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I first met Jenny Ritter in the waning days of her first Hungry Young Folk Music Superband, The Gruff – and if they were winding up, you sure couldn’t tell it from the audience! But All Good Things… and so after being toasted at festivals from coast to coast she found herself in the unenviable position of being a starving artist in our expensive little town by the sea. Singer-songwriters (however virtuous) don’t pull the same fees as bands do, so she aired out another aspect of her creative polymath portfolio, and supplemented her coffeeshop tips by puting her graphic design chops on the market, for people who needed handmade art for their wedding invitations or tattoo designs. (In truth the pencils had never been put away, as she’d always been working on gig posters and album covers the whole time – but this side of her creative practice took on perhaps a greater prominence.)

I’ve always been a big booster of the idea of the creative milieu – being part of a community of similar-minded creators who do related work. I found mine on bulletin board systems and IRC chat; she found hers among family and friends at square dances, coffeeshop open mics, jamming in green rooms and in ferry line-ups. Perhaps in some things, the old-fashioned ways are best: her coterie of Canadian alt-folk nobility include David Newberry, Fish & Bird, and Corbin Murdoch & the Nautical Miles (and, er, I sat in with her on a single occasion 8) – while the vast majority of my computer art colleagues I’ve never yet met face-to-face after over 20 years! (TABNet was a very face-to-face crew; Mistigris, even among the locals, not so much so.)

Jenny has wound up in the uncomfortable niche of marginal success like nobility without title or land; while undeniably hugely talented, after decades of steady building her creative endeavours aren’t yet sufficient for her to be a household name or lucrative enough for her to entertain the bourgeois fantasy of owning a house and raising a family (but forgive me projecting my aspirations on her: she cries all the way to Sweden. This profile isn’t a tragedy: she is consolidating and building her musical empire, but despite her formidable forces, it sure is taking a while. Nonetheless, she never stops chipping away at it!) This week her band opened for Lucinda Williams at a show in Scotland to rave reviews (the event that reminded me that it was time to profile her here: she still has a few remaining UK gigs, foreign readers!), but when she comes home it’s going to be another stint of getting the bills paid and scheming the next big tour. (Fortunately, she’s struck upon an ingenius formula for paying said bills: directing a choir of feckless youth singing their hearts out with arrangements of modern indie pop hits. Here you can catch an early clip of her Kingsgate Chorus playing at the defunct venue The Prophouse at a show with my jug band of the damned, about which you’ll be hearing more soon.)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJNAiZkp9rs&w=560&h=315]

When pressed to submit some works for MIST1015 Jenny was very gracious and sent me more pieces than I actually used; they were all lovely but despite my “in 2015 ALL art is computer art” sloganeering it was becoming increasingly clear that her very traditional art style was markedly dissonant from the growing mounds of computer art I was accumulating; I picked a couple of favorites but any more would have been jarring. Here however they only have to harmonize with the context of her other works, so I intended to air the pieces I left out – but then looked up other art by her, liked it more, and ran those instead. (Ain’t I a stinker!)

Without curating a theme specially intended to accommodate this lovely stuff, I don’t know if you’ll be seeing more of her work in regular Mistigris artpacks, as though I love it dearly, its lovingly stylized details of the natural world stick out as a bit of a mismatch for this virtual world of chunky pixels and chromed Platonic solids, and had I not actively solicited it, the seeds of her art would never have found purchase in the soil of computer art. Until I figure out how to make the two different voices sing together in harmony, a tricky and improbable melding of old and new like Moby’s “Play”, do go forth, and enjoy her art independent of a context of us! I wholeheartedly endorse her music – her second-most-recent album, Bright Mainland, has provided a constant driving soundtrack of rootsy Americana since its release that, like Amelia Curran’s War Brides, has been found to never get stale.

https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2703376824/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/

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I first met Otium Man, aka Fille, back during my artscene European vacation of 1999 – a pilgrimage to Assembly in Finland arriving and departing via Amsterdam – when my travel companion God Among Lice (formerly of Fire) just HAD to attend the Pukkelpop festival in Belgium (so as to get a chance to see DJ Shadow, among many, many others.) I ended up surprising and delighting a couple dozen friends with his PJ Harvey ASCII t-shirts I brought back, extended as a deposit against unclaimed future computer art favours. (Heads up: in the final reckoning of things, all favours will be called in!) Otium Man and God Among Lice knew of each other due to shared affiliation with the largely Russian group HRG (Hellraiser Group), with Otium co-founding (with Iron Lung) its “Galza” ASCII division, which straggled on to 2005 (#20) and then arose from the ashes (#21) in 2011 largely as a solo project. (I might have done that with Mistigris also, but I didn’t because: no one would have cared. Sad but true.)

