Mistigris Call For Submissions

Hey you! Yes, you! We want your art! We want you to put it into a computer, if it’s not already there. (If you need help, we’re game to give it a shot.) We want to collect it into a virtual “group show” (which we have traditionally called an “artpack”) here in cyberspace. We know it sounds like a long shot, but we’ve been doing it since the early 1990s (with a decade and a half off for good behavior in the middle.) This marks our 22nd anniversary of beginning to do it. We have returned to this activity after so long away because, simply put, art is worthwhile and making and sharing it is awesome.

Last year we got carried away, wanting to be explicitly inclusive of a thousand varieties, and instead of saying “a thousand varieties”, we named them all one by one. This year, we shall say more with less – less inspiring, less indulgent… less likely to fall unrecoverably down the valley of tl;dr. We’re not just talking visual art here (though we do synaesthetically want all flavours of that!), but any product of creative activity: literature, music and software come first to mind; conceptual art, performance art and dance are also of interest to us, though squeezing them into the computer requires some (eminently worthwhile) scheming. Our traditional wheelhouse is computer art, but in 2016, all art is computer art. When in doubt, the answer is almost certainly “yes”.

As with many creative undertakings, we have little concrete recompense to offer contributors: exposure to our audience with biographical blurbs describing your creative practice, with social media links leading back to you for viewers intrigued to learn more about your fascinating work. Select works will be profiled individually on our group blog, exploring all the other reasons your art is so amazing that viewers might not have clued into upon first exposure. Group membership is an old joke at this point, but taking part in our project does put you at the table with a number of other skilled creative practitioners (over 50 of them in last year’s collection) who may have talents you would find useful in the execution of your own projects – cross-pollenation is a thing, and it is beautiful. At this point in time (and, granted, at all previous points through our history), there is no money involved, so if that is a necessary component for your participation, then we wish you the best of luck in pursuit of that particular white whale.

In short, we want to provide an outlet to grant you an opportunity to vent unreleased or overlooked works from your portfolio or back catalogue that may be languishing in obscurity despite being generally meritorious, and give you an excuse to create something new (so as to better participate in your own manipulation) with the promise that It Will Be Seen By People Interested In Art. That is really what it boils down to. That lily cannot be further gilded, nor should it be.

The deadline for submissions for our next artpack is October 15, 2016, with the understanding that the collection will be released to the world by the end of that month. You can send submissions (and even mere questions and inquiries) to pseudo_intellectual@yahoo.com cthulu at tabnet dot ca, and if you absolutely feel you need to get up to speed with our milieu before committing one way or the other, you can find out more about what we do here at our Tumblr, at our @mistfunk Twitter feed, in our Facebook group, or by enjoying for yourself last year’s Mistigris artpack.

MISTIGRIS ARTPACK SUBMISSION DEADLINE:
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Thanks for your time.

- Cthulu, Mistigris founder

Mistigris 2016: When in doubt, the answer is almost certainly “yes”.

Logo by Weird, 1998, treated with Retrospecs, 2016.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XphjBd9UebU&w=480&h=360]