Mistigris computer arts

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Happy New Year’s Eve!  We made it through Christmas 2014 serving up literally hundreds of downloads for the re-release of our long-thought-lost December 1994 music disk The Bells of Yule, and as we approach the end of this year’s winter holiday season (12 Days of Christmas nonwithstanding) it’s apropos to draw things to a close with “1995 - A Rave”, a song released the month after (01/95) the original launch of the Bells of Yule music disk – before it was lost.


The song found itself remastered as part of Melodia’s push to release, well, the “Skeletons In My Closet” we already told you about in an earlier post, and as it was used back in 1995 to welcome the arrival of a New Year, we will be using it today for much the same purpose.




[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/152160455" params="color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]


(Pictured: “Sunrise in Cyberspace” by Tzeentch, representing a different kind of new beginning, included in the same archive as the song, MIST0195.ZIP)

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9kjKwrUTqc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Here it is, the culmination of our multimedia Christmas presentations: sounds and sights to beggar the imagination.  Well, ASCIIs and ANSIs, poems and meet reviews, high resolution works and all set to the strains of tracker music.  December 1997, this marked a rare demonstration of Sylphid’s MAGnum engine for generating e-mags (electronic magazines).

There are lots of little details at the video description over at YouTube including a full credits roll; some of the highlights include a Christmificated menu set for the DoDEL BBS and a surprise soundtrack switch when we begin displaying artwork by Silent Knight.


Not every part of the program was 100% functional run through DOSBox in 2014, so a few poems which failed to load were magically inserted back into the video, scrolling by at a much happier 14.4k baud.  Also a pair of monochrome logos from the pack’s FILE_ID.DIZ and infofile were tacked on as bookends, because the whole darned presentation was in a seasonal mode.

That just about concludes our look back at Mistigris’ Christmases past.  The well has run dry!  If we want to show you any new Christmassy computer art, we’re going to have to make more.  Hope it helped to give you an oldschool Christmas for 2014!

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

No Mistigris December 1996 festivities due to the Mistigris World Tour in progress, but here’s a holdout from nearly a year earlier – January of ‘96, a straggler from the pack of Dec '95 pieces in yesterday’s post.  This is a typically strange work by Grim Reaper aka Thanatos, so bizarre (happy holidays – enjoy my initials spelled out in urine!) that you just know it had to be his authentic work rather than some manipulation of a found source.

This is, of course, a representation of a scene from Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas.  Theodor Geisel never spelled out “MIST” in Christmas tree ornaments, but this inexplicable omission was here addressed.

Sorry for the micro-post, turns out our December '97 multimedia Christmas extravaganza I was planning on blogging today was even more bombastic than I’d realized, and has taken longer than expected for me to get into a shape suitable for presentation here.  Hopefully by tomorrow!

Monday, December 22, 2014

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l29i4vQx__A?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Christmas 2014 is nearly here!  We won’t be able to mine the past for holiday material indefinitely, so we’re hauling as much out of the stacks and middens for your inspection and enjoyment as we can now: the remastered re-release of The Bells of Yule, Cthulu’s 2001 ASCII Art Christmas card… Yesterday you got to see & enjoy our Christmas 1994 intro and some supplementary seasonal ANSIs and lits, and today we magically skip forward a whole year, sharing the greatly-expanded Christmas 1995 intro released (belatedly) as DCXMAS95.ZIP in the MIST0196.ZIP artpack.

As before, this one was spearheaded by Dr. CPU, and now includes a straightfoward programmed “snowfall” effect as well as several ANSIs and a strange piece of high-resolution artwork… all to the splendidly strange seasonal sounds of Sentience, who was at this time releasing music as part of EuphoniX – lightly skipping over the complicated occasion of Christmas, he instead opts for the traditional tune “Old Lang Syne” as written by Scottish poet Robbie Burns… but in a super ‘90s electronic arrangement.  (He is also responsible for the “Mist” logo on the bottom right of that scary Santa skull.  Amiga users, they were all polymaths.)

Full credits in the YouTube video description!  Merry Christ'mist!

Sunday, December 21, 2014

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VZ8wNA8_Rc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

20 years ago, it was just another month on BBSes, and underground computer artists continued along in their low-resolution hobby same as they ever did, minting blocky logos for BBSes and waiting for busy signals to resolve into symphonies of modem handshakes.  But December being what it is, and us being a bunch of kids, the occasion of Christmas was looming large in our collective subconscious.  So here’s what you get:

Resident coder Dr. CPU drew on some sound libraries and logos (and, all right, did some programming of his own as well 8) to put together a joint “intro”, an executable MS-DOS program that displayed scrolling pictures and text while playing music, acting as a multimedia Christmas card from the members of Mistigris and our fellow travellers in would-be 604 demogroup Sonic Equinox.  It was released in our third artpack, MIST1294.ZIP.