Demonstrating a remarkable largesse and openmindedness, Otium roped me in (twist my arm!) to contributing some poetry (sorry, “lits”) to the surprisingly political Galza 22 in early 2014, my first flicker of ‘scene activity in probably well over a decade (but just look what his re-awakened momentum has wrought!), and by October of that year I had tapped him for a guest appearance in our own revival artpack MIST1014.

Some time later, in 2015, he released Galza 23 (“Propaganda”) to the artscene, a stupendous collection of simulated PETSCII (the text mode of Commodore microcomputers) portraits of Communist icons… to some mild acclaim from the artscene and snooty disdain from Commodore enthusiasts, evincing an “if you can’t take us at our most computationally gutless, you don’t deserve us at our most richly textmoded” attitude.

Shortly thereafter, we “included” some works of his in MIST1015 in a medium for which he is not as well known in the artscene: panoramic photography. The framework required to display them in-browser refused to play nice when dealing with local files, so as with a few other filesize-heavy works, we represented a nicely-curated retrotechy selection of his photos as browser-redirecting HTML files, sending local viewers to remote locations (sorry, offline viewers!)

Judging from the traffic figures for the externally-hosted videos (barring Whazzit’s wildly popular ANSI movie of Dead Man’s Pants), we can only imagine that virtually no one got a chance to enjoy those photos, so this write-up is one more opportunity for us to urge you to check them out. The still slices illustrating the post are just the tip of the iceberg, static frames of moving, breathing panoramic vistas.

Then after we lured Nail out of retirement (first with BLENDER 2015, then MIST1015), he got on board to put some actual vintage C64 scene experience to use and spearhead a re-release (and draw that title screen pictured above) of Galza 23 in a form that would execute and display on actual Commodore 64 hardware, in which version it found itself celebrated and embraced by the same community who had spurned it when it was simply still images for display on modern machines. Packaging and presentation: turns out it’s surprisingly important! You can take it for a spin yourself (on your own vintage Commodore hardware, or VICE for the rest of us) if you like!

And that brings us up to speed with the history of Otium, his chance intersections with Mist and his ongoing related (computer) art projects. Stay tuned for more profiles!

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It doesn’t happen often, and heck – it may well never happen again – but at least once more, a Mistigris artist has taken point of pride in having featured as the Sixteencolors “ANSI of the Day”, with a piece from our recently-discharged MIST2000 collection:

I love being surprised with little gems like this.

The artist goes by the name Happyfish, and she represents one of the few textmode pieces in the new Mistigris pack, “Mist2000”. The pack comprises some compiled works by Mist artists circa 1997-2001 - work that was collected but never released.

I have no idea if she ever produced more ANSI work, or if she’s around at all, but if you’re reading this, Happyfish, you really ought to give the ol’ blocks another go. This piece is a definite standout.

I kindly pointed out that while this particular work dates back to approximately the turn of the century, she came out of retirement to take last place in the ANSI category of last year’s NVScene demoparty, and graced MIST1015 with that and one other work of ANSI art (attached), plus the FILE_ID.DIZ actually predating her involvement with Mistigris. So it turns out she’s not 100% retired… just closer to 95%. (And then… I explained our NSFW Eat Poop You Cat work at some great length. Probably it will warrant a blog post here also, eventually.)

In the meantime, however, she has remained creatively busy, chasing a strange new muse as a filk songwriter par excellence. While an early specimen of this work was also included in MIST2000, in a case of serendipitous timing, just as she was being awarded the esteemed AOTD, she also announced the release of a new collection of her songs:

Some people have asked if I’ve been writing fewer songs this year, and the answer is no, but most of them have been D&D songs for a campaign Wesley Crowell has been running at filk cons, and they seemed a bit too… specific… to throw in my regular bandcamp. Which is otherwise a cohesive blend of carefully curated, aestheticall– okay maybe not. But ANYWAY, here in their own little bucket are half a dozen songs by Melinda Vulluvette, the NPC…ish… bard voiced by me in the Abandoned campaign.

