MISTIGRIS 2015:
WE WANT YOUR ART

(to be submitted to us pro bono for free digital circulation
because that’s how we rolled when we were kids in the ‘90s with no bills to pay
and this particular collection is to be in memory of that freewheeling time
apologies to the pros)

In a nutshell:

The somewhat revived computer art group Mistigris, established in 1994 (but not much active since 1998), is casting a wide net, seeking submissions of creative works in all forms (visual, literary, musical, programmed… surprise us) to appear in an “artpack” (collection of computer files containing creative works) for release in late October of 2015, in celebration of the group’s first release 21 years prior. So we’re up front about it, there is no compensation beyond the hackneyed “exposure”, “opportunity for networking” and a certain satisfaction from playing some nominal part in the ongoing history of the storied digital underground’s artscene… and also hopefully you may receive some of that nebulous and unquantifiable perk, fun. The submission deadline is October 15th, 2015. Please field inquiries to cthulu at tabnet dot ca.

But if you’d like further information, please do read on at some great length for our FAQ:

“You want my art?  How do you know what kind of art I make?  Just what kinds of art are you looking for, anyhow?”

Textmode/pixel(/trixel/voxel/hexel) art: ANSI, ASCII, PETSCII, PlaySCII, teletext, typewriter art, cross-stitch, perler bead, mosaic, Lego, Minecraft, Blockout, Snake or Tetris and punch-card instructions.  You get the idea!

…but that’s not all!

“High resolution” visual art: raster/bitmap drawings made in Deluxe Paint 2, MS Paint or Photoshop, vector line art from the Tombstone Artist RIPscrip editor or Adobe Illustrator, clicked into place with a mouse or drawn on a tablet or touchscreen, raytraced, kaleidoscoped in Photo Booth, generated by an algorithm, portraits, landscapes and typography painted on a canvas or spraypainted on a wall or train, smeared on a scanner or squished on a photocopier; sculpted in marble, ice, butter or polys for screens or .STL files for 3D printers, photography (all three varieties: pinhole, conventional and Game Boy camera), silkscreen stencils, quilt patches, collage, tattoo flash, gig posters, comix (web or conventional), papercraft, stained glass, jewelery, aerialist display, cosplay and extreme hairstyles or set design and architectural CAD.  What are we missing?  Demo reels and short films (ANSImation, YouTube video or animated .GIF are great); flipbook animations; intriguing PowerPoint presentations, Macromedia Director projects or VRML databases; Second Life textures.

Phew!  I’m just getting started!

Music: 4-channel tracked, sequenced, presented in any style as new as black MIDI or as classic as Mario Paint, or just plain plucked out on an ukulele and recorded over a webcam or improvised on saxophone quartet into voice mail via conference call.  Sheet music, player piano rolls, long-forgotten demo tapes on audiocassette, cellphone ringtones and instructions for dot matrix printer orchestra are great, too!

But wait, there’s more!

Writing.  Yes, we want your poems – limericks, haiku, sonnets and more – short stories, flash fictions, novels, articles, memoirs, manifestos, one-act plays, film scripts, personal essays, reviews, recipes, pages from your dream diary, fan fiction, a sample chapter from your ebook, text adventures, Twines, visual novels, audiodramas, lipograms and conlangs.  Send it in as raw text, as painstakingly calligraphed or meticulously laid-out concrete poetry, or as an incomprehensible Dadaist soundscape collage recorded and manipulated through spliced tape loops (in which case please submit as MP3).  (When we closed up shop in 1998 I was investigating new digital avenues for poetry, like simulating a nutritional information label tattooed on the dorsal fin of an orca whale – for the informed dietary benefit of our Arctic neighbours – through laborious Photoshop work.  This time last year I attempted, unsuccessfully, to compose a meaningful poem entirely in Hayes AT modem commands… triumph where I failed!)

Surely that’s about it?

