Today on Mistigram, this ANSI art logo by Whazzit capped off his mermaid ANSImation with Kirkman in last year’s MIST1015 artpack. Previously I equated the blue with water but now I’m thinking it might be more the phosphorescence of jellyfish tentacles or electric eels, wriggling among the seaweed growing amongst the planks of a sunken vessel.
Separated at birth? Today on Mistigram: on the left, “Steampink” by legendary ACiD hirez artist (and wicked tattooist in his off hours) CatBones, featured as a guest in last year’s MIST1015 artpack… and on the right, the cover artwork to Jane’s Addiction’s 1987 eponymous live album. But only one of them has ASCII art printed on their midriff!
Today on Mistigram, this amazing MIST2015 ANSI art appearance from ACiD alumnus Vordreque (who also graced us with formidable hirez visuals and some great retrowave tunes from Arcade Summer, which we should also get around to blogging about). The spider in this extra-wide piece is one kind of greatness, but it’s when you start looking at the 3D logo (come to think of it, seemingly patterned after the classic 3D Realms logo) that you appreciate how this scene is amazing – and impossible!
When I courted Illarterate to make a submission to last year’s Mistigris artpack, I just expected to unlock permission to reprint classics from his back catalogue. Instead, he asked me what kinds of subjects characterised ANSI art – and suggested that he would attempt to transpose them across textmode mediums to teletext. I told him, well, superheroes, especially form Image Comics, and toon subjects such as Calvin & Hobbes and Animaniacs. And, well, here is what we got!
This hot pink-and-purple foggy ANSI art Mist logo was drawn by Mr. Wrong for release in a Blocktronics artpack in 2015, and then used by us in our MIST1015 infofiles. Many thanks!
Today on Mistigram, Illarterate drew us this lovely garish teletext cake for our 21st birthday marked by the MIST1015 artpack. To celebrate the occasion I posed in a goofy selfie blowing out the candles with his VR girl enjoying the scene through augmented reality. (Truthfully, though I’ve always been a fan of angry fruit salad, I don’t know if my stomach is strong enough for teletext cake.)
Today on Mistigram, the most epic letter “M” you ever will hope to see in ANSI art. This one was drawn by Enzo of Blocktronics as part of a group networked PabloDraw session set up by Sudden Death, and used atop the (itself epic) memberlist of last year’s MIST1015 artpack. A single letter writ huge, the group’s entire name writ small, flying hearts, skulls, an eyeball… this logo has it all!
@mistfunk Ah yes, the design stolen from @Factory_Records @P_Saville_Assoc. :)
— Dan Farrimond (@illarterate) August 19, 2016
Bonus trivia: the logo up top is a condensed version of the cursive ANSI art logo Mattmatthew kindly drew us when he first set up this very Tumblr!
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!
Not long after Mistigris’ first big slumber around the turn of the century, I wrote my friend Suzie (hi, Suzie! You are, er, totally not reading this blog) about incidents through my adolescence growing up in Vancouver where my story intertwined with those of 604-local Neuromancer author (and cyberspace visionary) William Gibson (… a correspondence I really ought to reproduce here someday, as somewhat relevant to computer art in the 604. But I digress.) The e-mail client glitched up and, brain fresh with the aftershock of a well written e-mail that failed to launch, I re-wrote the whole thing from memory – beat for beat, fact for fact, joke for joke… it would have been impossible to reproduce the message exactly, but in terms of semantic content the second draft was congruent to the first, and both being written in my voice, the apple was only ever going to fall so far from the tree. Unbeknownst to me, the first e-mail sent, so Suzie wrote back reporting how she got to enjoy the peculiar experience of reading the same thing, twice, two different ways. In short, given identical tasks in the same contexts, we may reasonably conclude that a given brain will approach them identically.
This must be why the only work of textmode art from our MIST1015 collection to be featured in the Sixteen Colours ANSI of the Day back on November 22nd… was just featured again on April 16th, this time under the texty auspices of Blocktronics. The same brain surveyed the same pack as before and the one work that jumped out at the same pair of eyes was, unsurprisingly, the same piece as before.
Just as well! It’s an exceptional piece, it warrants celebration outside of the scrum kudos of the previous post, and due to ongoing disruptions with 16 Colours, this time it’s touted before fans of Blocktronics – the most sophisticated textmode art enthusiasts on the planet!
There were other textmode pieces in that collection deserving of some spotlight (especially the videos – they rightfully touted Whazzit’s “Dead Man’s Pants”, but that was only one of three!), but I can’t argue that this one’s appeal is very immediate and obvious. I enjoy every part of it – the green seaweed on top, the floppy disks in the “total” font, the groovy textures in the “DOS”, the shaded IBM PC typeface for “collection”… nothing is more iconic of MS-DOS gaming than a cacodaemon from Doom (neatly cropped from the front cover of the “Manual of the Planes” AD&D sourcebook), the crunching of the cartoonish TDC letters is apt, “release” is radically written… and I don’t even mind that the purple swirlies at the bottom are just the green ones of the top, inverted.
The AOTD authorities adopted a canonical position of bafflement as to what “the Total DOS Collection” might be, but if I had to speculate, I’d imagine that it hearkens to the roots of the underground computer art scene (and the demoscene before it) and would be some kind of encyclopediac platform-complete compilation for purposes of “curation and preservation”.