But that’s not all the Christmas content that was to be found in that pack, so as a bonus, I’ve presented our two grand Christmas ANSI and lit (or poetry) “collies” – compilations glommed together into a single large file – scrolling by at a respectable period speed of 2400 baud… to the sweet strains of the first part of the Bells of Yule, which appeared in that artpack as a preview of sorts to the music disk we released later that month featuring all five parts, which was subsequently lost for 16 years and just this week re-issued in a remastered form.


(Full credits in the description of the video over at YouTube!)


We released another Christmas intro the following year, but … one post at a time!

Saturday, December 20, 2014

A writer of poems, I had long aspired to achieve a species of illuminated text – a poem calligraphically written out in visual typography… specifically in my preferred medium of labour-intensive ANSI or ASCII fonts, a generally graffiti-derived idiom. Steps toward this cyber-concrete-poetry were realized in the All-Stars experiment at Evoke 1999, but more was needed. But the year was 2001, and though there were still textmode fontists to be found in the wild, I lacked sufficient pull with any active artists to compel them to put the hours and sweat needed to make my words pop off the screen with the commission of original logos for my powerful words.


The occasion was Christmas 2001, and now living away from my parents’, I wanted to show my new independence as an artistic adult and make a run of Christmas cards. But I didn’t like the idea of celebrating that consumeristically co-opted clichéd religious occasion Christmas – so concluded I could achieve the same effect more palatably by refashioning them as winter solstice cards… in a sense, taking back the reason for the season. A few words about darkness and rebirth would do the trick – a very short poem by poetry standards, somehow managing to contradict itself in places, but apparently more coherent when viewed atomically in segments. And having it writ large would help to obfuscate its extreme brevity! Finally, I could derive a deeply personally satisfying resonance producing an illuminated manuscript… on the very subject of light itself. (In letters painted from light emerging from a darkened screen!)


But who would make it real? I had no choice: I would have to do it myself. But with no visual or graphic design sensibilities, I could not draw my way out of a paper bag. This project – a prototype, perhaps, for some future undertaking – would have to be tool-assisted. Figlet is and has been for years the premiere ASCII logo generator, but between its various typefaces on offer I was not able to quite satisfy wanting to locate a suitable style for each line’s sensibility. So I was compelled to do something that I was possibly the only person on the planet to do that year: I fired up the classic ANSI art editor TheDraw and loaded up some stock TheDraw .TDF typefaces. The one used here, hilariously entitled “Elite”, had been previously employed in some April Fool’s Packs, but despite being employed ironically elsewhere, here it was genuinely my best option. I inserted a small quantity of gradient shading with the F1-F4 blocks to emphasize that critical word “ALIGHT” with ASCII rays emanating from it (and the cherry on top, a single exclamation mark), then the remainder of the presentation practically filled itself in – dimming “dim” and “responding in kind”, distinguishing “blazing” with a highlight, a few flakes of classic ANSI snowfall (“rain” of that sort added 50 lines or so to countless scrollers circa 1993), and the insertion of a Figlet Inuit character peeking up over the letters.


The blueprints drawn up, the execution was a simple matter of some shopping around. Several copy shops were visited to find one capable of producing nice black blacks for the background, then milling them out in a quantity of maybe a hundred – mostly sent to people on The Everything Mailing Address Registry at everything2.com. Because I was at a point in my life where I couldn’t afford to both make colour copies and send the prints by mail, I saved a few cents by printing in b&w and then adding spot colour to relevant areas with a highlighter pen.


The back of every print had lots of white space for me to write holiday notes to the recipients, and between the notes and addressing and return addressing a hundred envelopes with my tiny, intensely engraved handwriting, I exacerbated a bad case of writer’s cramp (aka “scrivener’s palsy”) which plagued me for years afterward. So this was the start and end of my Christmas card tradition; mailing continued on a small scale with a postcard fiction spree on postcardx.net, and then my muse wandered down different avenues circa 2003.


For those wonderful Google spiders and such human readers who may be in the audience tonight, the eve of the winter solstice some 13 years later, we provide a transcript of the poem’s contents:


when days / grow short / and dim
we must / resist / responding / in kind / instead / setting / ourselves / alight
blazing / brilliant / and tall
bringing / the sun / back
in our own / thoughts / and actions
burn low and long

(and for readers in a seasonal mood, please don’t forget to download our recently-exhumed remastered and re-released music disk, The Bells of Yule, brought 20 years forward from 1994 to save the future… now with four mirrors because demand exceeded our original host’s ability to serve it up!)

