We hit you with its history, we held the contest, we let things simmer for a while, and finally… we can share the results with you!

Presenting, for the first time anywhere in the existing digital record, the outcome of a Tracker Fix computer music compo! This one is (at press time) the most recent, held February 20-21, 2016, and represents the only complete account of any Tracker Fix activity, previously known only to posterity in fragments and references from the late ‘90s. The event was envisioned as unfolding across two phases – an initial “rapid prototyping” phase and then a later “improve, expand & polish” phase – and scoring was going to be calculated as a function of improvement from the first phase to the second. But none of the initial song-sketches ever came back with improved versions, so the compo is not scored. As a bonus, in addition to the initial set of song-sketches, there are a couple of late “non-competing” songs that were sent in outside of the compo’s official times, as well as the initial track from MIST1015 by Claire Roberts that provided the offbeat belly-dancing sampleset we had to work with. (The samplepack is included with the archive, in case you feel, well after the fact, that you’d like to take a crack at them also.)

Participating composers ultimately included DraXx, Simon, Evgthug1, Cthulu, Nobilu, Freddy43, and bryface. Share & enjoy!

ascii-akr:

Tribute to the game “Another world”.

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THE WOMEN OF feMIniSTIGRIS. (Pictured: art that could only have come from women, as none of them include any washboard abs, stoic grimaces, or lit spliffs.)

Happy International Women’s Day! The underground computer artscene was not traditionally known as a great place for the ladies. I mean, you could ogle them by the yard as Gen13 supplanted Spawn as the most popular subject of ANSIfication, and Integrity (WHQ: “The Ho-Zone”) rose to success on an official internal policy of maintaining a strict minimum quota of “babe” pictures, decorating the artscene with wallpaper you might expect in the break room at a car repair shop. (Given a starting point of the Image comics revolution underway then, was this a foregone conclusion? As in the Sensational She-Hulk before, the only major title there in which women were treated as anything other than eye candy was The Maxx, and even there if you ignored the word bubbles – admittedly the first place I’d ever been exposed to the names Steinem and Paglia in print – Sam Kieth could easily exude a kind of En Vogue syndrome… whose empowering messages were reversed into objectifying ones when you hit “mute” on the music video. Does the artscene have a Bechtel test? Sure: how come none of Alison Bechdel’s comic strips ever got ANSIfied?) If you had a male gaze, you were in luck. But all there was to gaze upon was fiction and fantasy, right? Well… it turns out that there were a handf^H^H^H^H^Hfew women active in the artscene, primarily known as the girlfriend of x or the wife of y… not due to any failures in their own right as talented artists… being overshadowed by one’s man is just something that naturally happens, right? (Ask Frida Kahlo.) Tabaqui did good work; Kitiara was an amazing force to be reckoned with! And Superchick was, well, super. But where were the rest of them? Why such under-representation here when women were so at the vanguard of video art and net.art? (I, uh, don’t have any answer to that last one.) In PD circles, ‘90s textmode art was dominated by women – jgs in ASCII and Ebony Eyes in ANSI. Raquel Meyers lords over PETSCII and teletext, Keira Rathbone is the typewriter art hero of the day, and Jennifer Daniel just got ASCII stickmen printed in The New Yorker – but never released in an artpack! What kept them out of the realm of the underground elites? (Or am I answering my own question?)

The BBS world was one where you could largely be as anonymous as you wanted to – while the uptight Fido zone coordinators might require registered users to send in photocopies of their drivers’ licenses in order to access their private directory of Cindy Crawford swimsuit .GIFs, that kind of trail was exactly what you didn’t want haunting you in the legally grey area of ThE uNdErGrOuNd… so no one needed to know your real name, location or sex unless you chose to share them in a message base or at a meet; those kinds of details weren’t what we were about, and could in a sense be considered actual liabilities: we weren’t here to represent how we existed in the real world, it was supposed to be an escape from all that!

