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:
TargetDate = "10/15/2016 12:00 AM";
BackColor = "palegreen";
ForeColor = "navy";
CountActive = true;
CountStepper = -1;
LeadingZero = true;
DisplayFormat = "%%D%% Days, %%H%% Hours, %%M%% Minutes, %%S%% Seconds.";
FinishMessage = "Hope you got your submissions in!";
http://scripts.hashemian.com/js/countdown.js
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.
I first met Jenny Ritter in the waning days of her first Hungry Young Folk Music Superband, The Gruff – and if they were winding up, you sure couldn’t tell it from the audience! But All Good Things… and so after being toasted at festivals from coast to coast she found herself in the unenviable position of being a starving artist in our expensive little town by the sea. Singer-songwriters (however virtuous) don’t pull the same fees as bands do, so she aired out another aspect of her creative polymath portfolio, and supplemented her coffeeshop tips by puting her graphic design chops on the market, for people who needed handmade art for their wedding invitations or tattoo designs. (In truth the pencils had never been put away, as she’d always been working on gig posters and album covers the whole time – but this side of her creative practice took on perhaps a greater prominence.)
I’ve always been a big booster of the idea of the creative milieu – being part of a community of similar-minded creators who do related work. I found mine on bulletin board systems and IRC chat; she found hers among family and friends at square dances, coffeeshop open mics, jamming in green rooms and in ferry line-ups. Perhaps in some things, the old-fashioned ways are best: her coterie of Canadian alt-folk nobility include David Newberry, Fish & Bird, and Corbin Murdoch & the Nautical Miles (and, er, I sat in with her on a single occasion 8) – while the vast majority of my computer art colleagues I’ve never yet met face-to-face after over 20 years! (TABNet was a very face-to-face crew; Mistigris, even among the locals, not so much so.)
Jenny has wound up in the uncomfortable niche of marginal success like nobility without title or land; while undeniably hugely talented, after decades of steady building her creative endeavours aren’t yet sufficient for her to be a household name or lucrative enough for her to entertain the bourgeois fantasy of owning a house and raising a family (but forgive me projecting my aspirations on her: she cries all the way to Sweden. This profile isn’t a tragedy: she is consolidating and building her musical empire, but despite her formidable forces, it sure is taking a while. Nonetheless, she never stops chipping away at it!) This week her band opened for Lucinda Williams at a show in Scotland to rave reviews (the event that reminded me that it was time to profile her here: she still has a few remaining UK gigs, foreign readers!), but when she comes home it’s going to be another stint of getting the bills paid and scheming the next big tour. (Fortunately, she’s struck upon an ingenius formula for paying said bills: directing a choir of feckless youth singing their hearts out with arrangements of modern indie pop hits. Here you can catch an early clip of her Kingsgate Chorus playing at the defunct venue The Prophouse at a show with my jug band of the damned, about which you’ll be hearing more soon.)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJNAiZkp9rs&w=560&h=315]
When pressed to submit some works for MIST1015 Jenny was very gracious and sent me more pieces than I actually used; they were all lovely but despite my “in 2015 ALL art is computer art” sloganeering it was becoming increasingly clear that her very traditional art style was markedly dissonant from the growing mounds of computer art I was accumulating; I picked a couple of favorites but any more would have been jarring. Here however they only have to harmonize with the context of her other works, so I intended to air the pieces I left out – but then looked up other art by her, liked it more, and ran those instead. (Ain’t I a stinker!)