People have all kinds of reasons for wanting to maintain their privacy, and so I don’t have that much more to tell you about the celebrated artist VileR here – but here’s what I’ve been able to glean: He’s the only computer artist I’ve been able to lure out of the background through my long association documenting games of the gloriously obscure over at MobyGames, the video & computer game database founded by onetime Hornet archive FTP maintainer (and notorious artscene antagonist – keep your warez-scene-tainted ANSI art away from our totally-not-directly-descended-from-game-cracking demoscene works, it’s attracting heat from the feds!) Trixter… and the two of them have worked together as part of a team, most notably on the latest of the retro-demos written for the original IBM PC (with PC Speaker sound and CGA graphics card), the gob-smacking 8088 MPH.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y&w=560&h=315]
He maintains a fascinating blog of the same name where he explains tricks and and tips pursues mysteries of ancient lore pertaining to early home computers, including his recent Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack project (as billed). Also he has some textmode works waiting in the eaves using the Macrocom “ANSI from hell” technique (including another amazing cacodaemon) which will someday blow you all away … once they are made public.
In the meantime, we wait. Impatiently.
(Speaking of waiting impatiently, stay tuned for the annoucement of our call for submissions for MISt1016! This… is only the announcement of the announcement.)
I’d nearly completed my metamorphosis from juvenile penner of doggerel to “mature” composer of sonnets to a fully-realized published auteur of existentialist prose poetry (well, you saw it coming in the final few Mist packs; CT-*.LIT in MIST2000 represent a fully transformed writer: one who just isn’t very much fun anymore) and made my way to the nascent Vancouver poetry slam stages, where I obstinately refused to retool my divine visions to cater to hoi polloi by making them accessible and, y'know, enjoyable – even a poem about how great something was would have to contain some little speck of rot at its heart, a hidden knife to be twisted in the closing line. The good news is that I had found my voice as a writer! The bad news was that that voice … was that of depression. And verily I’d ardently cultivated an ability to hold forth on any subject and tease out the saddest and most devastating inconvenient truth it harboured just beneath its surface. (Wake up sheeple!) But despite this uncanny knack, it didn’t exactly make me any friends; I didn’t quite ascend, skyrocketing, through the ranks of our local spoken word community, speaking my harsh truths to power. (Mostly I just made old ladies uncomfortable at open mics with my intense negativity.) In short, poetry wasn’t doing me any favours – it wasn’t leading me on grand adventures or even getting me laid. And worse, the cultivation of my dire voice had me looking at the world through arse-coloured glasses, actively pursuing the heartbreaking in order to appease my strange muse. (Hi, is the new issue of Acme Novelty Library in yet?) The best I could hope for from the poetics of depression was a deeper and more profound depression – oh boy! So with some trepidation I set the poetry aside (never really to fully pick it up again – I pivoted to creative non-fiction with a poetic voice, but concluded that most of those poems didn’t really need to be written: however completely they encapsulated the experience of being me, I already knew what that was like and no one else cared.)
So that was it. Maybe I could get a job, find a nice girl and get over myself. But no: I was nonetheless an effete longhair, and if I wasn’t writing poems I had to foppishly be doing something creative. But what? Well, what did I do before I discovered BBSes? It just so happened that I’d studied classical piano for some 15 years, beginning at the likely premature age of 3. But due to the curriculum of the Royal Conservatory of Music, it wasn’t a creative education so much as an indoctrination; students were taught to reproduce, not interpret, and I had burned out on it not long before burning out on the artscene (and, indeed, burning out generally for the better part of a decade.) But I knew I enjoyed music – seeking inroads into the computer as a compositional tool had been one of my entry points to the artscene, and though I couldn’t in 1999 see a future for tracker music (sadly, just as mine was beginning to grow almost listenable) I figured that my future would be more filled with tunes than with poems.
I owned a piano, but it lived at my parents’ place; indeed they had told me that we would not be moving it until my lifestyle stabilized and I could expect to be maintaining the same residence indefinitely, because moving (and then tuning) a piano is an expensive proposition. So I stewed in contemplation of what instrument is enough like a piano that my 15 years of training could help me to transition? For years I went in circles figuring that I’d need some kind of synthesizer keyboard, but worrying about what capabilities I would need it to have, fearful of buying The Wrong Model and ending up unsatisfied with my new creative interface. Then, one week, I was exposed to three fateful accordion performances, and it struck me: an accordion is kind of like a piano. At least, half of it is.
So I found my way to the accordion. I had moved right out of computer art, seemingly for good, but still had one foot in performance poetry, getting on board with a 2005 group literary revue (spearheaded, incidentally, by the same fellow who blazed the trail for my first phone call to an artscene BBS: guess he was just a thought leader!) for which I provided words, music and dramaturgy: That’s My Brain And You’re Killing It! The show was a bust, garnering enough audiences in its 5-night run to cost all participating poets only $50 each for the privilege of having taken part, but a funny thing happened during our tour of promotional previews… (actually, several funny things happened: at the Song Slam at Cafe Deux Soleils, we paraded off stage singing our anthem and disappeared into the bathroom, growing quieter and quieter, leaving the night’s next performer to begin their act… only to return 5 minutes later, growing back up from a whisper, emerging full-throated seemingly still chanting our inane lyrics, interrupting the performer-in-progress. But I digress.) At January 2005’s monthly “Raw and Cooked” works-in-progress event at the old performance art hub the Western Front, the poets performed a handful of their most splendidly strange poems, and after they exhausted their slice of the evening… they were followed by a duo of consummately cultivated punk, singers who couldn’t sing playing instruments they couldn’t play, exuberantly and with impeccable accessorization. And they needed an accordion (and, y'know, someone who knew how to play music) as part of their ensemble. Happily, the performance poet association was a temporary one, and so I was happy to moor my ship to their landing and see how much fun we could have on shore leave.
