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!
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
A tool to draw ANSI through music, in realtime. ANSI MIDIo visualizer
is small piece of hardware by Will Lindsay (aka VBLANK) that converts notes to text characters, and velocity to colours.
Today on Mistigram, one last Nail showcase - he didn’t just dress our October 2016 infofiles with ANSI art Mistigris iconography, he also graced our October 2015 infofiles with two more very strong logos - here you can enjoy the one that’s graced the header of our Facebook group for the past year! It’s something pretty special. (and in case you wonder, the other one, which we are leaving in reserve in the event of some future blogging emergency, is also pretty great, too!)
One of the major drivers for computer art has traditionally been working around constraints and limitations. In today’s world of processor-intensive creative techniques that are ONLY possible through the heavy lifting of banks of supercomputers, the idea may seem jarring and dissonant, but today’s retrocomputing enthusiasts (and, y'know, the demoscene) keep burning the torch for those eras where making a computer perform any trick, despite their gutless innards, was a feat worth celebrating.
So this little demonstration included in MIST1016 shouldn’t be brushed off as a bit crude – given 40 minutes on a Commodore 64, it’s likely that you would come up with quite a bit less! But given the geographical proximity of these hackers to our traditional heart and homebase of Vancouver, BC, and the undeniable spookiness of these 8-bit ghosts flying around, we knew we had to share this little piece of instant code with the world in MIST1016!
If you want to get this program off the ground on vintage hardware at home (or in WinVICE) you’ll need to know that making it run requires a typical step – LOAD “*”,8,1 – and an extraordinary one: instead of RUN, tell it… SYS 4096.
Emerging ANSI artist LDA surprised us all with the submission of this… symbolically rich repast. Then, while seeking easy and obvious (but impressive!) animated transformations with which to populate our teaser trailer for the recent MIST1016 Hallowe'en artpack (which you can now enjoy in its entirety through your web browser at textmod.es, we surprised everyone by making it bloodlessly skip, jump, cavort and frolic for the entertainment and delight of bystanders! The version released in the artpack was the static ANSI art original, but we feel that this four-frame animation is its “best self”, so here you have another opportunity to appreciate it!
#pixelart Ghost jokes, Granada ORACLE, 20th June 1982. Quick (semi-)shoutout for @Grim_Fandango himself on this page!
Captured by Jason Robertson http://twitter.com/grim_fandango
Source: http://archive.teletextart.co.uk and http://www.uniquecodeanddata.co.uk/teletext76/
The perfect marriage of the graphical and the literary?
https://www.instagram.com/p/BHtYNkEDz-H/
Another newschool ASCII art Mistigris logo by Weird (a popular choice of subject for her), these fun letters spell out a good time. An unorthodox choice of lower white space characters give the logo a 3-D appearance, of being embedded in some malleable medium (and surely ascii qualifies!) Originally released in our 3rd anniversary artpack in 1997.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BHqzsL_DwqK/
Today on Mistigram, a Mist promo VGA (piece of high resolution art) depicting a surreal 3-D landscape, modelled by Quebec’s Enelf Daragard and submitted to our doomed M-9808 artpack. (Doomed because we’d bitten off more than we could chew in framing an entire artpack as a website, an effort that stopped Mistigris dead in its tracks until the logjam was finally resolved in 2015.) But unburdened of that fateful context, it was a nice piece for 1998!
https://www.instagram.com/p/BHpNbreDKIn/
Today on the daily archaeological Instagram dig from the Mistigris back archives, we have this true blue ANSI art Mist logo, rendered in the distinct and unmistakable typographical style of The Extremist(igris), first released in an infofile in MIST0996.
The Sixteen Colours’ ANSI of the Day series has always been disproportionally generous to us – since, let’s be fair, despite coming close at our most vigorous, Mistigris ANSI never set the artscene on fire and it was always our most troubled division, eternally torn between striking out on their own or just throwing in the towel altogether. But one of our most consistent guiding lights over the course of Mistigris’ Classic period was Mavrik, SysOp of Daemon’s Gate, host to our BBS echomail network KiTSCHNet and instigator of our newsletter/e-mag (electronic magazine) KiTHE. He, uh, wore many hats, and consequently ANSI art never got his full focus – but when he slipped a few hours in PabloDraw into his crowded schedule, he always got excellent results. (Even today, having dug Mav up from deep retirement, though we haven’t yet tricked him into coughing up any new artwork, he has graciously provided web hosting at mistigris.org , so to him we say hats off!)His appearance in today’s AOTD is the result of a recent swing toward the “roundup” format, of showing off multiple pictures of the same subject. Today’s theme is Julie Winters from The Maxx, and he represents us with an offering from the MIST0695 artpack.
Our back catalogue continues to yield strange dividends! This piece wasn’t granted elite “ANSI of the Day” status on its own, but as part of a roundup of ANSIs of characters from Jeff Smith’s comic Bone – one of the most popular “toon” ANSI subjects of all time. This rendition was executed by Sarcasm of Mistigris but initially credited as coming from the fellow artgroup Dark Illustrated – because we released it with them in May, 1997, in DARK0597.ZIP, Mistigris’ “World Tour” stop visiting Dark and releasing all our artwork in their collection. (It was confusing then and apparently it remains so today, some 19 years down the line.)
Sdaly I don’t have much to tell you about Sarcasm, an artist with an intriguing and idiosyncratic style… who I never met, whose name I ever knew, who came from parts unknown, and who proceeded to appear only nominally in a Glue artpack or two. Given so little to work with, of course we have been unsuccessful at locating him on Facebook, so I don’t have much else to report in this blog post.
This was not the first or even the best appearance of Bone characters in a Mistigris artpack – Babyface had a practice run, then knocked one out of the park in March of 1998 (despite my failure to secure a collaborator to add a second half to it, re-enacting this classic Muppets bit)… but that’s neither here nor there. Loath as I am to admit it, sometimes it turns out there is simply no interesting back story to share!
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.
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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.