Software: video games, APKs, BBS doors, hypercard stacks, Java applets, revealing source code listings, intros, romhacks, screensavers, Quake levels and everything in between.  (No viruses or malware, please.  They can be interesting but regretfully we must decline.)

Outta gas?

Conceptual art; net.art; fluxus “happening"s; puppetry.  Pyrotechnics!  Choreography?  Try us. (Because in this strange new world, all art is computer art.)

The creative works don’t have to be new or recent – indeed, it can be from lost decades of yore, back in the last century if you like. But it should be something that ideally is not currently still in circulation. (And you should have the proper rights to authorize its distribution by us 8)

"What’s this all about, anyway?”

When I was a teenager half a lifetime ago, I ran a computer art group for four years from a beige IBM PC clone in my parents’ basement. There and in similar computer rooms, me and dozens of other inspired youths released “artpacks”, digital collections of creative work in mediums visual, literary, musical and programmed. The technology was crude, but we had abundant free time and the fire of adolescent monomania burning beneath us, and were able to transcend the technical limitations of the era and create great art for the ages. Our group’s name was “MiSTiGRiS” (Mist for short), and we were but one regional group among many internationally, striving and vying to discover some new trick and push past constraints and limitations, through to some new cyber realm of digital creative potential, leaving the path open for our peers to follow into the unknown realms. (But mostly, it must be acknowledged, we made advertisements for bulletin board services out of comic books and graffiti.)

We may as well have been exploring the outer reaches of what was possible to achieve with Betamax VCRs, Pioneer LaserDiscs, Walkmans and Polaroid cameras, because unbeknownst to us, the technological underpinnings of our revolution were stale and fragile, and our anarchic digital utopian frontier of aesthetic hedonism was being subtly undermined, in a ruinous and permanent fashion, by the rise of Windows 95 and AOL. Our community (as with others, eg. Compuserve and UseNet) was vibrant but not agile, unable to respond to the changes in a timely manner, and in short order it was almost entirely dismantled in favour of a new online regime where the order of the day was not to create but to consume.

Just what remained for the term “computer art” to precisely describe after the lingering vestiges of the C64/Amiga/MS-DOS BBS/IRC scene finally dissipated beyond the point of no return circa 1999? As best as I could tell… superbad (surprisingly ahead of its time, it actually launched in 1997 making it a postmodern contemporary to our efforts) and zombo.com – there was room for outsider virtuosity in the new mediums, but nothing to build a community around. (Or: we were just too inflexible and crusty to get on board with Newgrounds.)

In the cold light of a new millennium I tried to apply what I knew about putting creators in different mediums into a bottle and shaking it up to see what kind of fizz erupted out, first by co-opting the monthly variety show series the Living Closet in marginal spaces like the millennial Church of Pointless Hysteria, then the long-running (5 years, longer than Mist with a more regular release schedule to boot!) 57 Varieties open stage series, which resulted in some intriguing surprise juxtapositions, compelling performances and curious spin-offs but they all imposed a distracting drag factor of requiring quite a bit of time and effort to be devoted to crudely material matters only tangentially related to creating and sharing art (eg. does the bar have enough disposable cups, is there toilet paper in the stalls, what is the fairest way to divide our $30 of profit among our 17 participants and why do I need to stick around until 1:30 am to do this math?)

If only I could somehow return to the seamless medium of computer art in a thriving milieu!

But after the last of my efforts ran their course and I found myself organizing only invoices and ledgers, no art or revolution, the trail went cold. Years of beating the dead horse and trying to turn back time, striving to put the genie back into the bottle and somehow infuse the smoke back into the resistor. Finally, I gave up, believing in my heart: I’m crazy, it’s stupid and no one cares.

But following the “reunion” turnout achieved last October for the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Mist’s first artpack release, I have since been proven wrong: I’m crazy, it’s stupid and some people might care a little bit. Many’s the time I’ve toiled away fruitlessly in dead ends without even a shred of hope; that little bit is all I need to stoke my fires and charge blindly back into action!