Walking to Valspar: The Increasingly Angry Songs of Melinda Vulluvette. There’s even one song the players haven’t heard yet, the national anthem of Melindarokin, a country I now… accidentally kind of… own.

The content involves a LOT of in jokes, because the songs were all written to be performed in-universe to make the players snicker - but I hope they can be enjoyed even if you weren’t there to watch the gaming sessions. :)

So hats off to Happyfish, and her splendidly peculiar artistic achievements past, present and future!

http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1243800073/size=small/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/transparent=true/

BONUS CONTENT! The AOTD-winning piece resonates with HF-GLEEP (excerpted) from the Mistigris World Tour stop in DARK0597, another negative-space hand, and it’s no coincidence:

In both cases I “traced” my hand help up to the monitor because it seemed fun. I also have a tattoo of my own hand. So I’m er, very handsy? Hands-on! Something like that.

One thing you can say: no one else has ever drawn ANSI like Happyfish, and no one ever will.

Back to the MIST1015 hit parade! This head-scratcher seemed to resonate with some current events, and even has a current payoff, so read on. Chasing my crazy art preoccupation following the collapse and seeming extinction of the computer artscene, I ended up in late 2003 taking on administration of a local art gallery, “The Butchershop Floor”, as part of a collective of 20. (Any artscene veteran should have had red flags go up seeing an organization so top-heavy with senior staff.) One of the 20 was my talented high school classmate Ehren Salazar, and some months into the ‘Shop’s tenuous existence (still hanging in today in a sense, transformed into home base for an improv theatre troupe) he vouched for admission of one of his polymath friends, Justin Adam, aka Birdband, one of those “pro athletes gives it all up to make art” cases like Dan Bern. For a time BB was my go-to for instant sonic wallpaper with a performative presence, as evidenced by this excerpt from a 2006 press release I wrote for the Perpetual Motion Roadshow (spun into motion by Jim Munroe – remember him?):

Primary Toquefest engineer BIRDBAND (Vancouver, birdband.org) opens, taking you on a terrifying journey through an electric guitar effect pedal vortex. birdband is a musical mule: a cross between sample-based and improvisational music. With the use of unaffected guitar, a vocal mic and a sampler; compositions are conceived in a live setting and once performed, exist as they are.

Realizing, as the MIST1015 submission countdown ticked on, that I might not be seeing repeat appearances from seemingly revived Mistigris alumni who contributed to MIST1014, I began looking up old cronies from that long period between when Mistigris went to sleep and when, Rip Van Winkle-like, it woke back up. So I hit up BirdBand – now Moon McMullen – with the call for submissions.

Moon McMullen> any format?

Cthulu> Unless you come up with something truly exotic, I should be fine. Contributions on 8-track tape or in the form of a foil hologram may be difficult for me to work with.

That was my first warning! Then, some time later…

MM> good morning! to give you an idea of what i am submitting, it is going to be music. i have a tonne, although i am likely going to submit something i made entirely on my phone. the presentation, i will also consider. the media will likely not be a file, but an object. that is all i can tell you right now!

CT> You have my attention!

Where is he going with this? I stewed a while longer, then…

MM> i have a project that i want to submit. i am able to send an image and concept statement, the actual object to follow. how are you presenting the work and when?

CT> Digital representations of all submissions are planned to go out publicly online tomorrow night
Playing up a conceptual angle that is sometimes lacking, I may need to represent the object’s mere potential now, and later document my interaction with it in some kind of digital video clip

MM> oh man!!!
let me think about how i want to present it

OK, this is building to something… and none too soon!

CT> The collection goes out tonight, so I can’t make any guarantees after about 8 pm PST. The image and concept statement would be a great start, then there’s a second act when we get to explore the actual object.

MM> ok. 8pm PST?
i can get you an image and concept statement. don’t want to cause any stress, but this idea hit me early week and i am really bent on it.
the object is a big part of it, but the image and statement describes it

And then, against all odds, the submission arrived at the last minute!

CT> … that is really something!

MM> Thanks! I hope it isn’t too far off the manifest although, certainly digital inspired art and an important project I have been waiting to launch. Seems appropriate since we did some of my first shows together. Let me know your thoughts on the actual object… Happy Halloween!

CT> it takes all kinds, something that throws us for a loop like this keeps us on our toes. this is the era of instant gratification, what’s with this suspense? It’s… deeply intriguing!