Turns out, it has never yet ended! Because our outsider format (initially: sea shanties and early ‘80s goth and industrial on accordion, banjo and ukulele) wasn’t an obvious fit for anywhere, we got to go everywhere as a species of variety spice, from festival stages to guerrilla gigs in illegal venues (hello, McBarge!) and just highly memorable oddball gigs like the opening of a tattoo parlour. (While we weren’t able to turn our nerdy background to the same good use that eg. bryface has, we weren’t totally dissociated from it: early memorable gigs included VIVO’s Video Game Orgy, and a ground floor association with Vancouver’s chapter of Free Geek – “I will support your endeavors in whatever way I can… with an accordion” – eventually put us on stage with Richard Stallman!) A functional band demands a certain quantity of administrative duties – setting rehearsals, making and distributing song arrangements, booking and promoting gigs – and it turns out that these were not entirely dissimilar to the divers & sundry thankless tasks that made up being senior staff in an underground computer artgroup! (Unlike the artscene, it turns out that being in a band actually pays, too! Terribly, but it’s not entirely sunk time – only mostly.) And like running an artgroup, there are always personnel changes to keep on top of. It’s not that members quit, but they just, y'know, stop sending in submissions. Then there are the finances and keeping track of everybody’s pirate codenames (so, as you can see, not much has changed. Greetings from “Blackbox Squeezebeard.”) And Mistigris always had trouble maintaining a web presence (finally addressed!) but we never had to deal with Wordpress pharma hacks!
My projects typically have a lifespan, and some time after that runs out, I get the memo and regretfully move on. Mistigris ran out of juice in a period of grand upheaval after three years and a bit, but this delightfully unlikely, perpetually self-reinventing “jug band of the damned” The Creaking Planks has been an ongoing concern for over eleven years now (over 3 times the lifespan of Mistigris Classic!) with no signs of any reason for it to close up shop. (The most unlikely part was getting it going in the first place, playing the songs least appropriate for its instrumentation – which is basically, “any acoustic instrument allowed except for guitar.” Once the speed bump of its establishment was traversed, no further obstacle comes anywhere close.)
You heard a slice of us in MIST1015 with our unused demo for the mobile game Afterland (I was pushing hard to get some game art included in the pack for promotional synergy, but despite early promising signs it didn’t make it in) and the Planks arrangement (sans-Planks) of Dead Man’s Pants; you got a chance to see a couple of our curious posters in MIST2000 (and a few more of them here! some of them the best work of flyingfish, who was part of the BBS milieu back in the day and has remained a living link ever since) I had hoped to invite you to our 11th anniversary concert scheduled for the evening of January 29th, 2016, but I prioritized the timeliness of other tie-ins and … underestimated the amount of time it would take me to reflect back so many years and connect the dots leading to this point. So, uh, you missed it. As the date approached, I considered the poignant twist of the knife approach, ending the post with “and it’s tonight, too late for you to make plans to attend.” But I was too busy, y'know, playing that show, so I had to revise the knife further: “it was last night.” (scratch) “It was last week.” (scraaaatch.) “It was one month ago.” Well… OK, it was slightly over one month ago.
I’m being silly, since of course most of you on the Internet live far, far away from us and wouldn’t be casually making plans to visit in any event (but if you’re nearby, our next scheduled gig is April 22nd at the Little Mountain Gallery!), besides which the good news is that thanks to our recent orientation toward posting film clips from our rehearsals, you can enjoy us in the comfort of your own home, whenever is convenient. This unlikely number dropped basically the same week as MIST1015 and I was kicking myself at having lacked the foresight to fold it in to the pack (the one thing I left out, apparently) – it’s a sweet little demonstration that we, too, remember watching the movie “Hackers” in 1995 with a mixture of bemusement and a modicum of dismay at how much they got wrong. We’ll be resuming these as a regular series, so if you enjoy – please subscribe! Cheers.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoORTedaJlY&w=560&h=315]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoORTedaJlY
Not long after the call for submissions opened for MIST1015, it became clear that most of the former Mistigrivians who had emerged from their long slumber for MIST1014 had, upon seeing their gloriously 16-coloured shadow, been scared back underground and would not be joining us for another kick at the can. No problem, I thought, I’ve moved through plenty of creative circles in the meantime and maybe I can tap some of them! My first stop after the Mistigris train ground to a halt was The Living Closet and my inquiries to the former principal players of that (similarly long-defunct) concern resulted in some interest – most of which didn’t pan out (observation: present company excepted, people with children seem to be less vulnerable to the predation of nostalgia on their scanty free time). But one person – Claire Roberts – expressed interest which bore through all the way to a work submitted (and released) in MIST1015 at the eleventh hour.
Back in the ol’ LC days, she was a fire-breathing, belly-dancing painter, and in the meantime she had burgeoned her creative skillset (I know: painting, belly dancing, fire-breathing – you thought she already had all bases covered!) in all directions simultaneously, especially in our traditional field of computer arts during a long stint at local code shop Relic Entertainment. (Isn’t that always the way? First you stop releasing computer art, then everyone you’ve ever met becomes a computer artist. Fortunately for us I got back on the wagon.) Additionally, she had ascended through the ranks of an entirely different underground art community, one based out of the Black Rock Desert for a few days every year.
Claire had never been part of the artscene back in the day, but something about the call for submissions piqued her and she diligently boned up on all the treasures of our past, watching hours of demos and reflecting to herself how easy those neat-o effects would be to achieve using her workplace toolchain (which would, doubtlessly, find it easier to crunch those particular numbers being hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the machines the demos were made to run on 8) She lined up an old computer nerd friend (we can be handy to have around, especially when you need a stereo system hooked up) to collaborate with her on a musical experiment, but he didn’t end up being available in time. The reason, however, that I am profiling Claire here today is not because she let that obstacle stop her, but instead she boldly went forth without her seasoned collaborator to create something in a wholly new-to-her idiom without any help or past experience: bringing art forth through sheer force of will alone – sheer force of will and Audacity. (That’s Audacity with a capital A.)
