Today we share our final Mist Classic holiday presentation, after skipping 1996 due to the Mistigris World Tour then in effect (and with December 1998 ahead nothing but a bitter waste of failure for us) … but this multimedia bit rocks, with plenty of great tunes, lit and meet reviews, textmode and hirez visuals, a complete Christmas re-skinning of DoDEL and a little musical trolling of Silent (K)night to boot! There’s something for everyone!
From the MIST1116 artpack collection we have this piece of found art by Steev Hise, an abstract composition rescued from airport security entitled “Tucson: still life with cashews and castor.” Granted, though this image is not the product of intentional human design, it did require the eye of an artist to realise the artistic merit of the image and act to capture it.
Today on Mistigram, reNM8R continued his celebratory victory lap of his rediscovery of the artscene with this hirez piece from MIST1116, an exploration of duality – fire vs ice, good vs evil – as exemplified by two angel babes splitting a Mistigris logo cleanly in half. He’s some two decades removed from the artscene, but clearly it still pulses boldly in his veins!
Today on Mistigram, another painting (“Smoke and Mirrors”) by the hugely talented Delphine Hennelly from MIST1116 – another piece in her series exploring the phenomenon of women and selfies. Woman posing for a painting drawn by a man = fine art, woman posing for a self-portrait = vain and shallow, right? That’s the standard breakdown. These paintings challenge that narrative. Sisters are doing it for, by and of themselves.
But we did labour beneath this misapprehension (which RaDMaN made sure to challenge straight out of the gate with his expulsion of Israfel, the paragon of artscene lit, following ACiD’s absorption of GOTHiC.) Consequently, Cthulu looked for lit writers to form part of Mist’s’ membership. Relatively few people took him up on it, so he inflated their contributions by simply curating captured texts from dialup BBS and echomail message boards, simply republishing them (usually with permission). BBSes were a text medium in habited by users of MS-DOS, which was another text medium, and consequently the words flowed freely. But by the end of the ‘90s, folks accessing the web through Netscape in Windows '95 were quite a bit less in the habit of putting forth their feelings in letters and words, and the decline of this always-considered-marginal artform was irreversible. (It actually saw a curious late-stage boom in the form of CiA’s abysmal lit division ScrollZ under the steering of Blue Devil, but I can’t fairly present that as anything other than fiddling while Rome burns.)
So, Mistigris revived in 2014, and we thought we could represent all the classic streams of computer art – textmode visuals, tracker music, and lit of course! But Crowkeeper aside, classic lit was a defunct concern. (Even the logorrheic Cthulu himself has not shared any original works as part of our revival! Of course, he has no words remaining after hammering out all these infofiles and blog posts.) In any case, we were interested in advancing our scope to keep pace with recent trends in digital expression, not purely being a museum collection of historical re-enactment. So Cthulu began cruising for some literary works written in emoji. He pitched the idea to his invereterately experimental performance poetry colleague RC Weslowski, but nothing came of it in MIST1015.
Like the Minecraft pixelart, we washed our hands of artforms we’d like but couldn’t obtain ourselves. Naturally, then some emoji texts immediately presented themselves. Over on a spiritual successor to the BBS message forums, a Slack packed with inheritors of the legacy of the proto-wiki Everything2, Flamingweasel was taking a break from Pico-8 game development to translate the first book of the Bible into emoji for kicks. And lo, here it is. We saw that it was good, and it was good.
Pulling down some super-high-resolution emoji icons for the occasion, we made this the opener of our MIST1116 trailer video, because in all the history of literature, is there really any better opening than “In the beginning…”? God (here depicted as “old black man”) then creates the heavens and the Earth, and we feature a couple of artpack pieces dealing with the sky and the land before slipping into a “transforming the human body through technology” vein.
Anyhow, zoom in and see if you can follow along!
Genesis 1 King James Version (KJV)
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Today on Mistigram, we feature this 2D work from MIST1116 by our MIST1015 sculpture star Theresa Oborn. Are they three pearls in a nest of seaweed? Three zygotes implanting themselves in uterine lining? Or perhaps three stages of a Julia set fractal? It is… nice to look at. That’s all it takes to satisfy us!
And today on Mistigram, in the recent MIST1116 artpack the incredible Starstew gifted us with “Threecoil”, a piece of very contemporary high resolution artwork devised so as to appear to be the ingenius output of some primordial plotter hooked up to a monochrome terminal circa 1978.