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

In December of 1994, Mistigris released a holiday-themed music disk, entitled “The Bells of Yule”, built around a five-movement epic instrumental suite from our friends at Digitallusions.  Though widely circulated locally on BBSes, it never made the leap to the internet, and when the final local boards went kaput circa ‘98, it appeared to be withdrawn from circulation… forever?

But this group of songs was much too special to lose: Cthulu kept his copy of it.  (Cthulu keeps as much as humanly possible.)  And now, two decades later, the disk emerges upon the Yuletide stage once again, 4-channel .MOD tracks remastered as MP3s, bolstered by fellow traveller holiday songs from the Mistigris glory days in the late ’90s and newer, thematically resonant tunes from Empress Play, which Digitallusions has gradually evolved into.  The 2014 collection boasts over double the songs of the 1994 one, has sprawled from an hour to 105 minutes, and as for its filesize… woah, Nelly!  The 186 meg archive is over a hundred times as big as the original release, which was in its time considered too large to mirror widely.  (Have you ever circulated an mp3 on a floppy diskette?  Cthulu has… but I digress.)

You can find the complete archive here (two days later: due to higher demand than anticipated, we hit a bandwidth limit, but the music disk is now mirrored at http://pixelwitches.com/MISTYULE.ZIP, http://bbs.ninja/pub/original/pack/2014/mistyule.zip , and http://bigbox.chattaway.com/temp/MISTYULE.ZIP), with supporting music from Melodia, Onyx, Freaq and Cthulu, or click below to enjoy the heart of the work, the updated 2014 remastered version of the original 5-part suite that got the whole (snow)ball rolling.




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Sunday, November 30, 2014

Someone remembered us!


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ARTDISK-.ZIP Mistigris 'best-of" compilation (re)release!


Tonight, after 16 years of dormancy: the second monthly public Mistigris release. ARTDISK-.ZIP was a “best-of” compilation – additionally featuring 13 previously-unreleased works – designed to act as a survey study for outsiders to the artscene, demonstrating a wide spectrum of different minimalist (and filesize-thrifty) approaches to computer art… and distributed in a limited edition of 10 floppy diskettes at a groovy real-world art party back in 1999: “The Living Closet” at “The Church of Pointless Hysteria”.


Only two of the ten floppies were taken home. (A new world record for least-viewed artpack?) During a premature attempt to rebuild Mistigris – before it had quite hit rock bottom – the disk was hand-converted into a web-viewable gallery in 2001 hosted on free (and subsequently withdrawn) Australian webspace and seen by roughly nobody… so the web gallery has been folded in to this archive as well for your local browsing convenience.


Technically a 15th-anniversary re-release – if you were one of the two lucky disk-takers – for the rest of you this archive represents an opportunity to enjoy the 13 hitherto unseen works and to renew your enjoyment of the other archive contents which, rest assured, you likely haven’t perused in quite… some… time.


bit.ly/artdisk


(Coming up next: the 20th-anniversary re-release of the long-unavailable seasonal music disk The Bells Of Yule – remastered!)

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

On the occasion of today, here’s a piece from the back catalogues: nineteen years ago today in fact!  I still have vivid recollections of stringing the verses together on foolscap in the breaks between classes and then rushing to the MS-DOS computer lab running Novell Netware to draft a legible copy for after-school submission to the local Royal Canadian Legion Hall – they were running a youth poetry contest for poems about Remembrance Day and I had a fire lit under me to rock the contest adjudicators with my hardline idealistic conscientious objector perspective that war brutalizes all its participants, even uninjured victors.  "How strange,“ I thought, that the contest deadline was at noon, "because all participants in a youth poetry contest will be tied up in school at midday, yet they are the only ones eligible to submit.”


I rushed off to the Legion Hall as soon as the tractor-feed printout finished chugging out and breathlessly handed the printout to the combination doorman/bartender.  Before he had a chance to ask me to remove my headwear (as a gesture of respect toward the portrait of Queen Elizabeth hanging in the room), I asked him if I’d missed the contest deadline.  He had absolutely no idea what the heck I was talking about and I slunk out in defeat, denied an opportunity to break out of the artscene lit ghetto with my rhyming thoughts.  Back to rhyming BBS names!


