Someone remembered us!

are you fucking kidding me yo?! #ansiart MiSTiGRiS (canadian?! artgroup) has made a return to digital pixel artwork ..

— Jeff James Castillo (@jeffjcastillo) December 1, 2014

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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hit rock bottom – the disk was hand-converted into a web-viewable gallery in 2001 hosted on free (and subsequently withdrawn) Australian webspace and seen by roughly nobody… so the web gallery has been folded in to this archive as well for your local browsing convenience.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!)

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!

[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…)

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