You first saw it in MIST1015, a Mistigris logo made of text symbols – but curiously not arranged according to the gridly demands of a fixed-width screen display. Robert “Lord Nikon” Doerfler, having conquered oldschool ASCII primarily under the auspices of Impure, had pursued new frontiers to tame and set his sights on the related undertaking of typewriter art. Through fiddly hand-tuning, a typewriter can do many things that PabloDraw, though it grieves me to say, cannot. He took first baby steps, as demonstrated in our collection, then continued since, making confident paces, and now travels with enormous, cocky strides – selling prints and commissioned originals from his typewriter art website at typewriter-art.de … but unsurprisingly, there’s not a huge market for Mistigris logos. (I know, the world is a cold and fundamentally unjust place, but that’s quite simply how it is.) So he decided to declutter his place (a single sheet of paper can really tip the balance!) and unsolicitedly mailed the original artwork over to the Mistigris WHQ (er, my front door).
However long it takes to transmit data from Germany to Canada, even at a historically low (300 baud?) speed, it typically takes even longer to send a physical object by post. (The sneakernet is the exception for short distances, but sneakernet would not traverse the Atlantic. The postal service actually played a crucial role in the European warez scene, where postage was cheaper than metred telephone use. But I digress!) We were nervous over here in Canada, knowing that our package was en route, yet also knowing that a massive (and wholly warranted) labour dispute is brewing in our postal system.
Spoiler warning: the package arrived. Not just containing the original artwork (you’d think that the coordinator of an artgroup would have accumulated more of these, but digital originals are hard to come by 8), the envelope also included a jolly note and a handful of what appear to be DeZign ASCII stickers of girls, b-boys and sword-wielding monsters – artscene subjects, in other words. Basically a bonanza of computer art made real, sitting in my living room where I can feel, smell and taste it. (Spoiler warning: doesn’t taste like much.)
Serendipitously, the very day the package arrived, I had been playing the part of the native speaker (ie, frantically dialing down the poet within) helping Robert work out some idiomatic English verbiage on a new piece of typewriter art on an epic scale, so it’s not just all about me – here’s something you can enjoy, also!
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Here, it looks like the Instagram video is having some challenges, let’s try the YouTube one instead:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dajx7SAAE0&w=560&h=315]
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