As BBSes withered on the vine and the scene shifted over to the IRC some of that privacy was lost: despite the given assumption that There Are No Girls Online, dudes (a/s/l?) were constantly sniffing around (a/s/l?) looking for a hint (a/s/l?) of evidence (a/s/l?) to the contrary. Hackers and crackers are devious sorts, skilled at connecting dots from trails of breadcrumbs, and so now that I have your home phone number, surely you wouldn’t refuse a friendly offer of a coffee date, would you?

Mistigris served as a refuge of sorts, an island and oasis for outliers of various stripes; on top of our stubborn resolve to continue including computer music in our artpacks, we were notorious for providing a home for lit writers when the rest of the scene was prepared to turn its back on them, and (perhaps not unrelatedly) we also counted quite a few women beneath our umbrella. I don’t know precisely what factors lent us this preeminence – beyond lip service to egalitarian and democratic rhetoric (meaning that Cthulu agonizingly consulted with everyone before doing what he wanted anyway), I can’t think of any policies we consciously enacted intended to provide this effect, so it may have just been dumb luck. (I can’t take any personal credit for it, thinking back to the time long, long ago that I followed Bast home uninvited from a meet like a complete creep, resolving to be bold and get to know this fascinating and troubled writer better… and staying on my best behavior of course, especially after observing her mantleplace overflowing with 1st prize trophies from Tae Kwon Do tournaments. I must thank her after all these years for not turning me into a grease stain on her carpet. But I digress.) If I had to speculate, it might be related to Mist’s long-toothed message echomail culture, increasingly as time went on fostered on bulletin boards whose system operators and network coordinators were women (the heavy-lifting Happyfish and Etana to be specific): so straight off the bat, the cyber toilet seat stayed down.

Ladies we provided an outlet for in our first century included (but aren’t necessarily limited to):

• 
  Bast


• Binty


• Delire


• Eoanya


• Etana


• Flyingfish


• Happyfish


• Heyoka


• Lady Blue, who also hearkened from Kitiara’s milieu of RCA – maybe they had a few drops of what was in our water?


• Maeve Wolf


• Melodia


• Silver Angel


• Spirit Wolf


• Voi the Analogue Cat


• Weird


• and Zinnia Kray, all talented artists that any group would be fortunate to include among their ranks.

A cocktail napkin calculation suggests that in regards to gender parity perhaps as high as 10% of classic Mistigris members were women. That is, uhh, not very high, but you would be hard pressed to find a more major group with a better ratio. (Hallucigenia trumps us, I believe, being basically a group spun off by the hard-working ladies of Mistigris to continue having a supportive safe space in which to release their computer art when I could no longer reliably provide one. QC was a big wedge: pop psychology might suggest that women prefer to work collaboratively where men are competitive. I don’t know if that holds any water, but its myth at least is relevant to the subject at hand.) My suspicion is that at one time or another we hosted the majority of the artscene’s women, which is to say over 50% of them, and if you’d like to challenge this purely speculative thesis I will happily include at the bottom of this post a tabulation of all known women who released works in the artscene outside of Mistigris.

Following our revival, we’ve done better by this metric – representing contributors from eg. MIST1015, the ladies’ numbers come in quite a bit higher, including Mistigris appearances from women we’ve never featured before:

• Andrea Schmidt


• Brady Ciel Marks


• Claire Roberts


• Emily Suzanne Shapiro


• ideath


• ill-esha


• Jenn Ashton


• Jenny Ritter


• ldb


• Raquel Meyers


• Sara Ciantar


• and Theresa Oborn.