It’s impossible to know (at least, not without directly interrogating the creator, but why spoil the ambiguity? If his plan was to poach the concept all along, then why wait so long to implement the cloning?) to what extent this unprecedented artpack curiosity (artpacks always were stuffed with ads, mostly art advertising BBSes – but never before ads advertising the art itself!) was inspired by the Wu-Tang Clan’s recent recording Once Upon A Time in Shaolin, of which a single copy was made, for the private enjoyment of a single buyer. (You probably know of it due to the revelation of that buyer, hedge fund manager and waste of skin Martin Shkreli – the man responsible for inflating the price of Daraprim by 5500% – and the fictitious clause in the sale contract entitling actor Bill Murray to attemp a heist to recover the album.) Both collections of music exist as solitary objects, impossible to access through a service or backdoor – hard to imagine in this new world of streams and torrents (and simultaneously strangely resonant of the earliest days of the recording industry, where a performance in a music studio would be captured by as many recording machines as could be arrayed around the performer, and then the next dozen records would capture the following take. But I digress.)

Did the iPhone get bought by a pharmaceutical magnate? What did the price breakdown look like? Were the tunes any good? Is Steve Martin allowed to mount an extraction mission to retrieve it? Could Siri be logically duped into to sharing its contents with another listener? These and many other questions bedevil us, but not having touched the phone and not having heard the music, we can only speculate in long-form on our blog.

But there is something you can listen to! Moon McMullen (or is it birdband now? It is, because it was…) recently commemmorated an anniversary by granting a pardon to a creative prisoner and letting it go free. Here’s the story:

I want to share a story, my Vancouver friends might remember, I used to perform under the moniker birdband, since they called me bird - it also represented the numbered band they would wrap around the bird’s wrist.

The whole idea was no plan, no repeats. It was my guitar, line out straight into an old Sony stereo receiver and into my PC. i was using a Boss RC-20, my ex had bought for me a couple years earlier.

One night, shortly after the new year, exactly 10 years ago (nearly to the minute) in Vancouver, i was mucking around. I caught a flow, and continued to follow it. It was one of those unconscious moments, and the song just sort of took shape right there. it had a nice arc, and when i was done i stood there silent. i wished i had captured it… I went over to my PC to record the next idea, and saw the timeline needle moving. It was recording! I quickly stopped it so i could save - and the program crashed. NO! i couldn’t believe it. i restarted my machine, and gave it one final try - dug into the temp files, and there it was. a 60mb file. i copied it over. I had saved it. I named it Recover, well because of the file recovery, also because I was at one of the low points in my life, after a breakup. i was attacked and chased back to my house, 5 nights earlier on New Year’s Eve… and this was the moment when I decided to bounce back…

Nice to listen back to this and see where I have come. It is raw and old, although still has an impact with me. Have a listen, if you’ve got 5 minutes to spare.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/240771857" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="450" iframe="true" /]

(Portrait by Ehren Salazar. We’ll see if I can’t get something by him into MIST1016.)

bryface workshops at freqfest5(LA)

OK, you’ve heard us talking about his work more than once, but… he’s an active individual, so there is much to report. Computer music native bryface is not only taking on the 2016 #weeklybeats songwriting challenge again (new works already out (week 1: experimenting with the Korg Gadget app on iPad), plus more upcoming at the rate of … one per week!), but he’s participating in 8bitLA’s Freq Fest 5 this upcoming weekend (Jan 15-17), so any of our fans in or around Los Angeles (Bueller? Bueller?) can have a chance to not only take in his seemingly effortless chiptune stylings, but also to participate in two chiptune workshops he’s leading on related subjects:

Saturday, January 16th - LSDJ Workshop 1: Chipmusic Sound Design Essentials (45 min)
Having trouble wrapping your head around creating sounds? We’ll explore some methodologies for crafting various types of individual sounds, as well as more holistic approaches with respect to a song’s overall sound design.

——-

Sunday, January 17th - LSDJ Workshop 2: Tracking Between The Rows (45 min)
Ever wonder how to write music that’s more than the sum of its parts? In this advanced workshop, we’ll take a deeper look into composition overall – drawing wisdom from demoscene legends and other notable composers, plus leveraging the psychoacoustic quirks of the human ear – to make the most out of the precious limited number of channels you have at your disposal.