We released her musical piece, “It’s Like A Collage”, in MIST1015, and in homage to the gutsiness of its circumstances (Claire is gutsy: after I proposed to Mistigris’ collected music department that we put together an album for FAWM, we have nothing and she has made big inroads into one of her own), we have made its constituent recordings (assorted vocal noises and sounds from the kinds of musical toys you might find in your belly-dancing gig bag) the grist for our imminent Tracker Fix mill. She didn’t know what she was doing, but came up with something anyway; surely those of you who do know what you’re doing, given the same materials, can do no less!
(And in a neat case of synchronicity, just as her turn to be profiled was coming up in the queue here, a free mobile game she was working on was released to the public – you can find out more information about it here: The Fourth Phase, the snowboarding movie, the game.)I first met Otium Man, aka Fille, back during my artscene European vacation of 1999 – a pilgrimage to Assembly in Finland arriving and departing via Amsterdam – when my travel companion God Among Lice (formerly of Fire) just HAD to attend the Pukkelpop festival in Belgium (so as to get a chance to see DJ Shadow, among many, many others.) I ended up surprising and delighting a couple dozen friends with his PJ Harvey ASCII t-shirts I brought back, extended as a deposit against unclaimed future computer art favours. (Heads up: in the final reckoning of things, all favours will be called in!) Otium Man and God Among Lice knew of each other due to shared affiliation with the largely Russian group HRG (Hellraiser Group), with Otium co-founding (with Iron Lung) its “Galza” ASCII division, which straggled on to 2005 (#20) and then arose from the ashes (#21) in 2011 largely as a solo project. (I might have done that with Mistigris also, but I didn’t because: no one would have cared. Sad but true.)
Demonstrating a remarkable largesse and openmindedness, Otium roped me in (twist my arm!) to contributing some poetry (sorry, “lits”) to the surprisingly political Galza 22 in early 2014, my first flicker of ‘scene activity in probably well over a decade (but just look what his re-awakened momentum has wrought!), and by October of that year I had tapped him for a guest appearance in our own revival artpack MIST1014.
Some time later, in 2015, he released Galza 23 (“Propaganda”) to the artscene, a stupendous collection of simulated PETSCII (the text mode of Commodore microcomputers) portraits of Communist icons… to some mild acclaim from the artscene and snooty disdain from Commodore enthusiasts, evincing an “if you can’t take us at our most computationally gutless, you don’t deserve us at our most richly textmoded” attitude.
Shortly thereafter, we “included” some works of his in MIST1015 in a medium for which he is not as well known in the artscene: panoramic photography. The framework required to display them in-browser refused to play nice when dealing with local files, so as with a few other filesize-heavy works, we represented a nicely-curated retrotechy selection of his photos as browser-redirecting HTML files, sending local viewers to remote locations (sorry, offline viewers!)
Judging from the traffic figures for the externally-hosted videos (barring Whazzit’s wildly popular ANSI movie of Dead Man’s Pants), we can only imagine that virtually no one got a chance to enjoy those photos, so this write-up is one more opportunity for us to urge you to check them out. The still slices illustrating the post are just the tip of the iceberg, static frames of moving, breathing panoramic vistas.
Then after we lured Nail out of retirement (first with BLENDER 2015, then MIST1015), he got on board to put some actual vintage C64 scene experience to use and spearhead a re-release (and draw that title screen pictured above) of Galza 23 in a form that would execute and display on actual Commodore 64 hardware, in which version it found itself celebrated and embraced by the same community who had spurned it when it was simply still images for display on modern machines. Packaging and presentation: turns out it’s surprisingly important! You can take it for a spin yourself (on your own vintage Commodore hardware, or VICE for the rest of us) if you like!
And that brings us up to speed with the history of Otium, his chance intersections with Mist and his ongoing related (computer) art projects. Stay tuned for more profiles!
It doesn’t happen often, and heck – it may well never happen again – but at least once more, a Mistigris artist has taken point of pride in having featured as the Sixteencolors “ANSI of the Day”, with a piece from our recently-discharged MIST2000 collection:
I love being surprised with little gems like this.
The artist goes by the name Happyfish, and she represents one of the few textmode pieces in the new Mistigris pack, “Mist2000”. The pack comprises some compiled works by Mist artists circa 1997-2001 - work that was collected but never released.
I have no idea if she ever produced more ANSI work, or if she’s around at all, but if you’re reading this, Happyfish, you really ought to give the ol’ blocks another go. This piece is a definite standout.
In the meantime, however, she has remained creatively busy, chasing a strange new muse as a filk songwriter par excellence. While an early specimen of this work was also included in MIST2000, in a case of serendipitous timing, just as she was being awarded the esteemed AOTD, she also announced the release of a new collection of her songs:
Some people have asked if I’ve been writing fewer songs this year, and the answer is no, but most of them have been D&D songs for a campaign Wesley Crowell has been running at filk cons, and they seemed a bit too… specific… to throw in my regular bandcamp. Which is otherwise a cohesive blend of carefully curated, aestheticall– okay maybe not. But ANYWAY, here in their own little bucket are half a dozen songs by Melinda Vulluvette, the NPC…ish… bard voiced by me in the Abandoned campaign.
Walking to Valspar: The Increasingly Angry Songs of Melinda Vulluvette. There’s even one song the players haven’t heard yet, the national anthem of Melindarokin, a country I now… accidentally kind of… own.
