Late in its run, Cthulu – Mistigris’ primary functionary – took over the administration of the Blender IRC competition, in which computer artists put their talents to the test to see what they could up with drawing inspiration from spontaneous shared prompts. While we were dark horses elsewhere in the artscene, due to its lack of ANSI-art-primacy we found ourselves excelling in the Blender compos, and released two artpacks consisting exclusively of our great contest entries, several of which were award-winning.
The contests in the series that Cthulu attended to were never released for sixteen years, awaiting a final ruling on scoring and adjudication for previous contests… ruling that never came. As part of his General Computer Art Amnesty of 2014-2015, on March 16th of this year Cthulu finally discharged the proceeds from these 13 Blender competitions into the wild, an unruly omnibus of very strange vintage computer artwork on bizarre themes, including works by Mistigris artists not previously viewable anywhere, which can be enjoyed as BLNDR048-060.ZIP here or in a web gallery at sixteencolors.net, which is just wrapping up its own Blender-inspired competition tournament among Blocktronics ANSI artists.
That’s not the big news, though: the thing making this tangential artpack release newsworthy here is that this Saturday, April 11th, Cthulu and longtime Blender admin Warpus of Lazarus will be running one final Blender compo for old time’s sakes, based out of #blender on the EFNet IRC. You can find more complete directions here. Join us, won’t you?
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Once again demonstrating the curious resilience that has served them so well, veteran computer art collective MiSTiGRiS has today (April 1, 2015) released perhaps their most popular and well-received artpack collection yet, containing a rich and varied assortment of visual, literary and conceptual art pranks in the ANSI, ASCII, high-resolution and even literary mediums. Even the infofile is a masterful text! (Also, there is one unexceptional piece of music.)
To anyone who was part of the underground computer artscene of the ‘90s, this rich love letter will be instantly recognizable for what it is: a little nostalgia covers a plethora of sins. And to anyone else… let this muddy the waters a little.
Its unparalleled contents can be enjoyed via the web gallery at sixteencolors.net or, if you prefer, transferred directly to your hard drive for local enjoyment.