We’ve got no lack of ancient history (and even some further current events!) to cover, so stay tuned for further interviews, promotions, behind-the-scenes peeks, archaeological digs and blooper outtakes. Excelsior!

searching for satellites

No Bowie appearances in the released Mistigris body of work… and yet, an old memory tickles. There it is – file dated July 30, 1998: a poem, omitted from M-9808 (not that it ended up waiting all that much longer for the big reveal, as it turns out.)

observation while star-gazing
examples of how the sky has been sold
he says this is a david bowie song
“searching for satellites.”

and I feel violated
like innocence stolen
but worse
culture relived (and it wasn’t even my culture
no redemption in nostalgia)

profound sadness
is it no longer possible to live in a modern world
without experiencing post-modern apostasy?

“He” would have been The Laughing Fool, the starlit cloudless summer sky likely observed from our pseudo-rural Kerrisdale/Southlands corner on the edge of Vancouver, far removed from the bright lights of downtown.

After having our stargazing (perhaps punctuating an overnight on Tower Beach after a spate of late-night coning) interrupted by one too many satellites, we shifted focus and began explicitly satellite-gazing. (cf. Wikipedia: Because of the shape of the Iridium satellites’ reflective antennas, the satellites focus sunlight on a small area of the Earth’s surface in an incidental manner. This results in an effect called Iridium flares, where the satellite momentarily appears as one of the brightest objects in the night sky and can even be seen during daylight.)

I believe he was mistaken; to the best of my knowledge, David Bowie never did make reference to watching satellites in any of his songs – probably what my friend intended to convey was that the situation was Bowie-esque… but what I got out of the remark was a frustration at the apparent impossibility of being the first person to encapsulate and enshrine an experience in art, the notion that no matter the idea, someone older (that garish spectre haunting my older sister’s bedroom in pin-up form during my childhood) had already gotten there first – potentially decades earlier in this case, not satisfied with his generous share, having to reach far into the future and snatch seeds of potential greatness right out of my grasp. Had I thought to unpack the remark a bit, I might have taken the comparison as a compliment, but that perspective would have been fundamentally incompatible with the freshly-minted Serious Prose Poet, who always finds the storm cloud to any silver lining: “I feel violated / like innocence stolen / but worse”. Oh, get over yourself!

“But worse.” This was not an unknown device for the period, sometimes employed with tongue lodged firmly in cheek as in “thank you”, recently released in MIST2000 (and with less irony as in “her braid; i obeyed” in M-9806-A):

thank you for reminding me

last night

that I am not a hot stove -
that I am capable of contact

sustained
without immediate withdrawl
and mutual discomfort.
I did not
burn you
though you did
touch me.

Perhaps worse.
Perhaps with a capital “T.”

(I don’t recall there being
a “t”
in “Perhaps”…)

Wherever a poem by a Serious Prose Poet starts, gravitational physics dictates that its predictable trajectory is oriented only in one possible direction: downward. Even on rare occasions where it may appear to be raising in exaltation, an obligatory twist or implied subtext of tragic flaw invoked at the conclusion will spike it down to the ground like Icarus, the volleyball of the gods; Serious Prose Poems understand that all emotions are bad, but that good emotions are worse because the world is still bad and the speaker is merely sadly deluded. But the icing on the cake:

is it no longer possible to live in a modern world
without experiencing post-modern apostasy?

Dense, huh? Here, permit me to translate:

ATTENTION LADIES: do not permit this man to insert his penis into any portion of your anatomy.

Fortunately, they seemed to have gotten the memo, instead reserving their erotic interest and devotion to more suitable subjects who weren’t so prone to flying into histrionics upon realising that they weren’t the only ones to ever taste their particular sweet breath of air; calmer, more sedate and successful subjects, which brings us right back around to David Bowie.

Early on in my accordion career (indulge me in the digression, it finds its place on the meta level), around the turn of the century, I had a method: get booked to provide music for a strangely specific function (eg. a fundraiser to recover from a house fire, hi Ivan E. Coyote!); the afternoon before the show, cram just-recognizable arrangements of thematically-relevant songs (Ring of Fire, Burning Down the House, etc.); perform a totally musically disjointed set; blame the theme. The sets weren’t any good, but you could not accuse them of being off-topic. But in time, I concluded – probably there is more to art than being relevant.

(And so in all likelihood you won’t be seeing a great deal more blog posts of this type 8)

Sorry to disappoint with the poetry (disappointing with poetry: a long-cherished artscene tradition) – if you were hoping for some textmode art with which to commomorate the starman, perhaps I can turn you on to some period teletext Illarterate exposed me to, further teletext by Horsenburger or a hastily-wrapped ANSI WIP from our Blocktronics colleague mypalgoo. Cheers & stay strange, everyone!