The content involves a LOT of in jokes, because the songs were all written to be performed in-universe to make the players snicker - but I hope they can be enjoyed even if you weren’t there to watch the gaming sessions. :)
BONUS CONTENT! The AOTD-winning piece resonates with HF-GLEEP (excerpted) from the Mistigris World Tour stop in DARK0597, another negative-space hand, and it’s no coincidence:
In both cases I “traced” my hand help up to the monitor because it seemed fun. I also have a tattoo of my own hand. So I’m er, very handsy? Hands-on! Something like that.One thing you can say: no one else has ever drawn ANSI like Happyfish, and no one ever will.
Back to the MIST1015 hit parade! This head-scratcher seemed to resonate with some current events, and even has a current payoff, so read on. Chasing my crazy art preoccupation following the collapse and seeming extinction of the computer artscene, I ended up in late 2003 taking on administration of a local art gallery, “The Butchershop Floor”, as part of a collective of 20. (Any artscene veteran should have had red flags go up seeing an organization so top-heavy with senior staff.) One of the 20 was my talented high school classmate Ehren Salazar, and some months into the ‘Shop’s tenuous existence (still hanging in today in a sense, transformed into home base for an improv theatre troupe) he vouched for admission of one of his polymath friends, Justin Adam, aka Birdband, one of those “pro athletes gives it all up to make art” cases like Dan Bern. For a time BB was my go-to for instant sonic wallpaper with a performative presence, as evidenced by this excerpt from a 2006 press release I wrote for the Perpetual Motion Roadshow (spun into motion by Jim Munroe – remember him?):
Primary Toquefest engineer BIRDBAND (Vancouver, birdband.org) opens, taking you on a terrifying journey through an electric guitar effect pedal vortex. birdband is a musical mule: a cross between sample-based and improvisational music. With the use of unaffected guitar, a vocal mic and a sampler; compositions are conceived in a live setting and once performed, exist as they are.Realizing, as the MIST1015 submission countdown ticked on, that I might not be seeing repeat appearances from seemingly revived Mistigris alumni who contributed to MIST1014, I began looking up old cronies from that long period between when Mistigris went to sleep and when, Rip Van Winkle-like, it woke back up. So I hit up BirdBand – now Moon McMullen – with the call for submissions.
Moon McMullen> any format?
Cthulu> Unless you come up with something truly exotic, I should be fine. Contributions on 8-track tape or in the form of a foil hologram may be difficult for me to work with.
MM> good morning! to give you an idea of what i am submitting, it is going to be music. i have a tonne, although i am likely going to submit something i made entirely on my phone. the presentation, i will also consider. the media will likely not be a file, but an object. that is all i can tell you right now!
CT> You have my attention!
MM> i have a project that i want to submit. i am able to send an image and concept statement, the actual object to follow. how are you presenting the work and when?
CT> Digital representations of all submissions are planned to go out publicly online tomorrow night
Playing up a conceptual angle that is sometimes lacking, I may need to represent the object’s mere potential now, and later document my interaction with it in some kind of digital video clip
MM> oh man!!!
let me think about how i want to present it
CT> The collection goes out tonight, so I can’t make any guarantees after about 8 pm PST. The image and concept statement would be a great start, then there’s a second act when we get to explore the actual object.
MM> ok. 8pm PST?
i can get you an image and concept statement. don’t want to cause any stress, but this idea hit me early week and i am really bent on it.
the object is a big part of it, but the image and statement describes it
CT> … that is really something!
MM> Thanks! I hope it isn’t too far off the manifest although, certainly digital inspired art and an important project I have been waiting to launch. Seems appropriate since we did some of my first shows together. Let me know your thoughts on the actual object… Happy Halloween!
CT> it takes all kinds, something that throws us for a loop like this keeps us on our toes. this is the era of instant gratification, what’s with this suspense? It’s… deeply intriguing!
Did the iPhone get bought by a pharmaceutical magnate? What did the price breakdown look like? Were the tunes any good? Is Steve Martin allowed to mount an extraction mission to retrieve it? Could Siri be logically duped into to sharing its contents with another listener? These and many other questions bedevil us, but not having touched the phone and not having heard the music, we can only speculate in long-form on our blog.
But there is something you can listen to! Moon McMullen (or is it birdband now? It is, because it was…) recently commemmorated an anniversary by granting a pardon to a creative prisoner and letting it go free. Here’s the story:
I want to share a story, my Vancouver friends might remember, I used to perform under the moniker birdband, since they called me bird - it also represented the numbered band they would wrap around the bird’s wrist.
The whole idea was no plan, no repeats. It was my guitar, line out straight into an old Sony stereo receiver and into my PC. i was using a Boss RC-20, my ex had bought for me a couple years earlier.
One night, shortly after the new year, exactly 10 years ago (nearly to the minute) in Vancouver, i was mucking around. I caught a flow, and continued to follow it. It was one of those unconscious moments, and the song just sort of took shape right there. it had a nice arc, and when i was done i stood there silent. i wished i had captured it… I went over to my PC to record the next idea, and saw the timeline needle moving. It was recording! I quickly stopped it so i could save - and the program crashed. NO! i couldn’t believe it. i restarted my machine, and gave it one final try - dug into the temp files, and there it was. a 60mb file. i copied it over. I had saved it. I named it Recover, well because of the file recovery, also because I was at one of the low points in my life, after a breakup. i was attacked and chased back to my house, 5 nights earlier on New Year’s Eve… and this was the moment when I decided to bounce back…
Nice to listen back to this and see where I have come. It is raw and old, although still has an impact with me. Have a listen, if you’ve got 5 minutes to spare.
(Portrait by Ehren Salazar. We’ll see if I can’t get something by him into MIST1016.)