For the past year I’ve been making soup from the bones of history, packaging, contextualizing and immortalizing fragments and forgotten creations from a lost world I’d allowed to linger on the fringes of my hard drives. That was a fun and interesting experience, reminding myself of the me I used to be and the dissipated context that forged that “me”. Maybe… if I could entreat some people to come on board and play along… we might discover more playful, creative selves we’d forgotten we ever were!

“Sorry, what’s an 'artpack’ again?”

You might prefer the term “group show” or “anthology”: in this case, it is taken to refer to a collection of small pieces of artwork in various mediums and formats from a plethora of different artists, represented in computer-accessible form for web browser accessing and local download. Sights, sounds, words and other lovely surprises.

“But what are the themes you’re hoping to engage with this art?”

Why, nothing less than the sum of human experience! But, uh, if you need a starting point, you could reflect upon the changes in your life and in the world over the past 20 years … or just make a “Mistigris” logo 8)

“So what am I going to get out of participating in your weird little project?”

In keeping with our “WHY CHEAP ART?” background, we take in no money (taking “cheap” to extremes) and consequently have none to disburse, so for the love of God please don’t send us something you hope someone might want to pay you first publication rights for someday. A deprecated or experimental portfolio piece would be ideal, something you’re proud of and have fondness for, but which isn’t going to undercut your regular art practice. Or, if you prefer, you can send us a taste, an excerpt or slice of the new work you’re keenest about, and its appearance here can be promotional – “If you like that, you know who to look up for more…” – in the interest of which we hope to compile brief bios and social media contact information for participating artists, under their current brand (if they want to build a link to their ongoing practice) or a nickname (if they want to hide any connection 8)

“How can I reach you?  Where do I submit?”

Any interactions of substance are best fielded to cthulu at tabnet dot ca. Our WHQ BBS is down, but we have an active private Facebook group and a dormant slack of great potential.

You can find further information, context and deeper interaction through our Tumblr (you are here at the moment) and our Twitter account @mistfunk

“When do you want submissions to be in by?”

The project is envisioned as an artpack to be entitled MIST1015, which would put release squarely in October of 2015.  Last year’s revival artpack, MIST1014, squeaked out hours before November 1st; we hope to not be pushing this one out in not quite as last-minute a fashion – the submission deadline is tentatively stated as midnight beginning October 15th, which leaves us two weeks of wiggle room to round everything up, chase out the bugs and get it all together.

Submissions due Countdown

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BONUS! "OK, I’m game, but I don’t have the tools.”

I will not presume to instruct you how to sculpt, cross-stitch or work with pyrotechnics, as it would be spurious and downright dangerous for me to do so. But I am qualified to recommend some (generally cheap-to-free) software that should all run in contemporary operating environments (some combination of: Windows, Mac OSX, Linux) to facilitate creation of some of the recommended traditional computer arts:

• For ANSI and ASCII art there is no better tool than the (Mistigris-produced!) PabloDraw
  editor. If you have further aspirations for a textmode aesthetic, you could tinker with PlaySCII and its variant textmodes and auto-conversion capabilities.



• If MS Paint is not enough and Photoshop is too much, Paint.NET sits as a happy medium for the creation and editing of high resolution images.



• So you don’t have an old computer at your disposal but you’d like to be able to distress your photos to make them throwbacks to that era of limitations? We can endorse Retrospecs for iOS devices and Bitzah on Android.



• If you’d like to make some sounds, you can start with the Audacity sound editor; you can then use the sounds you whipped up as samples in a music tracker such as the Impulse Tracker clone SchismTracker or the Fast Tracker II clone MilkyTracker. Or, if you hate messing with samples and just want to sequence, you could try that old Mario Paint Composer.



• And if you’d like to try to present some text in an interactive fashion, some easy and powerful tools you could consider might include Twine, Inform 7 or a new contender with a goofy name, Squiffy.