Today on Mistigram, we feature this historical photograph by...

Today on Mistigram, we feature this historical photograph by Mondo Charisma, released in the brand spanking new MIST0117 artpack yesterday, but shot sometime in the ‘90s. It’s been a hell of a week, and we can’t even be smugly Canadian about how the self inflicted terrorism is limited to the US side of the border. But the photo holds even further resonance for a subset of Mist Classic holdouts, the site here enshrined sitting literally across the street from the high school (now empty facades) we inhabited, thinking of computer art while daydreaming out the window. Its low-fi aesthetic reminds us that we were all mere snot-nosed art punks at one time, but only some of us are now adults with fond memories of being snot-nosed art punks. http://ift.tt/2kmx9Ik

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kmXO7r

Introducing the new Mistigris January 2017 artpack, fresh off...

Introducing the new Mistigris January 2017 artpack, fresh off the presses, featuring textmode art, line drawing, oil painting, photography and everything in between. (Even a little music and poetry for variety spice!) Not yet hosted on any artscene galleries, you can download the complete collection (only a trifling 30-odd megs, we let you off easy this time!) directly for local viewing at http://bit.ly/MIST0117 http://ift.tt/2jvuIyU

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jmZq1S

Today on Mistigram, Jenn Ashton’s painting “heart...

Today on Mistigram, Jenn Ashton’s painting “heart goes here” ♥ released in MIST1015. There’s no direct allegory to events unfolding south of the border except to ponder “where is the love?” (Airport protestors have heart in spades ♠, but the higher up you go the more it seems to be absent.) http://ift.tt/2jKaVih

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jmnu4Y

Today on Mistigram, this Snapchat faceswap by Brianne Baumber...

Today on Mistigram, this Snapchat faceswap by Brianne Baumber from MIST1116. What with the number of American women who will lose access to reproductive healthcare in the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, especially with all the noise about defunding Planned Parenthood, you’d be forgiven for thinking America’s GOP lawmakers see women as walking, talking uteruses subject to the control of men. This Magritte-like substitution makes the metaphor explicit.
Americans have until the end of the month to register for coverage under the ACA - however long it will last for - and some providers of reproductive health services are making available extended birth control pill supplies and are offering IUD installation as family planning methods that may weather through the political storms currently rocking the country. http://ift.tt/2jrSH1M

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kfThUm

Today on Mistigram, this desert photo by @dubaiwalla from...

Today on Mistigram, this desert photo by @dubaiwalla from MIST1015. There are few obstacles that a gentleman, properly attired and in full possession of his decorum, cannot manage to overcome. And happily, as a country that does business with the President of the United States, a wanderer in these trackless sands of the United Arab Emirates might be allowed entry privileges to the USA. Everyone else, however - pilgrim, tourist or refugee - is going to find themselves wandering the inhospitable desert wastes for quite some time. http://ift.tt/2jAB4QE

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kEzXNJ

And as a final lick of frivolity before the weekend gets...

And as a final lick of frivolity before the weekend gets underway, today at Pixel Pompeii, Cthulu shares a photo safari he undertook of video game sprites he found rendered as pixelart by Post-it Notes in the windows of nearby offices. You can enjoy the full post at http://ift.tt/2k1o7ho http://ift.tt/2jetRaA

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kv3iuJ

Today on Mistigram, we continue with our series of sober second...

Today on Mistigram, we continue with our series of sober second thoughts regarding the recent business in the United States. This is an untitled collage by Arielle Olivier we released in MIST1116, hearkening back to a naive time when a dreaded dystopian future might involve cold and dark rather than unchecked terraforming to an environment akin to the surface of Venus. http://ift.tt/2jwZn1U

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jbQ4FY

Today on Mistigram, another @horsenburger teletext portrait - of...

Today on Mistigram, another @horsenburger teletext portrait - of Walter White, a teacher forced to cook up methamphetamine in order to pay for his cancer treatment since the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. How prescient of the Breaking Bad showrunners! http://ift.tt/2knC3SJ

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2knD7G1

Today on Mistigram, another Shift_JIS remix by @kalchano from...

Today on Mistigram, another Shift_JIS remix by @kalchano from MIST1015 - this one taking on the stark abstraction of Picasso’s Guernica, commemorating the aftermath of a dry run of Nazi blitzkrieg tactics during the Spanish Civil War. Heads up : they’re up to their old tricks again. Keep your eyes open, you never know when an opportunity to punch one on camera may arise. 👊 http://ift.tt/2jZtlMz

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jwVuaR

Today on Mistigram, @daniellonglegs made this kaleidoscopic...