Counting ladies both classic and modern releasing in MIST1015 indicates that they make up 17 of its 66 contributors – a full quarter! I’m sure I myself am still guilty of the patriarchy’s microaggressions (at least I have stopped writing love sonnets to my disposable muses), but especially since becoming a father to two little girls (not that that’s the only reason to behave like a halfway-decent human being) I’ve tried to tread more carefully and just generally be aware of mindlessly repeating and perpetuating oppressive patterns baked in to the old system; when called on a piece of no-harm-intended sexist language (“FINALLY something to draw other than breasts”) in the instructions for my painstakingly revived Blender compo, I thanked the source and replaced it with an equivalent that everyone can enjoy. On being shown an astounding work in progress featuring cartoonish mammaries in the leadup to MIST1015 I congratulated the artist on his creative triumph but remarked (after quickly alt-tabbing away so as not to prompt too many awkward questions from the 3-year-old daughter sitting on my lap: yes, the artist simply hasn’t yet drawn the baby drinking from those, honey) that in order to avoid turning into a sausage party we’d already reached our quota of female nudes for that particular collection (because when you beg a guest appearance from CatBones, founder of the Xpak, you already know what you’re getting.) Baby steps: man-baby steps!

In conclusion: hats off, ladies, I’m sure it hasn’t been easy getting to this point in your computer art practice, with pushback every step along the way, from the dismissive dudebro clerks at the computer store asking technical questions from your tag-along boyfriend when it was you who were the one dropping a grand on your first new desktop machine, to the fedora-clad nice guys who were hoping for some kind of payment-in-kind for their tokens of seemingly freely offered technical support, to being uninvited from raids with your guild until you “grow the balls” to take part in the VoIP coordination (and all the victorious teabagging you consequently miss out on), to the run of the mill trolls, MRAs, GamerGaters and pick-up artists harrying your every movement online and who won’t take “buzz off” for an answer. Thanks for sharing your art with us. (Art: where we can imagine a future where things are better.) I can’t embed Happyfish’s on-point Tweets about how relatively culturally non-toxic we’d somehow managed to make Mistigris for the ladies due to the protected and private nature of her account (a woman securing her social media account against unwelcome visitors? How extraordinary!), so the last word is left to me and my pledge to continue working on boosting my gender ratios and curbing my micro-aggressions so that someday we can just get down to the business of making amazing art on computers without half of us having to take that order with a side of eating unfair treatment and smiling. We were the idealistic kids of computer art: we were supposed to improve on the institutions we were riffing on. The computers now are faster and display more colours – time to prioritize making participation a little more user friendly.

(So: which artscene ladies managed to carve out a little niche outside our small circle of light in the pervasive gloom?

• Amber Coal,
• Pinguino,
• Superchick
• …?)

Edit: RaDMaN chimes in with: The Ladies Of ACiD! (“I believe this is the complete list from ACiD, my apologies if I’ve forgotten anyone”)

• Adya
• GoatGirl
• Gwydian
• Jikan
• Kitiara
• Psylocke/Jamiesan
• Sara/Azayaka
• Sarah Connor/Severina
• Sprite
• Tabaqui
• Winter Rose
• Yoyo

. And at least one more:

• Sadist had Idler/disnie who was also in PLF, a girl who drew interesting stuff and was a real sweetheart IRL.
  Atleast one more example ;)

So far: Mistigris, 28; rest of artscene combined, 16. Bring it on!

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So, when Mistigris sailed off to Avalon (until it was needed once again) in mid-1998, I was left (no passive voice, my friend: I left myself) a little high and dry for lack of a creative milieu (and, specifically, one I was at the centre of.)

