j33p33
@chilkathaiku:
One crinite, wheen pillion down mistigris.
The kanji, ane mayhap thwart ambergris. iambicpent
bot-generated poetry. I always told you lit was computer art!
Finally, for once, Im in an unusual position of being able to just get on
with it and tell you all about the great stuff in this artpack without first
having to sum up two decades of technological innovation. Since reviving in
2014, theres been a great deal of necessary heres where we left off and
in case you forgot or never knew, let me explain ANSI art and BBSes in
infofiles. But here we are, and for the first time since 1998, weve
released two new artpack collections in two consecutive months. In fact,
its probably been around that long since ANYONE released two artpacks in
two consecutive months! So without further ado, I consider you all up to
speed and am pleased to introduce to you: the present.
Its an uneasy kind of place to be, a place that we really couldnt have
anticipated being a mere three weeks ago. Geopolitically, I mean. And
despite the best of intentions and extensive preparations, delays and
obstacles kept piling on: starting with an innocent baby dumping her
mothers full mug of coffee on a laptop and simply escalating from there --
the next stop was the decapitation of my AC adaptor... and so forth. But
despite the clear and present disapproving signs the gods of antiquated
electronic culture have shown me repeatedly, nothing short of a meteor
landing on my house will hold back this enormous artpack, containing over
200 megs of art representing over 200 individual artworks by approximately
60 participants ... and even if that giant space rock does light upon my
roof, the relevant files are mirrored in the cloud. But if youre reading
this, its incontrovertible evidence that the artpack managed somehow to
escape the event horizon of the black hole computer art creates on my hard
drive when accumulated in sufficient quantities.
Putting this one together has been quite a bit more work than I anticipated,
due to what could be characterised as a nice problem to have: excessive
participation! I did it again -- I invited everyone to take part, got antsy
waiting for nearly six months without hearing of much interest, and went out
to rustle up art on my own so as not to end up in the humiliating position
of being committed to presenting a ghost town of an artpack. Only once I
had secured substantial substitute artpack contents after enormous
quantities of hustling from some very unusual and unlikely sources did
everyone I initially invited return with submissions, yielding at least TWO
artpacks worth of material. Three or four is more like it MIST1016,
which you really ought to check out if you havent yet, was just a little
exercise in venting the spooky late-October content wed accumulated for a
thematically coherent collection before this, the main attraction, hit the
stage. But even freed from the eerie weight of those pieces, theres just
... well, I dont want to damn myself by saying too much, so Ill just
say: this artpack contains much of a muchness.
Im going to go on a bit of a whiz-bang highlights reel grand tour of the
artpacks contents here, but before I do: my sincerest apologies for failing
to represent absolutely every participant here -- there is a place where
every contributor is celebrated, and that place is the memberlist file,
which you will probably find right next to this one. If this was just that
comprehensive, it wouldnt be a highlights reel, but a bonsai artpack,
completely replicated in an unsatisfying miniature textual form. So if I
dont mention your contributions here, fear not -- they will, in time, be
revisited in painfully exacting detail as part of the daily Mistigram post
on four flavours of social media.
2016 has been a year of increasing outward-facing for Mistigris -- when I
revived the crew in 2014, I never expected that anyone would be interested
beyond our own not inconsiderable pool of historical alumni. But no fewer
than three artists appearing in this artpack -- Freddy43, Creonix, and
cccfire -- represented Mistigris placing and winning outright in a few
categories before judges and committees at several demoparties this year, a
number unmatched since our demoscene peak in 1997! In addition, we were
able to achieve some outreach at the recent Syntax Party by having the
trailer for this artpack shown on the big screen so in case youre
wondering, everybody, just like to all the listeners who heard our
retrospective on midnight radio with the Art of Beatz -- this is it, the
artpack whose release we were promoting is finally here. We jumped the gun
a little bit in getting the word out, but we hope that you havent grown
cold in waiting for it! Hopefully 2017 will see more of us working
together on projects external to That Giant Artpack Every Autumn. Well see.
Because what we now see as the classic mediums of the 90s artscene werent
at that time conspicuous exercises in nostalgia but rather... just doing what
we could with the tools we had available... we have been continuing along in
our campaign to include in our artpack collections not just classic
computer art styles of tracker music and textmode art but also current and
contemporary mediums for computer art: though the Pokmon Go landscape
photography fell though, we do feature one literary work translated into
emoji an undertaking wed been actively soliciting since before last years
artpack! and a distinctly unsettling Snapchat face-swap. Do what you can
with the tools that you have! Weve got found poems and readymades!
Further trying to correct the mistakes Mistigris made in 1998 regarding the
inclusion of real world artforms, we continue expanding their
representation here with collages by Arielle Olivier, an inktober comic by
Claire Roberts, the drawings of Theresa Oborn, photography by Diane
Smithers and Dubaiwalla, an entire suite of Delphine Hennellys deeply
intriguing selfie sister paintings dont blame her, I belive I came up
with that label in which technology is not the medium but the subject, with
further splendid paintings by Jenn Ashton, the Mythical Man, Maeve Wolf and
Unseen Fate... plus the eye-popping canvas colour studies of Nick Lakowski
who has fond memories of the BBS era that are totally unrepresented in his
current work, each piece of which comes with a bonus poem -- its title!