Just as well, the poem probably would have just upset an old man.  I doubt I knew much about eg. Operation Paperclip in 1995, but I figured my eyes were clear enough to see that something stunk about a country with a single border shared with a friendly nation maintaining a standing military. My countryman John McCrae wrote one of the most canonical poems of the Great War, In Flanders Fields, but my tastes ran more toward the veil-lifting clarity of the stark writings of Wilfred Owen.


Mage kindly illustrated the work: within 13 months of Mist’s first artpack launch, he had graduated from our company to Integrity and from there to ACiD.  Many people took that achievement as a sign to retire at the height of their game, but apparently he felt he still had one or two pictures left in him.  I don’t know if this one was ever even submitted to an ACID pack, but it gave us the distinction of having a work by an ACID artist appear in our humble collection, MIST1196.ZIP.  Thanks again!


(Edited to add: some remarks from the artist!  "I wish I had something, but I don’t. I vaguely remember thinking a minimalist silhouette would be appropriate. I think, too, that my quitting the scene soon afterwards had less to do with being at the top of my game, and more to do with being 17 and having a car and a girlfriend.“)


For the benefit of Google spiders here, now, is the raw text of the lit:



Lest we Remember


A war-hardened soldier, a young farmer lad -
he’s one and the same.
Trying to hide his doubts, silently mad;
he plays no man’s game.


Holding a rifle, he chokes back his bile
and hopes not to use it.
Eat or be eaten, he thinks all the while
and tries not to lose it.


Crouching in ditches, he smells the rank scent
of the battle’s grim toll.
Comrade and brother swears not to relent,
his fond face shows no soul.


A gunshot rings out, ripping through the tense silence;
a man meets the ground.
This crude overture starts the music of violence,
a sickening sound.


He’s been enraptured to make old wrongs right
at no matter the cost.
It doesn’t matter for which side he fights
for he’s already lost.


The poppy of peace flashes bright nowadays;
the "remember-me-not.”
We fought for our truth but we practise their ways;
We forgave and forgot.


[gallery]

The textmode visual artists and the computer musicians didn’t always see eye-to-eye – hey, why is the archive so big, but there are so few pictures inside of it? – but since the very beginning we at Mistigris have been working in tandem with Melodia, gracing us with tunes in honest-to-goodness .MOD format from the deep well of the Digitallusions solo imprint.  When the ANSI artscene went belly-up, many of us gave up the ghost and shut down our computer art production, seemingly indefinitely.  Not so for Melodia, taking it in stride as an opportunity to develop new skills and appeal to new audiences.


Seemingly non-stop for over 20 years, her musical production has been as unceasing as the dance of the moon and sun overhead, so it comes as no great surprise that we have multiple announcements to share regarding her musical work, past and present: releasing under the banner of Empress Play, Melodia has two collections of music that have recently become available for listeners to enjoy – first, there is the free release Skeletons In My Closet, an anthology of some 38 (!) remastered tracks from the intensely productive period 1994-2000 (including some that long-time Mistigris fans may recognize, such as our highly memorable bombastic application generator soundtrack.)


Additionally, there is Press Play On Tape, released just prior to the unveiling of our 20th anniversary artpack, a more recent revisitation of the retro audio aesthetic emerging from a modern musical sensibility and of course, engineered from the ground up with modern tools rather than the restrictive ones of decades hence. It includes the track Adventures of a Pixel Hero (which we featured in our release) as its opening number, so if you enjoyed that tune here’s an opportunity for you to purchase 15 more in a similar vein.


Furthermore, discussions are underway regarding re-releasing The Bells of Yule, the instantly out-of-print and digitally unavailable anywhere Digitallusions collection of seasonal holiday music centred around a suite of five dark instrumental works. Stay tuned and keep your ears open as December approaches!

Sunday, November 9, 2014

[gallery]

By and large, the denizens of Mistigris managed to avoid that pathetic ANSI artscene pitfall of “ripping”, ie. (being caught) claiming credit for the hard work of others.  (In retrospect, longterm VGA department head Grim Reaper / Thanatos and musician |<ing |rthur were both found to have engaged in some dubious practices in this area.)  But languishing in our obscure corner of the continent, it never occurred to us that someone might find us and take credit for our work: the ideal victim is virtuous yet unknown.  We maintained as high a profile as we could but never imagined that our work was worth stealing – it turns out that we were selling ourselves short!