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I’m not even sure how Theresa Oborn and her creations got on to my radar – some overlap on the creative fringe of the punk accordion scene, from the looks of things – but her regular social media sharings of impossible evocative creatures from the strange realms of the imaginary, manifest here in concrete reality, were impossible to ignore… and naturally floated toward the top of my “if I release another artpack… if we finally make good on the ‘real world art’ division” list. And while sculpture was an uneasy devolution of 3D modelling as far as computer art goes (let’s face it, putting this kind of stuff into an artpack is well-nigh unpredecented), once she started posing them in animated .GIF loops, we no longer had to sweat the compromise between old mediums, new media and contemporary art. All that matters is that her pieces are awesome, and we made a nice welcoming space for them! The only hard part was narrowing myself down to four pieces and not just ransacking her portfolio wholesale. All that remained was to communicate to a total stranger what an artpack was and what the artscene was, and why she might be interested in participating. Well, OK: the communication was probably somewhat incomplete, but while all we had to offer was “exposure”, on the bright side: we weren’t asking her to do any new work, just to allow us to advertise her existing material!

(Anyhow, 3D sculpture is not an entirely unknown genre for enthusiasts of cathode ray entertainment: Clay Fighter aside, it was rarely better used than in Doug TenNapel’s graphical adventure game The Neverhood: a bold experiment that has gone virtually ignored since its release now 20 years ago (barring perhaps Squinky’s musical detective game Dominique Pamplemousse.) In my estimation any one of these characters would be well qualified to take a starring role in Neverhood 2: Electric Boogaloo. But I digress.)

Had I been curating more carefully, I might have been able to counter Catbones’ gratuitous nipplage (well, non-optional for a work entitled “SteamPink” I suppose) with some carefully crafted twigs & berries, laboriously formed through careful ministrations of a woman’s diligent hands. Not just decorative, in many of her sculptures they play a critical role of acting as a balancing counterweight – somewhat opposite to how things often work out in real life. But I digress further.

The reason I’ve taken it upon myself to expound upon the virtues of her work at this particular juncture, despite not yet having really taken the time to get to know the artist or learn more about her inspirations and techniques, is to revisit a popular theme at this time of year – to helpfully alert you fans and readers that she has Christmas bills to pay and consequently her soulful little Sculpey characters are for sale at a steep discount at her etsy store! Now go forth and empty her shelves!

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His partner gave him an ultimatum: to focus on one of his creative gifts rather than splitting focus between them. So Ozero (aka Onyx, aka NinjaDude of (CORRECTION: fellow TPOE traveller to) HFR, aka Joseph Picard, onetime SysOp of The Crimson Helm) set aside his visual art (see Mist-released examples attached; apparently he also kept on keeping on for some time) and the tracks which filled Sonic Equinox music disks, and focused on his current creative mainstay as a purveyor of ebooks.

Then he suffered a long hospital stay, and in the tedium of medicalized confinement, looking for some small way for the spark of human whimsy to express itself in a wholy institutionalized environment, the drawings (well, doodles) crept back in.

Because nothing is wasted, after being released from the hospital these doodles were compiled into an ebook, and as periodically happens – this weekend it is being given away for free. Avail yourself! It is almost certainly the best collection of work ever produced on its subject: linguistical curiosities found on hospital meal menus.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWyvoKzQn78?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

blocktronics:

Texmode art demo “New.Txt” with graphics by Blocktronics artists The Textorcistand and Nail got 1st. place at TMDC 2015 event!

Congrats, buddies!

Link to results page:
http://www.pouet.net/party_results.php?which=167&when=2015&font=1

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[wpvideo mzXApRFJ]

We have provided a great testament to the “when it’s ready” mentality, the idea that some works of art are like fine wines, losing nothing if bottled up and left to ferment in a basement for a decade or so. Indeed, the audience for our 2014 re-release of the 1994 Bells of Yule music disk was undoubtedly larger – if we had been ahead of our time, perhaps popular tastes had finally caught up to our vanguardism. (Popular ears still aren’t quite ready for the modern 1930s sounds of Kurt Weill– being ahead of the pack doesn’t always pay off, but as it turns out, nothing we were doing is quite that avant-garde 8)

There is one thing that instantly freezes a piece into a moment in time, associating the two permanently like a stapler, and that is: including a date or year on it. This is why we had to use the Pablo jam ANSI in our MIST1015 memberlist (awesome though it was regardless) despite the fact that it was arguably incomplete (through several release tweaks and revisions, completion of Frankenstein’s shading was promise, but never delivered) – because at no point in the future would there ever be a better moment to release an ANSI that read “MISTIGRIS 1015”.