You will already have noticed an extraordinary thread running through the
music in this years collection: a rich vein of accordion-playing runs
through the first few tunes here, but far from trying to crassly shoehorn my
unrelated hobbies in to an artpack, I think that these recordings effectively
capture compelling aspects to electronic musics -- in this case, the Square
console RPG soundtracks covered by An Historic and Anton van Oosbrees
squeezebox rendition of a Daft Punk song. These are the kinds of ideas I
would have eventually snuck into my artpack myself, but happily they have
already done the heavy lifting for me. And its not all accordion ooh, but
did you see the poster art for my accordion festival Elin Jonsson of
Afterland fame allowed me to include here? wow! while the basic
electronica types managed to somehow avoid us this year, there are several
pieces of straight-up circa-1998 classical computer music from Orangeboxman,
plus ... whatever the impeccably-named Desolation Sound is Soundcloud bio
reads Plunderphonics and Folk-Noise, that works! and a sadly timely
release of Perpetual Dream Theorys 2006 tribute to Leonard Cohen. It was
a catastrophic year all around, with no fewer than two tributes --
non-musical -- to David Bowie, whose death kicked of the year and started
everything unravelling.
Casting our nets wide resulted in ensnaring more than a few artscene
outsiders, few further outside than Chris Godber, whose included game
Glitch marks the first Mistigris game release since 1997 lets... not
count MIST2000s inclusion of 1998s Onyx Arcade II -- conspicuously still
in the interactive fiction idiom where we left off with Kithe 14! -- plus
his paintings and intriguing conceptual pieces from his colleague from The
Tunnel Jamie Stantonian.
Speaking of outsiders -- all those lits we released back in the day werent
by and large submitted to us by artscene participants, they were just
postings intercepted on local BBSes and echomail networks that were captured
and sometimes requested for reprinting. In a sense, that was probably the
strength of our lit division: they had no interest in being part of the art
scene, they just wanted to produce interesting writing. It is much the same
today: I have begged permission to reprint plenty of micropoems seemingly
all most people can get txted out with their thumbs on their phones today
pertaining to technology and the everyday experience of life in our
traditional stomping grounds of Vancouver, plus a substantial body of
micropoems by our classic colleague Crowkeeper culled from Twitter which
take on a qualitative transformation into a species of literary monument
solely by virtue of their sheer quantity, an entire year shared in stark
moments of observation and introspection in the most poetically affected
diction imaginable. Needless to say, its a major achievement. Also make
sure not to pass up Chris Brayshaws poem: the man is the proprietor of
Vancouvers best bookstore, he had no choice but to become literary purely
by osmosis.
Its easy too easy? to skip over the lits I know you do it was the big
shocker when we saw the file-by-file traffic breakdown of MIST1014 from
sixteencolors but one thing that cant be overlooked or ignored is the
massive footprint felt here of the ANSI-like textmode visual medium of
teletext, which basically dominates this artpack -- first with a few
strategically chosen pieces by last years breakout star Illarterate, here
celebrating the characters of the British comix tradition, but then with a
seemingly endless promenade of virtuous pop culture cameo appearances from
his alphabetically adjacent colleague Horsenburger, who mints more of these
on a daily basis... and weve only just skimmed the cream! For the love of
God, someone please slow him down a little bit with some paid commissions!
Speaking of paid commissions, its truly gobsmacking to observe just how far
Lord Nikons typewriter art has progressed in the 13 months since we
released his first experiments into the ASCII-like artform. The photos are
high resolution for a reason, allowing you to zoom way in to appreciate the
realms of detail he implies with individual keystrokes. As far as other
textmode art fellow travellers go, we are again graced with further
ShiftJIS art by Kalcha, whose diverse spread of interests all receive the
laser-like intensity of his conversion focus. And due to purely
alphabetical circumstances, we find a bizarre concentration of ANSI art
nearly at the very end of the alphabet... where we switch tracks and
highlight the evocative works of Yaimel Lopez, perhaps the first time an
artpack has ever featured work from Cuba. Bienvenido, Yaimel!
Other MIST1116 highlights might include reNM8rs seemingly time-travelling
reappearance, as if picking up seamlessly from his Mist Classic work in the
mid 90s, Starstews Picasso-like diversity of styles demonstated to be on
tap, and xer0s glitch works -- as emblematic of the computer art of today
as ANSI art was of 1994. And finally, a special thanks to Nail for again!
providing the textmode iconography needed to allow these artpacks to happen
according to the prescribed rituals of the old artscene traditions!
Anyhow, I could go on forever and I will, just you watch our social media
accounts! but this isnt just about my ability to write at a marathon pace
-- any readers still with us deserve some kind of nominal conclusion to
reward their patience with. So thanks for hanging in here and indulging us,
we hope that you find much of interest within this collection. Will we be
doing monthly artpacks from now on? Ha ha, that would kill me. But
hopefully we will find a happier medium, some golden mean of regular
activity throughout the year rather than an annual violent spasm of art
discharge. Anything is possible.
-- Cthulu, Nov 23, 2016
8o X 5o REMiXED
/ / / / / / / / / / sI
IIIII I /I/I /I/I/ /IIIII/I III
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii/iiiiiiiiiiii/iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii/iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
mISTIGRIS / tEXT aRTS
Mistigis 2016: Anything is possible!
If youd like to work with us or just let us know what hoopy froods you think
we are, please dont hesitate to look us up at mistigris.org or on social
media.
And no infofile would be complete without... greetings to Blocktronics, Break,
Galza, Impure, Dezign, Hornet, Hack Canada, pen15 see? Im paying
attention!, the Vancouver Chipmusic Society, Concrete and TABNet...
iLF is gonna rock ya!