Today on Mistigram, the sad story (expounded upon at great length on Instagram) of this lovely little piece of surreal Amiga hirez drawn by Sentience sometime in the mid-‘90s and then reserved for use as cover art for a printed collection of Mistigris literature that was never to be. The hand-tree, the land-shark, the restful penguin… probably all reaching a wider audience today than in the previous 20 years combined. Thank god for the long tail!
Today on Mistigram, a piece of ANSI art in the exotic 80x50 screen mode by Sentience, drawn on his Amiga using homebrew software. It was released as part of a “colly” (an end-to-end compilation if you will) of other works drawn in the same 50-line mode in our January 1996 artpack. The logo is purple and pleasant, round and friendly, but the Terminator-esque illustration warns of the promises and perils of the cyber era knocking at the door.
This piece of oldschool Amiga-style 50-row ASCII art was an contribution from on-again-off-again guest Mist artist Feral, at this point (October 1996, our second anniversary collection) formally a member of Trance – no genuine Mist member would ever be caught with such braggadocio! I didn’t know about viewing oldschool ASCII in 50-line mode with Amiga fonts until, gulp, a couple of years ago (I don’t know if it was even possible on period MS-DOS machines) but chee whiz, it looks good that way!
Hallowe'en is here again and we are dressed up as … ourselves, 20 years ago. (Are any costumes possibly scarier than our own adolescences?) I know that trends and fashions are supposed to go in 20-year cycles – is 2015 the new 1995? (Microsoft probably hopes so.)
But I digress. You can find our new, 21st anniversary artpack MIST1015.ZIP at our new website at mistigris.org, or download it wholesale at bit.ly/mist1015, or view and hear (much of) it through your web browser at pc.textmod.es/pack/mist1015.
It’s a massive undertaking, containing over 100 files submitted by over 50 artists (including over an hour and a half of music!), representing works created from the late ‘80s to … late last night.
There’s no official theme (if “computer art” is a theme in 2015, it’s one so broad as to be unuseful), but due to the timing of our release, it naturally happened that a certain quantity of spooky, Hallowe'eny art accumulated in our incoming directory. We actually debated just releasing it as a separate Hallowe'en pack, but twice as many packs == twice as much administrative work, so to avoid killing our senior staff (what would be a more fitting Devil’s Night twist?) we opted to lump it all in as a sub-theme within the greater pack.
There’s lots to enjoy here – and even tomorrow, when the Christmas decorations come out, there will still be lots of non-Hallowe'eny material in there for you to continue enjoying. (And how does that joke go? “Why do programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas? Because 25 DEC == 31 OCT!”)
But in the meantime… Boo!
..Posted works: witchy animated .GIF by Janos Horak, Shift JIS by Kalcha, Amiga pixelart by $too, ANSI spider by Vordreque, ballerina spider by Theresa Oborn, Skullflower by Phatal, Zombies, Run! ANSI by Happyfish, DJ of the Dead by Vordreque, ASCII by ldb.
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BONUS: appearing in the artpack, though not with this track – electronic music master Ill-Esha has made a sinister electro rearrangement of Danny Elfman’s thme music to Beetlejuice, which you can enjoy at http://subdotmission.com/sub-freebies
History repeats itself. Teenagers, enamoured with the multimedia potential of their powerful new home computer, apply themselves to digital creativity, finding a wide audience for their innovations. But I’m not talking about the PC, MS-DOS based ANSI artscene, rearing up circa 1992, but the community revolving around the Commodore Amiga, a revolutionary machine which just celebrated its 30th anniversary. (The Amiga itself repeats splashes made by Commodore’s earlier Commodore 64 and even the Apple 2, but those are distant enough second-degree connections that I will choose to overlook in this particular post 8)
In terms of computer art, Amiga users were living in palaces of high art when IBM-bound PC users were huddled in stinking mud huts, unaware that we were as blind and deaf to the nature of computer art as the denizens of Plato’s Cave were to reality itself. We thought 16 colours in our computer games was hot stuff while we watched special effects produced on Video Toaster-equipped Amigas appear in millions of colours in our favorite TV programs and movies.
Where was the Amiga “scene”? They had BBSes PD and underground and, sure, even a squished variant of ASCII art, but due to its limited community and showing up at the party a little early, they missed being a major part of the artscene (well, Electronic Arts made it the powerhouse for the 16-bit generation of game developers, knowing that here at last was the power to make games sexy – and for a few years published tools and applications (like Deluxe Paint, source code just liberated) needed to seed the future video game industry. So they were players in the digital underground in the sense that they were developing the games our couriers were warezing 8)
But don’t let me go on about the visionary Amiga scene at too great length, because (despite my entry at the Amiga Music Preservation site) … I was never part of it. But these guys were: EuphoniX broke the mold for the 604 music-tracking scene – first in to make a splash, greeted and name-checked by all and sundry who followed… and all using only a masterfully minimal four channels! Their period of scene activity was so brief (at nearly four years of “active” activity, Mistigris outlasted nearly all – but never had a chance to distinguish itself with a big splash until October 2015 , by which point the competition had really dwindled 8) but their manic method of what could be described as “rapid prototyping” resulted in such a flood of output that their moment on the stage felt like a genuine era. This fan already took a crack at boosting his teenage obsession – over ten years ago! (That write-up provided the basis for this collection’s infofile; it has been mildly groomed and updated.) I won’t put you to sleep by rehashing it yet again.
The collection – as complete an omnibus of the complete tracked works of EuphoniX as is possible, plus a few tracks by satellites of their crew – can be enjoyed in-browser courtesy of pc.textmod.es , as day 9 of Mistigris’ May Music Madness… forensic retrieval of their cassette tapes continues apace, but we’ll simply have to let you know if and when they are successfully recovered, remastered and re-released. For the time being, we’re all about the .MODs.