We learned that we’d been the subjects of this heinous act in 2003 when RaDMaN of ACiD looked up Cthulu and asked about the contents of this February 1997 artpack (available, as best as we can tell, here exclusively) by a one-pack group named “Mistic” – because if you’re going to repurpose artwork, it may as well be from something that already sounds kind of like yourself… less reworking needed.  The Mistic pack wasn’t exclusively populated by Mistgris rips, but they were present in a sufficiently peculiar density as to make their pack look like a kind of Mistigris pack from Bizarro world.  (Maybe the remainder of the pack is merely ripped from other sources, I don’t know.)


The Mist rips are all credited to the group’s founder, Air Walker (whose other ANSIs are presumed as well to derive from alternate sources), and they’re taken from a variety of artists who displayed work in the MIST0696.ZIP collection eight months prior – descending from the top (Mistigris originals on the left) we have our memorable FILE_ID.DIZ by Nitnatsnoc in his distinctive original toony style, a striking piece by Babyface, the sinister face by Solar Menace, a font by Platinum celebrating our distinctively-strangely-named group WHQ The Screaming Tomato (oh no, this is for an entirely DIFFERENT “The Screaming Tomato” BBS based out of Washington!), and two illustrations by Kestrel – one of which was used in our memberlist!  Basically Air Walker stole just about a full half of the textmode art from our 0696 pack.


Now, many of these pieces were watermarked by their artists – slipping in their initials amidst the blocks that make up the piece – but that was always just a formality, it being trivial to find and replace one artist’s initials with another’s.  The artist’s remarks are generally preserved (“I can never draw fists…”), ironically so when they tout the originality of the work or actively solicit payment for further work.  (This also presumably gives us the full name and home address, circa 1997, of the culprit – don’t worry, Ethan Sullens of Birmingham, AL, I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations is up on this one.)


And then, there’s the humiliating hypocrisy in their infofile.  "All work is owned by Mist"?  Well, in a manner of speaking: yes.  Also, I can breathe easy knowing I’m cleared of of the legal mumbo jumbo of your depraved mind.


In short, disappointingly there has always been plagiarism and there always will be, but there is no quick route to artistic talent.  (And this isn’t even the only time it happened to humble Mistigris – maybe next time we’ll tell you about the time ACiD released an ANSI that previously appeared in a Mist pack!)


The only question is: how come nobody ever plagiarised our lit?  It was lying around knee-deep all over the place and nobody would ever have realised where it had come from because no one read it in the first place!  Basically, that would have been the perfect crime.

(Update, June 2015: Air Walker explains!  We’ll have the exclusive scoop for you in a response blog post coming up shortly…)

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Publius Emeritus’ amazing numerical representation, “M15716R15,” featured in the 20th anniversary Mistigris pack.

bit.ly/mist1014

It is said that a poltergeist marks a charged physical site where some tremendous psychic activity once occurred, echoing through time with physical disturbances.


A revenant is an apparition informed by those who loved too much or dared too deep before they departed, bound to return without their flesh to attend to the unfinished business they couldn’t let go of and leave behind.


Just in time for Hallowe'en, a writhing cadaver that’s been in the ground for over 15 years improbably creeps back to the overworld to once again make its mark in the land of the living.


Ladies and gentlemen, avert your eyes, for I present to you a bold affront against the very Gods, the revival that nobody expected, least of all us: the first new Mistigris artpack release since June of 1998.


MISTIGRIS: THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, featuring 27 new works ripped from the very souls of 19 classic artists in both traditional and contemporary computer art mediums, genres and styles.


Returning from limbo to mark the 20TH ANNIVERSARY, to the month, of its first artpack release.


Download at:
bit.ly/mist1014



Cthulu / Mistigris

Friday, October 31, 2014

It’s a bit of a moot point because historically large scrollers were quite few and far between in Mist land 8)



We were a nation of logo collies



Cthulu, in regards to selecting the appropriate hosting service for displaying textmode scrollers at 100%

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Putting the 20th anniversary Mistigris artpack together tonight…

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Mistigris (pronounced “misty-gree”) was an artscene group founded in late 1994 by Cthulu of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.


Read more at:


http://tinyurl.com/qh7sxkg

The Mist tour was literally like Moses wandering in the desert for 40 years with the Israelites after fleeing from Egypt — LITERALLY — many members quit to worship golden calf idols


cthulu conversation with mattmatthew, oct 19 2014

A web gallery of the first Mistigris artpack release in October of 1994:


http://tinyurl.com/pp2cjpe

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dqC6op_omI?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=375]

Perhaps our greatest triumph, the Blender ANSI movie about “monks / playing water polo / in Venice”.

The last promo made for Mistigris, submitted too late to be released with us.  Thanks to Dionyzos of Irato!