Without curating a theme specially intended to accommodate this lovely stuff, I don’t know if you’ll be seeing more of her work in regular Mistigris artpacks, as though I love it dearly, its lovingly stylized details of the natural world stick out as a bit of a mismatch for this virtual world of chunky pixels and chromed Platonic solids, and had I not actively solicited it, the seeds of her art would never have found purchase in the soil of computer art. Until I figure out how to make the two different voices sing together in harmony, a tricky and improbable melding of old and new like Moby’s “Play”, do go forth, and enjoy her art independent of a context of us! I wholeheartedly endorse her music – her second-most-recent album, Bright Mainland, has provided a constant driving soundtrack of rootsy Americana since its release that, like Amelia Curran’s War Brides, has been found to never get stale.
https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2703376824/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/
We open with Sara Ciantar’s “Red Sky At Morning”, the traditional omen of foreboding to oceanbound sailors. I really appreciated her pixelart aesthetic, and only moreso when it was revealed that she had merely taken a photograph through a screen door. To its right, a piece of PETSCII – the textmode of the Commodore 64 – by its rock star artist Raquel Meyers. (It has a name, but I have tentatively given it a new one: “Dead Kids of Instagram.”) Do look up Raquel, as she is curently crowdfunding to support similar work on a similar theme – textmode illustrations of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
Next is a mean little skull logo by Nail that you might have missed in the artpack proper, hiding out at the bottom as the footer illustration to the pack’s infofile.
On the following line is Freelance Pete’s detailed take on the nuclear family’s suburban fantasy, followed by another early-'90s Amiga pixelart piece from the portfolio of $too.
Onward, we get two paintings, the first by Mythical Man – which seems ominous but not too grim until you look a little more carefully at the running man burning in the background – the other “Heart Goes Here” by Jenn Ashton. All the skulls nonwithstanding, this painting demonstrates that there’s nothing necessarily creepy about mere bones… after all, as the pithy quote has it: “You’re a ghost driving a meat coated skeleton made from stardust, what do you have to be scared of?”
This (small-e) eerie gallery ends with the fabulous header to our memberlist, a networked PabloDraw ANSI art session jointly drawn by numerous contributors, notably the logo by the bothersomely talented enzO of Blocktronics (not just a fabulous letter M, also note the spooky skulls beneath it – sorry, Jenn, maybe the skull is just the scariest bone in the body), followed by a menacing Frankenstein’s monster sketched out by Sudden Death, with contributions from Whazzit and Sephiroth.
OK, that’s almost it for the spooky stuff – next time I’ll see if I can’t squeeze in some spooky tunes and make Tumblr sing!
Introducing the fabulous MIST2000.ZIP treasure hunt!
All right, you miserable wretches! I’ve been unleashing mounds of collections of lost, previously-unreleased, and downright new computer art from the underground PC art scene for the past year! I’ve been exhausting long-fermenting stockpiles of the stuff, discharging it all out into the uncaring air of history, and I’m through! By which I mean… we have one final collection of classics for you to enjoy, MIST2000.ZIP (subsequently referred to as M2K for brevity’s sake), a digest of materials optimistically collected ~1997-2001 for eventual artpack release before I’d come to the conclusion that my artgroup Mistigris had really and truly died for the forseeable future. (Happily proven kind of wrong: like Banishment in Master of Magic, you can come back – but you have to wait a heck of a lot of turns to do so.)
But unlike all of those prior offerings from the vault, I’m not going to deliver it to your front door on a silver platter. I made this whole process too easy, pathetically offering the unplucked flower of our youth up with no shred of coyness, tainted with the whiff of desperation surrounding something well past its prime. And why, after all, debase yourself by accepting what was so needily proffered? It’s not last call, and you have no obligation to take our art home with you just because it wants to live on your hard drive!