I’d nearly completed my metamorphosis from juvenile penner of doggerel to “mature” composer of sonnets to a fully-realized published auteur of existentialist prose poetry (well, you saw it coming in the final few Mist packs; CT-*.LIT in MIST2000 represent a fully transformed writer: one who just isn’t very much fun anymore) and made my way to the nascent Vancouver poetry slam stages, where I obstinately refused to retool my divine visions to cater to hoi polloi by making them accessible and, y'know, enjoyable – even a poem about how great something was would have to contain some little speck of rot at its heart, a hidden knife to be twisted in the closing line. The good news is that I had found my voice as a writer! The bad news was that that voice … was that of depression. And verily I’d ardently cultivated an ability to hold forth on any subject and tease out the saddest and most devastating inconvenient truth it harboured just beneath its surface. (Wake up sheeple!) But despite this uncanny knack, it didn’t exactly make me any friends; I didn’t quite ascend, skyrocketing, through the ranks of our local spoken word community, speaking my harsh truths to power. (Mostly I just made old ladies uncomfortable at open mics with my intense negativity.) In short, poetry wasn’t doing me any favours – it wasn’t leading me on grand adventures or even getting me laid. And worse, the cultivation of my dire voice had me looking at the world through arse-coloured glasses, actively pursuing the heartbreaking in order to appease my strange muse. (Hi, is the new issue of Acme Novelty Library in yet?) The best I could hope for from the poetics of depression was a deeper and more profound depression – oh boy! So with some trepidation I set the poetry aside (never really to fully pick it up again – I pivoted to creative non-fiction with a poetic voice, but concluded that most of those poems didn’t really need to be written: however completely they encapsulated the experience of being me, I already knew what that was like and no one else cared.)

So that was it. Maybe I could get a job, find a nice girl and get over myself. But no: I was nonetheless an effete longhair, and if I wasn’t writing poems I had to foppishly be doing something creative. But what? Well, what did I do before I discovered BBSes? It just so happened that I’d studied classical piano for some 15 years, beginning at the likely premature age of 3. But due to the curriculum of the Royal Conservatory of Music, it wasn’t a creative education so much as an indoctrination; students were taught to reproduce, not interpret, and I had burned out on it not long before burning out on the artscene (and, indeed, burning out generally for the better part of a decade.) But I knew I enjoyed music – seeking inroads into the computer as a compositional tool had been one of my entry points to the artscene, and though I couldn’t in 1999 see a future for tracker music (sadly, just as mine was beginning to grow almost listenable) I figured that my future would be more filled with tunes than with poems.

I owned a piano, but it lived at my parents’ place; indeed they had told me that we would not be moving it until my lifestyle stabilized and I could expect to be maintaining the same residence indefinitely, because moving (and then tuning) a piano is an expensive proposition. So I stewed in contemplation of what instrument is enough like a piano that my 15 years of training could help me to transition? For years I went in circles figuring that I’d need some kind of synthesizer keyboard, but worrying about what capabilities I would need it to have, fearful of buying The Wrong Model and ending up unsatisfied with my new creative interface. Then, one week, I was exposed to three fateful accordion performances, and it struck me: an accordion is kind of like a piano. At least, half of it is.

So I found my way to the accordion. I had moved right out of computer art, seemingly for good, but still had one foot in performance poetry, getting on board with a 2005 group literary revue (spearheaded, incidentally, by the same fellow who blazed the trail for my first phone call to an artscene BBS: guess he was just a thought leader!) for which I provided words, music and dramaturgy: That’s My Brain And You’re Killing It! The show was a bust, garnering enough audiences in its 5-night run to cost all participating poets only $50 each for the privilege of having taken part, but a funny thing happened during our tour of promotional previews… (actually, several funny things happened: at the Song Slam at Cafe Deux Soleils, we paraded off stage singing our anthem and disappeared into the bathroom, growing quieter and quieter, leaving the night’s next performer to begin their act… only to return 5 minutes later, growing back up from a whisper, emerging full-throated seemingly still chanting our inane lyrics, interrupting the performer-in-progress. But I digress.) At January 2005’s monthly “Raw and Cooked” works-in-progress event at the old performance art hub the Western Front, the poets performed a handful of their most splendidly strange poems, and after they exhausted their slice of the evening… they were followed by a duo of consummately cultivated punk, singers who couldn’t sing playing instruments they couldn’t play, exuberantly and with impeccable accessorization. And they needed an accordion (and, y'know, someone who knew how to play music) as part of their ensemble. Happily, the performance poet association was a temporary one, and so I was happy to moor my ship to their landing and see how much fun we could have on shore leave.

