Time flies while you’re attending to other matters… but for another couple of hours at least, this piece of holiday-themed ANSI art still applies, if not necessarily in time zones where it applies.We can’t legitimately lay claim to this one on hardly any basis: it was released by Coluche, who was never a Mistigris member, in the July 1994 in the penultimate artpack release of our predecessor group iMPERiAL, itself a temporary merger between the area code 604-based “New Wave Artists” and the Québec-based “GRIP/AD” (Graphic Revolution In Progress / Art Division).  (You can probably guess which camp this work’s artist, SysOp of Rash Reflections BBS, belonged to.) 

What role he played in GRIP was unclear; he was the programmer of the group’s “IMPview” application, and doesn’t appear to have returned in GRIP’s subsequent return to the scene in 1995.There was really no reason for groups in Vancouver and Québec to find common ground and work together; long distance charges being what they were, we could have sought sister cities anywhere there were phone lines attached to computers.  Nonetheless, as with iMPERiAL, Mistigris echoed its predecessor and also maintained a virtual office dans la belle province for most of its existence, drawing on the labours of a small cadre of artists sending in submissions through The Extremist’s board City iZ Burning.  It sure endows one with a cosmopolitan feeling!

Cthulu finally made it out east in 2002, and wouldn’t you know it, he landed in Montréal on St. Jean-Baptiste day, a holiday unknown outside the province… during the World Cup, concurrently with the Fringe Festival and the Jazz Festival and a blistering heat wave.  There he concluded that there was so much going on in that city, it must have been no coincidence that the big BBS scene in Québec had been around Québec City rather than Montréal for the same reason that the artscene had never been dominated by New York City crews: there was so much going on there that people were too busy living their lives in thriving cultural hubs to waste the pricey opportunity to play intangible games with invisible strangers on the other side of the planet.  They don’t draw logocollies in Montréal, they paint graffiti murals.

In conclusion: bonne saint-jean!