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!