I’m not even sure how Theresa Oborn and her creations got on to my radar – some overlap on the creative fringe of the punk accordion scene, from the looks of things – but her regular social media sharings of impossible evocative creatures from the strange realms of the imaginary, manifest here in concrete reality, were impossible to ignore… and naturally floated toward the top of my “if I release another artpack… if we finally make good on the ‘real world art’ division” list. And while sculpture was an uneasy devolution of 3D modelling as far as computer art goes (let’s face it, putting this kind of stuff into an artpack is well-nigh unpredecented), once she started posing them in animated .GIF loops, we no longer had to sweat the compromise between old mediums, new media and contemporary art. All that matters is that her pieces are awesome, and we made a nice welcoming space for them! The only hard part was narrowing myself down to four pieces and not just ransacking her portfolio wholesale. All that remained was to communicate to a total stranger what an artpack was and what the artscene was, and why she might be interested in participating. Well, OK: the communication was probably somewhat incomplete, but while all we had to offer was “exposure”, on the bright side: we weren’t asking her to do any new work, just to allow us to advertise her existing material!
(Anyhow, 3D sculpture is not an entirely unknown genre for enthusiasts of cathode ray entertainment: Clay Fighter aside, it was rarely better used than in Doug TenNapel’s graphical adventure game The Neverhood: a bold experiment that has gone virtually ignored since its release now 20 years ago (barring perhaps Squinky’s musical detective game Dominique Pamplemousse.) In my estimation any one of these characters would be well qualified to take a starring role in Neverhood 2: Electric Boogaloo. But I digress.)
Had I been curating more carefully, I might have been able to counter Catbones’ gratuitous nipplage (well, non-optional for a work entitled “SteamPink” I suppose) with some carefully crafted twigs & berries, laboriously formed through careful ministrations of a woman’s diligent hands. Not just decorative, in many of her sculptures they play a critical role of acting as a balancing counterweight – somewhat opposite to how things often work out in real life. But I digress further.
The reason I’ve taken it upon myself to expound upon the virtues of her work at this particular juncture, despite not yet having really taken the time to get to know the artist or learn more about her inspirations and techniques, is to revisit a popular theme at this time of year – to helpfully alert you fans and readers that she has Christmas bills to pay and consequently her soulful little Sculpey characters are for sale at a steep discount at her etsy store! Now go forth and empty her shelves!
In any artscene anthropological digs, lit (short for “literature” – poems, fiction, rants) maintains its traditional scene status by getting the short end of the stick. Due to biases inherent in our delightful Web 2.0, images (textmode, vector and high resolution) are very easy to share, needing only a conversion if indeed any treatment; music is less trivial to put up, especially if initially distributed in tracked form, but still very possible. Getting programs to work (or at least demonstrate their output) in-browser is a hurdle but not an insurmountable one. But displaying period text – which should be the most seamless medium to share of all, much as it was considered the easiest (and least “skilled”) computer art form – is rarely, if ever, undertaken. This is a shame, because it was one of our traditional strengths (but, y'know, one of those strengths that is also a weakness.)
Ironically, while (some of) our practitioners of other art forms have kept on chugging along, most of Mist’s lit writers, deprived of the primarily textual cyber medium in which they reflexively expressed themselves, fell by the wayside as writers… to the point where we had a hard time finding any to put in our recent revival artpacks. But but but… it simply wouldn’t be a Mist pack with no lit! (That would be like an ACiD pack without the WE-WILL.SUE disclaimer!) So I had to go a bit further afield and headhunt some relevant words to include in our collections.
Jim Munroe (not all of our contributors rate Wikipedia articles about them!) was never part of the artscene, though he did write for the digital underground. While we were active in Mistigris making artpacks, he was also here in the 604, working for The Media Foundation as managing editor of the influential Adbusters magazine in its heyday. But before then, he was putting together e-zines in the newsgroups and small press scene of Southern Ontario – I asked him if he knew any members of Dark Illustrated, but though they were in the same place, they were not active at the same time. (Fo shizzle he knew BBSes, though – one of them provided the initial textmode setting for one of his video games, “Guilded Youth”.)
His time in Vancouver informed the setting of this third novel, 2002’s Everyone in Silico, a slice of West Coast near-future dystopia. (He’s been working with SF themes regularly, a bit of a Canadian Cory Doctorow (whoops, as Jim reminds me – Cory IS the Canadian Cory Doctorow), but instead of Boingboing, he established the Perpetual Motion Roadshow, a small press indie tour circuit I helped prop up the Vancouver end of back in my days at the Butchershop Floor art gallery.) As I approached him regarding permission for us to reprint an excerpt, we found my timing was perfect, as he was discharging his back catalogue of novels and graphic novels as temporarily-free, forevermore-pay-what-you-like ebooks (hot off the presses: Therefore Repent!, a story of magical hipsters hustling in post-Rapture Chicago while avoiding angelic death squads.) The Vancouver setting and cyberpunk tone of Everyone in Silico made it the perfect candidate for appearing in our artpack – how revelatory, for the kids who grew up in William Gibson’s cyberspace matrix (not just sharing the byways of imagination, for Gibson lived and walked the same streets of Vancouver as we did – we joked more than once about how we should look him up in the phone book and pay him an unsolicited late-night visit, imploring him to autograph our cybernetic implants… and, oh geez, I will just have to write a follow-up post about William Gibson later on) to finally see their own home rendered in some sour future form, not just the world capitols of Tokyo, New York and SoCal. Here we are, we have a future also! It’s not great, but at least we rate mention! Is Vancouver a world class city? Who knows, but the 604 is in effect!
I need not excerpt the excerpt here – you can read our chunk in the artpack, and of course you can also access the entire work as an ebook now for … name your price. Jim’s always got several exciting projects on the go – novels, comics, games and also films (Ghosts With Shit Jobs: required viewing) – and his latest project is recently-launched, a Torontonian historical mystery audiobook puzzle app for iOS, Wonderland, described as a walking stimulator. Jim Munroe doesn’t need an artgroup, he by himself is a veritable creative industry! Check his work out, because for every work I highlighted here, there are three more I was obliged to skip over for conciseness.
