As Horsenburger was getting his teletext groove back, he produced a few caracatures of right-wing politians, such as this rendition of “Tiny Hands Trump”. For a laugh, we folded them in to our MIST1016 Hallowe'en artpack of a week and a half ago, keeping good company with various creepy characters, chilling scenarios and assorted monsters. We’re not laughing now.
So, a substantial chunk of Mist Classic parted ways from us and established Hallucigenia, where they could continue making computer art – and heck, real-world art too, why not? – in the manner to which they were accustomed. I always wondered… maybe if I’d acted sooner on admitting real-world art, I could have kept them under our roof and we could have maintained the momentum of an active core needed to continue operations. But we don’t have a time machine, so instead we get the historical record: Mist Classic stalled out in August of 1998 with me descending into HTML insanity, while Hallucigenia continued chugging along, and in October there it was: real-world art – they ran a gallery of Jack O'Lanterns in their artpack.
Since reforming, we’ve released three October artpacks, and they’ve only gradually been getting more and more Hallowe'eny – first, not at all in 2014, then substantially in 2015… this year, our October artpack was entirely Hallowe'eny. And here, in MIST1016, we just included a photo of an old Jack O'Lantern by Nail (that guy again?), a flaming skull (Ghost Rider or a Lost Soul from DooM? You be the judge!) so finally we can achieve a taste of the MIST1098 (well, at that time our naming convention would have looked like M-9810-B) that never was but might have been.
Painter Delphine Hennelly is in the middle of a series of works exploring the theme of the selfie, but none of them carry a more unsettling subtext than this, the “Bathroom Selfie” featured in MIST1016, enshrining one girl’s attempt to (optimistically? foolishly?) squeeze beauty out of a context of larger-than-life squalor. (That’s funny, I’ve lost my appetite!)
(And for 604 appeal there, in the foreground, are the condos of Yaletown and Vancouver’s West End.)
On the fine art side of things, MIST1016 also included perhaps our first charcoal drawing, a gripping piece by Tom Heuckendorff of the band Soatoa: its title is “Spider face” and its edge is undeniable.
We don’t want MIST1016 to overstay its welcome what with all of its Hallowe'eny contents, but at the same time… it’s the only thing holding back Christmas at this point, so we must persevere and press on. This morning we kick off celebrating this piece by the recently-rediscovered reNM8r which, let’s be fair, we can’t really get away with sharing at virtually any other time of year. A sublime exercise in lighting, I can’t really describe the effects of black magic being depicted here, but they resonate as intense and awesome. I would not mess with that witch and I strongly advise you do not either.
Which is, huh, there’s a lot going on there. But the high and low is that no one out in the public has ever had a chance to get a good look at the underlying art before, and here – due to my onetime Quixotic quest getting box artists properly credited on Mobygames – in MIST1016, the veil was lifted and they finally had a chance to appreciate how it looked before the squiggles were applied.
Anyhow, the previous two of his pieces we examined were minor works – a FILE_ID.DIZ is necessarily constrained, while “the world’s smallest Mist logo” doesn’t really have the chance to bust out. But here, atop the newsletter, he went for the gusto and minted this wicked logo depicting some species of digital graffiti from Hell, balancing the whimsically looped “i"s with the Satanically inverted "G”. It’s a typographical tour de force, and really got us out the door on a Hallowe'eny foot, no doubt! Hats off and thanks again to Nail for ensuring that we didn’t head out into the world undressed 8)
While the version of the art included in our recent MIST1016 artpack was a static image, we all agreed that this was an optimal presentation for Ed “Starstew” Statsny’s Pixkeletal … somewhat akin to how it might be cranked out of a tractor feed dot matrix printer. I remembered how “back in the day” the old graphics viewing program CSHOW would present images that way, after performing some very processor-intensive calculations, no doubt! But CSHOW is unhappy performing in DOSBox today, and I had to go through a lot of MS-DOS graphics applications before I found one that could deliver the effect – that of underpowered limping – that I was searching for. Art isn’t always supposed to be easy! Even computer art. (ESPECIALLY computer art!)
While there’s still a pumpkin on your porch and some candy wrappers blowing around in your wastebasket, here’s another sweet piece of Hallowe'eny computer art from MIST1016 – a pack of Pokemon going trick-or-treating, drawn by artscene stalwart Pinguino! The trick is that every trick-or-treater is the juvenile form, dressed as the adult form: Psyduck is dressed as Golduck, Charmander masquerading as Charizard, Shellder incognito as Cloyster, and Gastly anticipating becoming Haunter. Before we got our hands on it, a print of this was exhibited as part of the Meltdown Comics Spooky Art Show in Hollywood, hanging there for most of last month!
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.
Prints of the design (and shirts bearing the image) are available for sale; we’ll be serving you up a menu of goods for sale by Mistigris artists when holiday season is a bit closer upon us. But for now – it’s still Hallowe'en, at least for one more day!
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!
(This logo was used atop the memberlist of the recent MIST1016 artpack release: small logo, long infofile!)
(Have you tried blowing in the slot?)
(Of course, my favorite part is that there’s an entire roast chicken hidden inside the third pillar from the left!)
A highlight of our recent MIST1016 Hallowe'en artpack was this second annual guest appearance by Raquel “ACIDT*” Meyers, a kind of textmode outsider art savant who happens to, happily for us, specialise in monsters! This piece of PETSCII (the textmode character set of Commodore’s home computers, most notably the C=64) art is entitled “Ambush”, and … I think that I’m looking at Thriller-era Michael Jackson at the bottom left there. Shamon!
This one was in response to the “Witchcraft Wednesday” prompt, and I can’t help but think that this might be Holtzman in an alternate reality Ghostbusters where it is the busters who are the supernatural creatures.
Starting off today’s offerings from the recent MIST1016 Hallowe'en artpack, here’s an ASCII art Gojira (Godzilla) from the desk of ldb, colourized by myself and used at the end of our infofile. I know he’s supposed to be flattening Tokyo, but isn’t he cute?
While the cross is upside-down (shades of Manson, but that’s a swastika… which has no upside-down!), it’s worth noting that pentagrams in this orientation actually represent holiness: a good Christian, legs firmly grounded, arms held out in worship, head pointing to the sky. (Reversed, it becomes more of a goat’s head.) But the point is… isn’t it just adorable?