Dutch computer artist Freddy43, whose astounding work you got a chance to hear and see in MIST1015, presented us with a demo of some compelling technology – a sine-bouncing scrolly bar working its way across a pair of HTC smartphones. (It’s a trick, making fiddly work that is somewhat obvious in retrospect look easy and seamless. Parting the curtains and revealing the magician’s ruse: “i have to videocapture the sine scrolling text, then make 2 splitted video’s of it, and film it again when playing back at the phones..so it’s not some script running on both phone’s together or whatsoever..it takes a bit of time and patience to make it..”) We agreed that it would be a good fit for our vintage affectations and felt that we could totally incorporate that into our new run of artpack-promotional video imagery. But it wasn’t ready to roll prior to the pack’s launch, and though it eventually did come through the pipe in a complete form, it didn’t fit in with any of the year’s remaining (Christmas music video 8) releases, so it went unused.

No problem – we can just sit on it and use it later, right? BZZT! Sadly, we will never again be Mistigris 2015. Our proclamation of what computer art is and isn’t in 2015 is instantly stale here in the bold new world of 2016. Alas! And here is the downside of the great trick that is actually just hard work: due to the pain-in-the-ass factor of making so trivial an alteration as changing two instances of “2015” to read “2016” – basically, redoing all of the hard work over again in its entirety – instead it gets left, wasted, by the roadside, and we think to ourselves: “Too bad we stamped it with an expiration date, because it was a pretty cool trick!”

At least today we can say: it will never again be as close to 2015 as it is now, and squeak it out the gate to impress with what it does rather than just what it says 8)

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MIST2000, our final compilation of works collected and never released, now has – following some extensive use as the carrot in our treasure hunt – at long last been made available to the general public. Here. Right here. Click the link already!

This pack basically represents materials that began piling up right from the assembly of M-9808 that were too inconvenient to late-breakingly incorporate into its bespoke HTML framework. We hadn’t determined yet that we wouldn’t be releasing any more artpacks until 2014, so potential submissions just kept on piling up. (Not from the textmode artists who go largely unrepresented here, they were always an antsy and impatient bunch, but in 1998 that was the most hastily-dwindling sub-specialization of the rapidly-diminishing artpack tradition anyhow… we were all looking ahead to what the hot new thing would be. If you’d told us that in 2015 it would be ANSI art, we’d have dumped our open cans of J0lt Cola on your head.)

This artpack contains a few specialty sub-collections, including a couple of bodies of work that we simply couldn’t figure out how to include in an artpack in 1998 (photographs? sketches? paper collages? THE SKY WILL FALL! In all fairness, releasing a 100-meg artpack in 1998 would have turned us into pariahs.) These include a complete story from the Dream Factory comic book that artists related to Mistigris actually published a single issue of (after we spent a few years talking it up), remastered versions of Digitallusions songs Melodia prepared for use on the WebTV service (and which did end up using them – though never paying her for them!), a complete playthrough of the “Eat Poop You Cat” game of telephone pictionary, unreleased tracks from our never-launched Mistigris music CD, Ice Cream Emperor’s suite of MS Paint works in an abstract expressionistic style, and the collaborative “Shakespeare’s Pen” comic book – up to the point where the narrative spiralled out of coherence. And – the only documentary existence suggesting that the Tracker Fix parties or 11th E-mag ever happened! Also: nearly 4 hours of music.

All that and many other interesting qualities which are expounded upon, at great length, in the artpack’s infofile. We hope that you enjoy this last great flourishing of historical Mistigris! After this, the vaults are looking positively vacant!

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The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #9, explained!

This is it. I’ve held your hand through every contentious piece of show-stopping material along this path, standing between you, the avid vintage computer art enthusiast, and me, the gatekeeper of the jam-packed MIST2000 archive. If you had any aspiration to figure out any of the treasure hunt’s puzzles, this is the last unspoiled territory for you to try your hand at – the final speed bump.