Antti Minkkinen (aka Unseen) contributed two of his paintings (and an ANSI logo for his scene project PEN15 whose name I am regrettably unable to satisfyingly explain) to the artpack, and now (and indeed, since November 25th… and until December 20th, so you still have a chance) you can see some of his other paintings hanging on a wall in an art gallery. That is, if you happen to be situated in or near the town of Tapiola in Finland. (If I know the computer underground, definitely that applies to a few of you!)
The exhibition has a website whose blurb I was invited to translate:
“This exhibition is of my most recent works. I rarely sketch during the process and I hardly think anything while painting. I never pick themes consciously while working but I often find myself exploring similar topics. I’m interested in honesty, authenticity and humour, and try to search for beauty, as mundane as it may sound. I want my art to, at some primitive level, narrate my experience with authenticity.”
Antti Minkkinen is a fine artist from Espoo. He has graduated from Vapaa Taidekoulu with a BFA degree majoring in painting. He works mainly as a painter but also in other medias like sculpture, video and digital art.
Antti Minkkinen reflects on the challenge of the concept of beauty
by Anneli Tuominen-Halomo
Artist Antti Minkkinen mostly paints, but also makes sculptures, videos and multimedia. His paintings raise a smile – there on the Studio Aarni wall next to a portrait are a couple of still lives of flowers. “The face started to look like an evening rose, so I painted it between two tables covered in flowers,” the artist explains.
The exhibition includes Minkkinen’s latest paintings, from which eyes, noses or tongues may emerge: Minkkinen has used “everything that can be found on the floor” to make the protrusions. “People have a dull perception of beauty - I have deliberately chosen random themes, but I see them manifesting the same topics.”
Through a lens of his interest in honesty, authenticity and humour, he has begun to explore beauty. Inspiration is all around – when he sees colors running together from garbage in the gutter, he remembers the shades and hues, then subsequently applies the color scheme to a painting.
The paintings in this show are all quite small in size. “A small canvas concentrates an idea down to be stronger.” Minkkinen says he makes quite a lot of drawings and some of the paintings emerge from the sketches. He always carries a sketchbook to take notes in case he sees an interesting subject of study, but with mobile phone use on the rise he finds more often a quick digital photograph is made for reference instead. “The works are often syntheses. If a part isn’t working, paint over it – you can’t afford to fall in love with your own work.”
For his own influences, Antti Minkkinen points at the Dutch Karel Appel, as well as Espoo visual artists Tycho Elon and teacher Tarmo Paunu.
Antti Minkkinen is an Espoo-based artist who graduated from the Free Art School in 2012. He is up for election as the representative for the Painters’ Union board.
The exhibition of Antti’s paintings at Studio Aarni in Heikki’s Square, Tapiola, will continue until 20 December.“
Unseen isn’t the only Mistigris contributor to exhibit his works in a gallery context; he probably isn’t even the first. (At least one of us is currently curating a gallery space!) Someday, we hope to curate and mount a textmode art retrospective gallery exhibition ourselves! (That’s an aspiration that’s been in the works since 2004, pre-dating any notion of reforming Mistigris, and which actually set everything that followed in motion.) Stay tuned for more highlights from our recent (and distant) back stacks, plus shout-outs to ongoing achievements by Mist folks past and present!
“Dead Man’s Pants” – the most intense of all our pack’s grim Hallowe'en contents… yet of eternal appeal all year ‘round! I’ve performed it hundreds of times for a decade, first arranged on the occasion of Vancouver’s first ZombieWalk, but even after all that time here was a new approach! A breakout hit from MIST1015, having been enjoyed more times than the artpack itself has – here it receives a much-warranted behind-the-scenes “making-of” interview (or… would “postmortem” be too obvious?) conducted in an impromptu fashion as soon as it was submitted:
Sept 5:
Whazzit> I have finished my submission for the Mist pack, I think.
Cthulu> So in advance, very rigorous!
WZ> You might remember, about 6 months ago I said I had an idea that felt more Mist than Blocktronics.
[shares video]
CT> holy swamoli, this is pretty incredible
CT> I can see why you needed to make sure I had some time and was sitting down before you unleashed that on me
WZ> Does it work?
CT> I only wish I could have provided you a better quality recording!
WZ> Haha that one was quite good quality, compared to the live ones I found
CT> oh yes, I have a long career of only being caught on tape doing my very worst performances
WZ> I would have asked, but, well, I wanted it to be a surprise. Also, I had no idea if I could pull it off.
CT> also I’m wondering if I could interest you in the album cut of my band performing the song, I have no idea how it would effect the synchronization
WZ> It’s synced quite specifically to this version of the song, besides which I like the simplicity of you playing alone on the accordion. (It means I didn’t need to draw a whole undead band ;)
CT> I’m curious what was the source of that audio track?
WZ> Um, that Louw down interview you did
CT> oh gee whiz, just about exactly one year ago!
WZ> I grabbed the video from youtube, then cut the song out, then trimmed the sound
CT> I always felt a bit dubious about the value of having conducted that interview, but at last it has been vindicated as well worthwhile!
WZ> It was a good quality recording, anyway ;)
CT> that’s an amazing tribute, I’m curious at a few technical aspects of it. you know what, hold on, I haven’t even finished watching it.
I had to restart and pull my girlfriend over to explain that I wasn’t just vainly listening to a recording of myself. It’s amazing on several levels. it kind of deserves to be entered into the textmode demo competition 8)
WZ> Yeah, looking at the rules, I don’t think there’s a category for this in the demo competitions.
