Today on Mistigram, this piece of hirez from the late Mist Classic period – June 1998! The cat (“Mistigris” is French for “alleycat”, you may recall) is drawn by local #hirez rando Katz making his first and only Mist appearance here, enhanced with a splendid logo by Weird – the source for this year’s animated call for submission graphic.
Today on Mistigram, the conclusion to that piece shared a couple of weeks ago – the rest of Muton’s superheroic newschool ASCII art piece from our third anniversary, capped off with a killer logo by Weird! What more could you want?
Today on Mistigram, we feature another historical piece of colourful newschool ASCII art by crowd favorite Weird, who beefs up her creative letterforms with some sassy smiley faces. It is admittedly an odd place to break the word “Mistigris” in two, but where would be less odd? This piece was first released in our July 1997 artpack.
Everybody loves Weird! I don’t know that we have too much more of her work coming up before we transition out of the world of Mistigris promo art, so here is one of her all-time great Mistigris promos – not just typography (which, let’s be fair, I’m sure she could bang out all day long) but also a charming newschool ASCII art illustration and catchy slogan (a distant reference to E.T. and his penchant for Reece’s Pieces?)
For today’s sunny summer’s day, today on Mistigram, we offer up a coloured newschool ASCII by Weird, breaking up a complete “Mistigris” logo with a charismatic, leonine sun (ostensibly having a bad hair day, I don’t believe it). First released in July of 1997. Weird reports:
i was obsessed with this smiling sun motif in high school. i drew it all the time on paper and in ascii. if any notebooks from my high school days could be unearthed you would definitely see this sun. everything i drew had a smiling face on it. sometimes with a saturated blue cloud. someone asked me if that was the only thing i knew how to draw. it might have beeni should note that after that random person in high school asked if that was the only thing i knew how to draw, i became super self-conscious about it stopped drawing it.!
This monochrome newschool ASCII logo was drawn by Weird – who drew us a lot of logos, didn’t she? – and released in our 3rd-anniversary artpack back circa October of 1997. It doesn’t read “Mist” or “Mistigris” – remember, we were busy reinventing ourselves as, if not an elite clique, at least a hip crew… an approach which worked until it failed.
A big change of pace for today’s Mistigram post: this is a piece of hirez (high resolution artwork) by Weird, most recently seen rocking the Alpha-Bits logo style in newschool ASCII art. But the times were changing (this is from our January 1997 Fistful of Steel artpack on the Mistigris World Tour), and sometimes you have to go from being the best at the old style to being a rank beginner of the new style. Certainly Photoshop gave artists powerful options (did I mention lens flare?) that PabloDraw did not, so in the interest of moving forward our artists had to shift gears from time to time. Weird ended up doing visual work for the video game industry, a path that assuredly this kind of stuff unlocked more helpfully than her elegant but outmoded ASCII art. But commercial concerns aside, that latter has probably better stood the test of time as an eternal classic of computer art 8)
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.
Today on Mistigram, a seemingly effortless clean, clear, crisp newschool ASCII Mist logo by Weird. Offset on a single-column slant and awesomely purple, she made it look easy. Originally released in an infofile in MIST0897.
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.
MISTIGRIS ARTPACK SUBMISSION DEADLINE:
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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.
THE WOMEN OF feMIniSTIGRIS. (Pictured: art that could only have come from women, as none of them include any washboard abs, stoic grimaces, or lit spliffs.)
Happy International Women’s Day! The underground computer artscene was not traditionally known as a great place for the ladies. I mean, you could ogle them by the yard as Gen13 supplanted Spawn as the most popular subject of ANSIfication, and Integrity (WHQ: “The Ho-Zone”) rose to success on an official internal policy of maintaining a strict minimum quota of “babe” pictures, decorating the artscene with wallpaper you might expect in the break room at a car repair shop. (Given a starting point of the Image comics revolution underway then, was this a foregone conclusion? As in the Sensational She-Hulk before, the only major title there in which women were treated as anything other than eye candy was The Maxx, and even there if you ignored the word bubbles – admittedly the first place I’d ever been exposed to the names Steinem and Paglia in print – Sam Kieth could easily exude a kind of En Vogue syndrome… whose empowering messages were reversed into objectifying ones when you hit “mute” on the music video. Does the artscene have a Bechtel test? Sure: how come none of Alison Bechdel’s comic strips ever got ANSIfied?) If you had a male gaze, you were in luck. But all there was to gaze upon was fiction and fantasy, right? Well… it turns out that there were a handf^H^H^H^H^Hfew women active in the artscene, primarily known as the girlfriend of x or the wife of y… not due to any failures in their own right as talented artists… being overshadowed by one’s man is just something that naturally happens, right? (Ask Frida Kahlo.) Tabaqui did good work; Kitiara was an amazing force to be reckoned with! And Superchick was, well, super. But where were the rest of them? Why such under-representation here when women were so at the vanguard of video art and net.art? (I, uh, don’t have any answer to that last one.) In PD circles, ‘90s textmode art was dominated by women – jgs in ASCII and Ebony Eyes in ANSI. Raquel Meyers lords over PETSCII and teletext, Keira Rathbone is the typewriter art hero of the day, and Jennifer Daniel just got ASCII stickmen printed in The New Yorker – but never released in an artpack! What kept them out of the realm of the underground elites? (Or am I answering my own question?)