Today on Mistigram, @daniellonglegs made this kaleidoscopic image of sea anemones as part of a batch of hundreds (!) of similar images, a subset of which were animated together in MIST1116 - due to a certain Lovecraftian quality to this one, however, with its inhuman angles and non-Euclidian geometries, it was folded early into the MIST1016 collection of eerie Halloween art. http://ift.tt/2j9Qubl

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jsBkia

Today on Mistigram, we feature an oil painting by...

Today on Mistigram, we feature an oil painting by @the_mythical_man released in MIST1015 - “Secure Own Mask Before Helping Others”. While it appears to contain no molluscs, there is a certain resonance with the iconography of Pink Floyd album covers. http://ift.tt/2j5eaxb

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2k8v3Ji

Today on Mistigram, this detailed skull/flower drawing by Phatal...

Today on Mistigram, this detailed skull/flower drawing by Phatal from MIST1015. Nice sunflower 🌻! http://ift.tt/2jlTL8d

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jcIvND

Today on Mistigram - sailors take warning! ⛵ ⚠ This photo by...

Today on Mistigram - sailors take warning! ⛵ ⚠ This photo by Sara Ciantar from MIST1015 does a good impression of pixelart by photographing a spectacular sunrise through the screen door of a cabin. http://ift.tt/2jjiD0j

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2iNLC02

Mistigram part 3 on this special occasion - Freelance Pete might...

Mistigram part 3 on this special occasion - Freelance Pete might observe that to many, we have jumped into a fascist fire 🔥 but only out of a neoliberal frying pan 🍳. (And you would likely correctly surmise that he is a straight white man who may feel he hasn’t much to lose with this changing of the guards. But cut him some slack, I’m putting words in his mouth here.) This American Gothic of his could well describe past, present or future. (it did, however, run in MIST1015) http://ift.tt/2jHQO4N

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jICHN4

And the yin to that yang, another door closes. Teletext...

And the yin to that yang, another door closes. Teletext portrait from MIST1116 by @horsenburger http://ift.tt/2iJueJK

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jHdhj7

Today on Mistigram, two @horsenburger teletext portraits. One...

Today on Mistigram, two @horsenburger teletext portraits. One door opens… http://ift.tt/2j1RMZ5

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jH2VQ0

The Atari ST composers of Trideja (by which I mean Simon) are on...

The Atari ST composers of Trideja (by which I mean Simon) are on the rise! Fellow travellers through the BBSes of the 604, their absence in our May 2015 campaign to put all the historical tracker musics of our corner of cyberspace back into circulation for posterity was a conspicuous omission, stymied by our attempts to be completist - even they weren’t quite sure how many .MODs they’d composed. But yesterday Simon put a massive quantity of cream skimmed from their back catalogue up online and you can now enjoy what must be hours of Trideja tunes streaming through your web browser at http://ift.tt/2jsYrKu http://ift.tt/2jD3XfP

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2iP0Tsu

Today on Mistigram, we feature Ice Cream Emperor’s...

Today on Mistigram, we feature Ice Cream Emperor’s turn-of-the-century MS Paint abstract expressionism experiment “Blue Elephant With Trumpet”, eventually released to the public a year ago in Jan of 2016 as part of a series of similar pieces in the MIST2000 artpack collection. What use has an elephant for a trumpet? That must just be part of the joke. http://ift.tt/2k71cEq

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jBQLbd

Breaking news - a second installment of Vancouver’s...

Breaking news - a second installment of Vancouver’s Overflow chipmusic series has been announced March 23 at Vancouver Art & Leisure, featuring sets by Boaconstrictor, Glooms, Hitori Tori, and a return from the Swedish phenomenon Fastbom, plus visuals by Base64 and Vectrola. It should be a fun time! http://ift.tt/2jKVncj

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2j9gXqa

Today on Pixel Pompeii, @nicheinterests shares his latest...

Today on Pixel Pompeii, @nicheinterests shares his latest findings from his explorations into video game textmode art, past & present, artscene & outsider - all sourced from the endless galleries of @deviantart
Full blog post at http://ift.tt/2k4ujZ5 http://ift.tt/2j98D9M

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jKOHuB

Today on Mistigram, we feature the painting “Midnight...

Today on Mistigram, we feature the painting “Midnight Stroll” by @dashsharon which we released in our 20th anniversary reunion / revival MIST1014 artpack collection - a big change of pace from Maeve Wolf’s Mist Classic ANSI art work but no less exceptional! http://ift.tt/2k4278l

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2iIgJFy

Today on Mistigram, another tessellating pattern from Portland,...

Today on Mistigram, another tessellating pattern from Portland, this one by ideath in the original pixelart medium - textile! This Escherian infinity scarf first appeared in MIST1015 - indeed, for months it was the first and only file in our incoming directory, but we were inspired by an infinite garment to expand indefinitely. http://ift.tt/2iCTHzC

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2iJa4hA

Today on Instagram, @Starstew provided us with this science...