Yesterday on Mistigram, we featured this appearance by our random Twitter textmode acquaintance Spitoufs (aka Lobo) from the recent MIST1116 artpack release. It’s a coloured ASCII art rendition of the 1913 Japanese superhero Ōgon Bat! (Don’t worry, we had to Google him also.))
From the recent MIST1116 artpack comes this piece of high resolution visual artwork by Jamie Stantonian, juxtaposing a classic nude photograph with biometric analysis the likes of which Facebook, the Xbox 360 Kinect and the CIA run on user-contributed content and surveillance footage to determine just who you are, which ads to serve you, and where you’re going.
Today on Mistigram, a painting from MIST1116 by Jenn Ashton entitled “Capacity”. On a first viewing, it might look like a map of ski runs at a resort, but this is secretly computer art of the highest degree: those are capacitors, and this is a circuit diagram on a breadboard!
Today on Mistigram, another painting from the recent MIST1116 artpack. This one is by Finnish painter Antti Minkkinen aka Unseen Fate, of pen15 (among other affiliations). I assigned it a flippant filename involving saunas trying to make some sense of what I was seeing, but only Antti knows for sure what’s going on in this busy scene.
Today on Mistigram, Kalcha delivers more of his unique Shift_JIS illustration (the ASCII art of Japan, using a vastly extended character set) from the MIST1116 artpack with this suite of nine Gods from the Hindu pantheon.
Today on Mistigram we share this image from MIST1116, Pinguino’s cover artwork to this year’s ToonCon program guide. The movie Hackers may have celebrated its 20th anniversary, but it is more on fleek than ever!
Everyone’s always making ANSI art of comic book characters, but no one’s ever making ASCII art of comic strip characters. So alike, yet so different! This year in MIST1116 we compiled what must be a decade of textmode doodles made by my old TABNet colleague Pannekoekologist into a digest of textmode art adaptations of Tony Millionaire’s ‘90s alt-weekly staple, “Maakies”, boiled down into something we couldn’t resist calling “Maakscii art”. Pictured here is the dipsomaniac character Drinky Crow, likely mere panels before filling his head with bullets.
As art imitates life, no contrived glitch can be as compelling as a genuine hardware error resulting from the inadvertent contact between a fragile monitor and a hard object. Garlic Joy made this expensive discovery and immediately we knew we had a cyberspace readymade on our hands perfect for MIST1116. Where pictures of the contents of a monitor might conventionally be described as “screen shots”, these were branded “screen shards”.
Today on Mistigram, an oil painting tribute to the Thin White Duke, if he were a small piece of green citrus fruit, as released in the recent MIST1116 artpack collection. The Mythical Man did this oil painting rendition of a bit of David Bowie wordplay, taking his song “Life on Mars” from 1971’s Hunky Dory album and tweaking a letter, turning it into … “Lime on Mars”. As one does!
Today on Mistigram, another genuine Horsenburger teletext work released in last week’s MIST1116 collection (was it somehow impossibly only a week ago?) – the only textmode fanart I have ever seen of the UK’s dark SF comedy Red Dwarf, the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel depicted here.
Yesterday Canada’s Prime Minister put the nail in the coffin of Northern Gateway – but he gave government approval to two further pipeline projects, Line 3 and Kinder Morgan’s twinned Trans Mountain, the latter of which will be running quite a bit closer to Mistigris HQ. This is not what we voted for, and we, also, do not consent to this action.
Today on Mistigram, this Blade-Runnerian spaceport ANSI art landscape by LDA from the wilds of the 8bitMUSH at ANSIART.COM is a pure slice of oldschool (practically Public Domain) bliss, evoking happy memories of hours spent exploring in rounds of Trade Wars 2002. Maybe those vessels have their bellies full of volunteers to populate the off-world colonies… and maybe the captain’s alignment is good and he won’t open the airlock as soon as he leaves orbit. Maybe. My point is: it’s a hell of a sunset.
Today on Mistigram, we feature a painting by Maeve Wolf from last week’s MIST1116 artpack release. While she drew some ANSI art back in the Mist Classic era, in more recent years she’s taken up painting and employment in the field of architecture – which leads us to today’s selection, one of her two paintings from that collection blending elements of all three realms!