The BBS world was one where you could largely be as anonymous as you wanted to – while the uptight Fido zone coordinators might require registered users to send in photocopies of their drivers’ licenses in order to access their private directory of Cindy Crawford swimsuit .GIFs, that kind of trail was exactly what you didn’t want haunting you in the legally grey area of ThE uNdErGrOuNd… so no one needed to know your real name, location or sex unless you chose to share them in a message base or at a meet; those kinds of details weren’t what we were about, and could in a sense be considered actual liabilities: we weren’t here to represent how we existed in the real world, it was supposed to be an escape from all that!
As BBSes withered on the vine and the scene shifted over to the IRC some of that privacy was lost: despite the given assumption that There Are No Girls Online, dudes (a/s/l?) were constantly sniffing around (a/s/l?) looking for a hint (a/s/l?) of evidence (a/s/l?) to the contrary. Hackers and crackers are devious sorts, skilled at connecting dots from trails of breadcrumbs, and so now that I have your home phone number, surely you wouldn’t refuse a friendly offer of a coffee date, would you?
Mistigris served as a refuge of sorts, an island and oasis for outliers of various stripes; on top of our stubborn resolve to continue including computer music in our artpacks, we were notorious for providing a home for lit writers when the rest of the scene was prepared to turn its back on them, and (perhaps not unrelatedly) we also counted quite a few women beneath our umbrella. I don’t know precisely what factors lent us this preeminence – beyond lip service to egalitarian and democratic rhetoric (meaning that Cthulu agonizingly consulted with everyone before doing what he wanted anyway), I can’t think of any policies we consciously enacted intended to provide this effect, so it may have just been dumb luck. (I can’t take any personal credit for it, thinking back to the time long, long ago that I followed Bast home uninvited from a meet like a complete creep, resolving to be bold and get to know this fascinating and troubled writer better… and staying on my best behavior of course, especially after observing her mantleplace overflowing with 1st prize trophies from Tae Kwon Do tournaments. I must thank her after all these years for not turning me into a grease stain on her carpet. But I digress.) If I had to speculate, it might be related to Mist’s long-toothed message echomail culture, increasingly as time went on fostered on bulletin boards whose system operators and network coordinators were women (the heavy-lifting Happyfish and Etana to be specific): so straight off the bat, the cyber toilet seat stayed down.
Ladies we provided an outlet for in our first century included (but aren’t necessarily limited to):
Following our revival, we’ve done better by this metric – representing contributors from eg. MIST1015, the ladies’ numbers come in quite a bit higher, including Mistigris appearances from women we’ve never featured before:
In conclusion: hats off, ladies, I’m sure it hasn’t been easy getting to this point in your computer art practice, with pushback every step along the way, from the dismissive dudebro clerks at the computer store asking technical questions from your tag-along boyfriend when it was you who were the one dropping a grand on your first new desktop machine, to the fedora-clad nice guys who were hoping for some kind of payment-in-kind for their tokens of seemingly freely offered technical support, to being uninvited from raids with your guild until you “grow the balls” to take part in the VoIP coordination (and all the victorious teabagging you consequently miss out on), to the run of the mill trolls, MRAs, GamerGaters and pick-up artists harrying your every movement online and who won’t take “buzz off” for an answer. Thanks for sharing your art with us. (Art: where we can imagine a future where things are better.) I can’t embed Happyfish’s on-point Tweets about how relatively culturally non-toxic we’d somehow managed to make Mistigris for the ladies due to the protected and private nature of her account (a woman securing her social media account against unwelcome visitors? How extraordinary!), so the last word is left to me and my pledge to continue working on boosting my gender ratios and curbing my micro-aggressions so that someday we can just get down to the business of making amazing art on computers without half of us having to take that order with a side of eating unfair treatment and smiling. We were the idealistic kids of computer art: we were supposed to improve on the institutions we were riffing on. The computers now are faster and display more colours – time to prioritize making participation a little more user friendly.
(So: which artscene ladies managed to carve out a little niche outside our small circle of light in the pervasive gloom?