So here we go. bit.ly/planesofHell brought you to a web page, joker.html – the group name “Mistigris” carries a few meanings, but despite the early emphasis on “a variation of poker in which the joker is wild”, largely we ended up celebrating the “French for alleycat” interpretation instead. But here we have a couple of vintage Mist jokers harrassing you, because … not everything here is entirely as it seems. It is the final puzzle – again, not much of one, but a little drag factor at least. Both ANSIs depict jester heads and – is that a clock around the neck of the first one? Mid-‘90s Menace, Flava Flav is a hype man, not a jester.

Now, where were we? Oh yes, there’s the link – you click it, and … what? 404? Is nothing in this accursed world as straightforward as it pretends to be? (OK, an invalid complaint: this has all along pretended nothing less than to be a puzzle.) There are no hints on the 404 page. It really does want you to go back. (If I’d been in a crueller mood, I would have made the 404 page’s link redirect to a different “joker” page that looked the same and whose URL read the same – some lowercase-“l” / numeral “1” / capital-“I” ambiguity perhaps – whose “step across the finish line” link was now valid. But that would have been cruel. The finish line was, it turns out, right in front of you all along: it was just, as in puzzle #3, hiding in plain sight. Hit Ctrl-A or whatever your system understands to invoke the “Select All” command, and marvel in amazement as additional text is revealed beneath the bogus hyperlink:

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another. – Edouard Manet
__________

(I bet that’s probably the only time Edouard Manet has ever been referenced in artscene history! But it’s a nice quote, seemingly applicable to ANSI art – perhaps a mantra for practitioners of pHUNK.)

Anyhow: THAT line of underscores is the “finish line” described above. Anyhow, if it is clicked upon, the computer user will skip to the very end of the merry chase and see the eye-bleeding congratulatory extravaganza you never earned, on which we blew our entire VFX budget. (Also, next time you run The Secret of Monkey Island in SCUMMVM, try “Ctrl-W” to Win the Game. It will bring with it a parallel thrill.) It really is worth seeing, words will only take you so far, but before you go here, you need to have been given a Pokemon epileptic seizure warning. Warning! OK, now go knock yourselves out.

That’s it! No more puzzles! Go home already!

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #8, explained!

OK, so you jumped through the hoops. bit.ly/spiderlegs delivered you a file, isenough.rar, which contained a very brief text file that just read “examine not the contents but the container”, plus some SAUCE metadata, fingering this file as: the contents. Finally, an actual puzzle! It’s not much of one, but it requires you to do a little more than sit, wait and watch.

In a perfect world, you scrutinize the .RAR archive itself (“the container”) for the SAUCE with which it has been invisibly enriched using SPOON – but in a pinch, you can just open it in a text editor and take a peek seeking out text strings at the end. Here, so close to the end, it sends you further along, to bit.ly/planesofHell. Could the end of our epic quest be within reach? Very nearly so, I think!

Sudden Death opened a joint networked PabloDraw session, that’s the important part – on intermittently on a regular basis (from now on?) at stolen-archives.us port 9600. Could I resist popping in? Don’t be daft! And who do I see there but none other than wi of Mist, who had popped in of his own volition without the heavy-handed invitation usually required of largely-retired historical ANSI-ists… well, maybe I had put him in the mood earlier in the day with my late-‘90s Al’s House of Meats ANSI art quilt Tweet:

@icicle I already made a quilt, back in 1999! It, uh, was made of ANSI art. Sorry, what were we discussing again? pic.twitter.com/geEGn80eLd

— Rowan Lipkovits (@UnwashedMass) December 31, 2015

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Anyhow, despite his friendliness with us, Sudden Death was never really part of the Mist crew; co-founder of CiA, at present he opportunistically just tries to light textmode sparks wherever a chance of a flame is present. So this wasn’t explicitly intended as a Mistigris joint (unlike the last one) and indeed it did contain other material by Mist-unrelated artists that I cropped out after following up on a suggestion in the PabloDraw chatroom and coming up with a bit of spontaneous lit rhapsodizing on the occasion of Hogmanay, laid out according to certain concrete poetry conventions last explored in ANSI back in an improvised illustrated poem from the 1999 installment of the (still-running!) Evoke demoparty in Germany. With wi and Cthulu of Mistigris both representing, we had a real Mistigris production together, and so here we share it with you. Will it end up in an artpack? Who cares! Happy New Year!

(And to enhance your fresh start, don’t forget the 1995 New Year tune – and its remix – we blogged about here a year ago. They’re not getting any older, just more and more classic!)