Turns out, it has never yet ended! Because our outsider format (initially: sea shanties and early ‘80s goth and industrial on accordion, banjo and ukulele) wasn’t an obvious fit for anywhere, we got to go everywhere as a species of variety spice, from festival stages to guerrilla gigs in illegal venues (hello, McBarge!) and just highly memorable oddball gigs like the opening of a tattoo parlour. (While we weren’t able to turn our nerdy background to the same good use that eg. bryface has, we weren’t totally dissociated from it: early memorable gigs included VIVO’s Video Game Orgy, and a ground floor association with Vancouver’s chapter of Free Geek – “I will support your endeavors in whatever way I can… with an accordion” – eventually put us on stage with Richard Stallman!) A functional band demands a certain quantity of administrative duties – setting rehearsals, making and distributing song arrangements, booking and promoting gigs – and it turns out that these were not entirely dissimilar to the divers & sundry thankless tasks that made up being senior staff in an underground computer artgroup! (Unlike the artscene, it turns out that being in a band actually pays, too! Terribly, but it’s not entirely sunk time – only mostly.) And like running an artgroup, there are always personnel changes to keep on top of. It’s not that members quit, but they just, y'know, stop sending in submissions. Then there are the finances and keeping track of everybody’s pirate codenames (so, as you can see, not much has changed. Greetings from “Blackbox Squeezebeard.”) And Mistigris always had trouble maintaining a web presence (finally addressed!) but we never had to deal with Wordpress pharma hacks!

My projects typically have a lifespan, and some time after that runs out, I get the memo and regretfully move on. Mistigris ran out of juice in a period of grand upheaval after three years and a bit, but this delightfully unlikely, perpetually self-reinventing “jug band of the damned” The Creaking Planks has been an ongoing concern for over eleven years now (over 3 times the lifespan of Mistigris Classic!) with no signs of any reason for it to close up shop. (The most unlikely part was getting it going in the first place, playing the songs least appropriate for its instrumentation – which is basically, “any acoustic instrument allowed except for guitar.” Once the speed bump of its establishment was traversed, no further obstacle comes anywhere close.)

You heard a slice of us in MIST1015 with our unused demo for the mobile game Afterland (I was pushing hard to get some game art included in the pack for promotional synergy, but despite early promising signs it didn’t make it in) and the Planks arrangement (sans-Planks) of Dead Man’s Pants; you got a chance to see a couple of our curious posters in MIST2000 (and a few more of them here! some of them the best work of flyingfish, who was part of the BBS milieu back in the day and has remained a living link ever since) I had hoped to invite you to our 11th anniversary concert scheduled for the evening of January 29th, 2016, but I prioritized the timeliness of other tie-ins and … underestimated the amount of time it would take me to reflect back so many years and connect the dots leading to this point. So, uh, you missed it. As the date approached, I considered the poignant twist of the knife approach, ending the post with “and it’s tonight, too late for you to make plans to attend.” But I was too busy, y'know, playing that show, so I had to revise the knife further: “it was last night.” (scratch) “It was last week.” (scraaaatch.) “It was one month ago.” Well… OK, it was slightly over one month ago.

I’m being silly, since of course most of you on the Internet live far, far away from us and wouldn’t be casually making plans to visit in any event (but if you’re nearby, our next scheduled gig is April 22nd at the Little Mountain Gallery!), besides which the good news is that thanks to our recent orientation toward posting film clips from our rehearsals, you can enjoy us in the comfort of your own home, whenever is convenient. This unlikely number dropped basically the same week as MIST1015 and I was kicking myself at having lacked the foresight to fold it in to the pack (the one thing I left out, apparently) – it’s a sweet little demonstration that we, too, remember watching the movie “Hackers” in 1995 with a mixture of bemusement and a modicum of dismay at how much they got wrong. We’ll be resuming these as a regular series, so if you enjoy – please subscribe! Cheers.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoORTedaJlY&w=560&h=315]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoORTedaJlY