[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)