Today on Instagram, @Starstew provided us with this science fiction fever dream from MIST1116, tessellating a pixelart portrait of a spaceman (with several more “a"s) mutating through every possible permutation like some Prometheus petri dish. In its original animated form this must have been wild! http://ift.tt/2jrkGlL

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2iyrJW0

Today on Mistigram, from the “lost” M-9808 artpack:...

Today on Mistigram, from the “lost” M-9808 artpack: “dreams of flying”, Tincat’s final work in RIPscrip vector art… never released until 2015 - but well worth the wait! http://ift.tt/2jlhqJh

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jMBIIh

Today on Mistigram, the beginning of a wild trip. At some...

Today on Mistigram, the beginning of a wild trip. At some unclear time (most likely sometime in the mid-‘80s) BC poet Robin Skelton had his “night poem, Vancouver Island” published by the Massachusetts Review. Quite a bit later, around the turn of the century, I used a line from the poem, “time has its lives to eat”, as starter fuel for an online round of the telephone Pictionary game “Eat Poop You Cat”. Faced with the task of illustrating such an abstract phrase, @maureenevans produced this valiant effort: Father Time - so magical he floats, so aged his beard trails along - breaking his hourglass ⏳ and consuming a red, man-shaped leak of its contents as surely as in a Goya painting… Well done! And then this drawing got described, and then that description got drawn, and the semantic signal got gradually mutated to a delightful and hilarious extent, culminating in the most incredible round of EPYC this evangelist ever experienced.
You can see the entire (NSFW) round at http://ift.tt/2jQ7poa , as it found itself included wholesale in the MIST2000 collection of unreleased turn-of-the-century art finally made public following the great grand MIST2000 treasure hunt (a whole other story) in early 2016 - just about exactly a year ago! http://ift.tt/2iTDxTE

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jk38bx

Today on Mistigram, from MIST1014 comes this illustration by...

Today on Mistigram, from MIST1014 comes this illustration by Mist Classic alumnus Sentience entitled “Game of Frogs”. You can compare & contrast directly with hirez he created on his Amiga back in the ‘90s, but he claims that this was just an experimental exercise putting a new tablet through its paces. http://ift.tt/2iPvszc

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2iPLDwi

Today on Mistigram - Hein Cooper’s head-scratching...

Today on Mistigram - Hein Cooper’s head-scratching landscape photo from MIST1015. Sometimes if you want to appear in an artpack you need to lose sleep over individual pixels, agonizing between a sine and saw wave… while other times all you need is a friend to accidentally post your vacation picture upside down. We may not be the only artgroup whose organisers have ever read a book about Marcel Duchamps but the capricious genius of our curations has by far filled our artpack collections with the most found readymades. http://ift.tt/2iL9Io3

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jbpzQq

Bonemouse - What Lies in the Mist

Today on Mistigram - from the #inktober spree of @bonemouse we presented this eerie drawing of balloon-headed ghasts in MIST1016. He had a ton of amazing spooky drawings, many of which arguably outclassed this particular one (which is a nice idea but a little goofy in its execution), but when we saw its title we couldn’t say no: “What Lies in the Mist”. And that’s the truth!

Jamie Stantonian - eolas trachta

Today on Mistigram, this amazing photo from MIST1116 by Jamie Stantonian. If you can’t find a piece of textmode artwork, this is absolutely the next best thing. My guess is that this is some kind of diagnostic mode on a sign demonstrating the possible characters available to convey your message. What kind of message? “Information” doesn’t clarify that much (any signal will do), but I can report that “eolas trachta” translates (from Gaelic) to “traffic information”. A bandwidth report here on the information superhighway then? Allegorically so, perhaps. In any case, I don’t see many box-drawing characters, perhaps explaining why Ireland never had any renowned ANSI art groups.

My mistake, we had one more loose piece of winter art from MIST1216 – the cozy hobbit hole under “Hawthorne Hill”, by Claire Roberts. It’s not new, dating to 2011, but it was new to us, so … good enough! It was originally painted as a gift for her friend and collaborator (on, for example, her #inktober comic book included in MIST1116 which we’ll have to get around to visiting here sometime soon) Edd Macdonald… but now it can also be enjoyed by the masses!

[gallery]

While the Mistfunk Tumblr was … down for maintenance during the holidays, we ran several swell Horsenburger teletext pieces on Mistigram to celebrate the holiday season. We’re doing a bit of a batch catch-up here, so as you can see you missed his blocky renditions of the Grinch, Scrooge McDuck in Mickey’s Christmas Carol, Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life, and Stripe the Gremlin dressed as Santa in Gremlins. Also, a totally nuclear New Year’s wish for everyone. You could catch most of these as part of his teletext advent calendar through December, and also we used the images for visuals in the music video for our 1999 “Silent Night” remix and from there in the MIST1216 artpack. So now we should be just about all caught up! Cheers!