CT> duh, wild compo! if I won it in crash '97 by fighting people with foam boffers, this has a much more legitimate place. Also, hats off – there are many incorrect ways of drawing an accordion and you managed to duck all of them.
WZ> hah that was one of the easier parts :D I just copied yours from that video.
CT> reference! it helps. artists be like, “sure I know how an accordion works”… then they draw something that could never play, hands strapped into immobility. damn, this is going to be hard for me to avoid spreading all around immediately, but it will just act as incentive to expedite the pack’s release.
WZ> I admit I have no idea what the left hand does… but I decided that wasn’t particularly important to the animation as a whole.
CT> the very attempt to render the instrument at that resolution is audacious. well whatever else ends up in the pack now, I can rest secure that we have one historic first for the books!
WZ> It *may* be the first accordion in ansi. I’m not sure. I imagine there are a number of firsts here :D
CT> currently searching for instances of the string “accordion” in 16c… hmm, three returns, one from last year’s mist pack, and two more from older mist file separators 8) if it is drawn anywhere, it is not described by its name.
WZ> It certainly hasn’t been the most popular instrument for ansification… I think we’d struggle to find a piano in ansi, for that matter.
CT> Hey, you could be on the vanguard of a sea change! drawing a skeleton and an accordion individually are tremendous feats, together it seems almost insurmountable! did you draw one and then draw the other around it, or draw them separately and superimpose them? there are just so many fiddly little fine details
WZ> Well, the skeleton came first - you’ll see the same rough picture a lot before he actually picks it up and plays it. I just took the picture I had, cut out the chest and added an accordion.
CT> but of course bringing them together after being drawn separately would present problems of keeping a consistent scale
heh, so does this mean that somewhere you have five animation cells of accordions in different positions floating in space? (thoughts for video material if I ever make good on my threat to do an accordion cover of Skaven’s Catch That Goblin!)
WZ> hah, 12 and that’s without the head movement
CT> plus the obligatory “accordion dropped slack in shock” pose
WZ> resignation, really At least, that’s what I was aiming for. “Damn it, it’s back. And now I need to look at the jeans? Gah. Stupid afterlife.”
CT> I want to show the video to the author of the song’s words, but he isn’t even online and no part of it will make any goddamn sense to him
WZ> Hah, yeah I just used the title as inspiration rather than the lyrics, mostly.
CT> My partner is like, “he put the pants on and now he’s happy, look how he’s smiling!”
I’m all, “he has no choice, he doesn’t have any lips. that’s not a smile, it’s a rictus!”
WZ> Hah, I actually made the decision early to allow him some movement for expression. You’ll see his eyebrows move in the first major scene.
CT> Despite the fact that I’m going on at some length about it, basically I’m speechless. I’m blown away. Did it change my life? Quite possibly. I think this will really open the doors of possibilities for others to follow the trail you’ve blazed.
WZ> Well, thank you. The whole thing was inspired by the song, really - when I heard it I immediately imagined a skeleton playing the accordion.
CT> see, everyone always imagines the skeleton playing xylophone, but that’s the unimaginative way out
WZ> I imagined it as a picture to begin with, but the idea of a video didn’t take too long to coalesce.
CT> but the work!
WZ> Hah! Yeah, it took a while. It was an exploration.. I began with a “can I do this?” attitude, then moved to “I have to finish this!” Make a picture, save it, tweak it, save it, etc… I really do not know anything about animation, except for what I puzzled out while doing this.. The whole thing was one big problem-solving exercise, really.
CT> I must know, did you just export your ANSI screen cells as static pngs and string them together in conventional animation software? It’s ansi animation but it’s not ansimation, y'know?
WZ> right And yes I made each frame according to whatever criteria I had, then put them together to figure out the timing of the sync
There are somewhere in the vicinity of 1200 frames in total. I went with 10 frames a second… easier to calculate.
CT> how many distinct different screens are shown?
WZ> I’m not sure exactly, but I’d hazard to guess about 800 unique ANSIs.
CT> egad! so incredibly labour intensive. I would never recommend anyone make an animation without tool assistance to fill in between keyframes, but the end result sure is impressive!
WZ> Obviously I wasn’t starting from scratch on most of them.
CT> you see, that’s why the Raimis would have filmed this using practical effects
WZ> hmm. Difficult. That would require a much larger budget.
CT> How long start to finish did you spend working on it? start of project : end of project or estimated hours logged?
WZ> oh, I wouldn’t know. I started pretty much as soon as I asked you about where to find the song/video months back.. in April? May?
CT> aha, that’s actually relatively quick
WZ> As for hours, I really don’t know. Maybe 100, but it’s hard to say. I tended to draw, get bored and take a break, come back for an hour….
CT> I was pretty floored that it shrunk down to only 15 megs, considering what a big chunk of that must just be the audio
WZ> The audio mp3 is 3.4 megs
CT> it all seems impossibly inefficient by artpack file size standards
then again, when we stacked the bells of yule music disk re-release with remasters in mp3, I think we bloated it from 1.5 megs to 300 8)
WZ> Times have changed ;D We can download 300 megs in 2 minutes now
CT> ok, I almost certainly have more questions but my partner is kindly suggesting I wrap it up as I have a long day tomorrow playing accordion in a recording studio for use in a video game (at last, living the dream!) in conclusion: wow!
WZ> Good luck tomorrow then!
CT> a perfect closing note for two old farts celebrating an extinct culture!
WZ> Oh let’s wait another 30 years before we accept that.
(The crazy thing is… this isn’t even the only ANSI animation he shared in MIST1015 – he also devised overlapping sprites for Kirkman’s tool-assisted parallax-scrolling mermaid tech demo “Under the Sea”. But that’ll have to get a post of its own – or you can enjoy Kirkman’s own notes on it!)
