshuffle in early 2023, and the "postcart" name and format were proposed as a way to keep the spirit of tweetcarts alive in a platform-independent form, and with a slightly larger character limit (300).
The tiny code size combined with PICO-8's limited 128x128 display creates a format that is not only a technical challenge, but a cosy medium. A postcart can be like a poem that unfolds upon closer inspection, a focused place to explore ideas, or simply to converse with fellow postcart authors through the language of visual design. To discover a postcart adrift on the internet is to open a message in a bottle laced with ASMR.
POSTCART is curated and hosted by Pico Pico Cafe, the home of the PICO-8 Fantasy Console that postcart programs run on. We are excited to present a view into the colourful world of postcarts!