Summer’s over;Mistigris provided a home to as many forms of computer art as we could find, but the visual artwork and computer music still dominate people’s memory. One major quality that distinguished Mistigris from other artscene artgroups was its dedication to hosting a regular “lit” department (short for literature, encompassing the written word in all its forms – poetry, fiction, drama, creative non-fiction, other things we perhaps hadn’t thought of 8), an extension of an historical anomaly of the earlier local artgroups NWA and iMPERiAL supporting lit divisions as well. (For quite a while, lit was the only form in which Mist founder Cthulu released digital artwork, so if we had not supported it, we would have needed a different president – had we indeed ever been founded in the first place!)
school is back.
Leaves are golden;
evening’s black.
Days of freedom-
far away.
Work and worry
in class all day.
Another priority of Mistigris was collaboration, specifically intermedia ones between members who practiced different forms of art. Here that takes the form of a seasonal poem by The Pope (typically a composer of computer music, this piece was extraordinary), illustrated in ANSI by Neophyte.
For many of us in the ‘90s, the rhythms of the artscene were dictated by the beats of the school year, summertime freeing us up to stay up late trying to connect to elite BBSes and granting us downtime needed to perfect our niche forms of expression. (Every summer would promise greater and greater gains and advances until typically the summer following high school graduation would result in artists’ sudden and often permanent disappearance from the scene, the hobby permanently shelved in favour of new, adult lives in university – with its exclusive access to high-speed internet access and the potentials it offered – and beyond.)
This piece was originally released in the MIST0996 artpack of September 1996.