Today on Mistigram - one final ANSI art Mist logo by Nail (like all the rest!) from MIST1116’s infofiles. Not very Christmassy, is it, all sharp points and ribbons of gore? It is surely no accident. Which reminds me, wear eye protection while walking by… http://ift.tt/2iZSXZF

Today on Mistigram - as seen in MIST1216 (etc.), @Horsenburger drew this uncanny likeness of Will Farrell in the movie Elf.

There are plenty of pieces from that collection we haven’t looked at yet but with the 12th day of Christmas now behind us, the theme is beginning to feel a little hoary, so we’ll be leaving 1216 behind (for the time being) and future Mistigram posts will point further back - first to our tremendous MIST1116 artpack release (where you will find the quest to escape overrepresentation by the prolific Horsenburger was still a pressing concern), but also a return to the Mist Classic art vault. Stay tuned, Instagram friends and synchronized IFTTT viewers! http://ift.tt/2iRfSGi

Today on Mistigram, a hirez illustration from MIST1216, “Not A Creature Was Sleeping…” by @athenacreative depicting some cosy creatures all tucked in for a long winter’s nap. http://ift.tt/2i24uTZ

[gallery]

I was surfing around for some counterpart to Horsenburger’s masterful teletext advent calendar entries, thinking that they needed a complement for their appearance in the “Silent Night” music video and MIST1216 artpack, but something substantial was needed to counter them at the risk of being “all the teletext and then a couple of other things.” Then I found Vinny “@C64_endings” Mainolfi sharing a series of self-winterized images from classic C64 video games and I realised we just might have what we’re looking for! There were a pile of them (indeed, there are some he hasn’t even released yet) – these are ones we’ve featured in Mistigram so far, revamped versions of Bubble “Bauble” (Bobble), Impossible Mission, Bruce Lee, and Last Ninja (I Gave You My Heart). Formidable!

[gallery]
We got the new year off to a good start on New Year’s Day with Horsenburger’s second illegitimate appearance in the esteemed Sixteen Colors ANSI of the Day listings… illegitimate since his particular textmode artform is, of course, teletext rather than ANSI. But we can’t argue with the results! The AOTD appreciated his manly take on the Christmas holiday as epitomized by this trifecta of pieces celebrating the movie Die Hard (not incidentally also acting as a send-off to actor Alan Rickman who shuffled off this mortal coil early in 2016.)

(As for the first… it appears to have slipped us by in all the confusion surrounding the release of MIST1116, but fear not: we will be returning to set the matter straight!)

[gallery]
And after all the sweat of assembling the collection of assets for that music video, we figured… why not give people a chance to look at them, static, for longer than a few seconds? So here they are, all the bits that went into “Silent Night”, lovingly reassembled for a reunion as the MIST1217 artpack.

It was a retrocomputing extravaganza, with the Apple ][ represented via Melodia’s curation of seasonal demos for that pioneering platform extruded into three dimensions through her Octalyzer, the Commodore 64 in full effect thanks to @C64_endings and his winterized screenshots of classic C64 games, Atari ST representing courtesy of STuART “Forgotten Grove” and his STatariART cadre… I faked a Mac Classic selfie thanks to the iOS Retrospecs app, and of course we had a pile of amazing Horsenburger pieces on board thanks to his advent calendar project this year! (The only truly vintage platforms missing are the TRS-80 and ZX Spectrum… well, and the Amiga, but they have their own thing going.) All that plus a few pieces from Mistigris irregulars – Diane Smithers’ Prismafied photos, FidoNet-style ASCII art by ldb and more.

You can enjoy the whole thing, admittedly a little after the fact, through a browser-accessible web gallery at textmod.es. Cheers!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS0g7nEUdV0?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Is it possible that we somehow failed to tell you about our major Christmas 2016 project? It is possible – the smashing of my main computer’s screen interfered both in the commission of the project and the promotion of it. Well, season’s belated greetings, folks – it’s an outtake from Melodia’s “1999” music disk, a remix of Enya singing “Silent Night”, complete with an array of vintage and contemporary retrocomputing holiday imagery from Horsenburger’s teletext advent calendar, @C64_endings’ winterized screenshots of classic Commodore 64 games, imagery from Apple ][ demos run through Melodia’s Octalyzer, a few tidbits from the STatariART crew… plus even a couple of seasonal pieces by Mistigris regulars! Don’t worry if you didn’t get a chance to see this in time this year, we’ll certainly be parading it out again next December!

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