Now, as Louis C.K. says, everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. But think back to the artscene’s eyeblink in the limelight of technological relevance. In order to procure an artpack, there were so many steps you had to undertake: first you needed a computer (expensive and far from ubiquitous) and a modem, and some understanding of what the latter could be used for; you needed an ANSI-supporting terminal program you had to figure out how to use without tapping into any kind of online assistance, and BBS phone numbers, enough of them that you could slip through the surface layer of Public Domain systems to some underground boards; you needed to obtain access to said underground boards by gleaning enough elite insight from bubbles up to the PD sphere to pass review by the new user application committee. Then when you called back, you had to wait in line for the busy signal to resolve. Finally you reconnected, and found you needed to build up your file points by sending in something that you had that they wanted and didn’t have yet, a catch-22 if ever there was one. After several uploads, you finally accrued enough file points to download your desired artpack – but the board hung up on you for running out of your daily allotment of time! You called back the next day and found that you didn’t actually have enough daily minutes needed to download the file, so you banked that day’s remaining allotment and called back on day THREE, at which point you withdrew the extra minutes and successfully initiated the download at 1200 baud – which tied up your computer and your phone line for one hour and 82 seconds. By some stroke of luck your mom didn’t pick up the phone extension for the whole hour, and at the end you had an archive on your 40 meg hard drive ready to be cracked open. Well, first you had to delete some files to make room for the archive to be uncompressed… then you had to wait for them to decompress… and there, finally you had the files there on your hard drive, ready to enjoy. Only – you didn’t have enough RAM to load ANSI.SYS in your overloaded CONFIG.SYS file, so you couldn’t view the files from the MS-DOS prompt, and you needed to wait until the next day to download an ANSI viewer from the BBS. And then you managed to do so, and then you basked in the warm glow of getting to enjoy subjecting yourself to advertisements for long distance bulletin boards you could never afford to be able to call, even if the ads didn’t blank out their actual phone numbers. Hopefully you enjoyed the art, because you weren’t getting those file points back, or that time, or your ephemeral youth…
THIS SYSTEM WAS, QUITE FRANKLY, INSANE. (It brings to mind my high school valedictorian’s observation that between your mother’s lifetime egg production and your father’s lifetime sperm production, simply by being conceived by a combination of those particular two gametes you had beat odds of two hundred trillion one hundred billion to one.) But by making itself impossible, it compelled us to up our game, to better ourselves and harden ourselves to handle the impossible as just another everyday curve ball to be hit out of the park. We would do three impossible things before breakfast and then queue a batch of four more to process automatically while we were at school! We became efficiency ninja, and like perpetuators of cruel hazing practices, carried on the elite practices because we believed that it really separated the wheat from the chaff – and if nothing else, it guaranteed that everyone in the artscene that you interacted with felt keenly passionately about being there… because it had taken so many steps to get there, and they’d be damned if they didn’t get some return on their investment. Everything gained by working under such conditions felt more rewarding as if earned through hard work, because it was hard work… unpaid work that no one asked to be done, but labour nonetheless that required a rare specialist skillset, focus and dedication.
Today, by contrast, we invite you to click a link for instant gratification – and you may or may not be arsed to lift that proverbial finger.
So maybe it turns out that people are more interested in something that they have to sweat a little over in order to obtain. It just so happens that I’ve had a bug in my ear to creatively add inefficiency to a simple process for quite a while – predating my involvement in the artscene, I sketched out plans for a PD BBS treasure hunt, inspired by Kit Williams’ 1979 puzzle-book Masquerade, by way of Bamber Gascoigne’s account of the mania in the 1983 book “Quest for the Golden Hare”. I thought it would be a good premise for a “grand tour” through the BBS scene, encouraging people to visit specialist boards beyond their particular online community and comfort zone, but when the SysOps balked at coughing up $5 a piece for a $100 grand prize to the winner in exchange for a failsafe plan for the free traffic guaranteed a mandatory stop along the route, my aspiration stalled and I resolved to find less elaborate ways to express myself.
Ever since then this idea has rattled around in my head as the good idea that “got away”, a funny bone tickled when I encountered David Münnich’s 2004 NotPron, Aaron Reed’s 2009 blueful, and Ernest Cline’s 2011 book READY PLAYER ONE. I don’t have many treasures to give away – no golden hares, not even a $100 pot… but I do have this amazing time capsule what is M2K, so why not make you more interested in it by being a tease and throttling your access to it a little bit for a little while?
So there we go, that’s all the setup. How do you play this contest? What is the structure of the puzzle? I’m not going to spill it all here at this moment in time, but I will assert that to overcome the gauntlet you will need to demonstrate a handy mastery of oldschool artscene lore across all its mediums – challenges that might take a guru 5 minutes (like Myst, if you know what you’re doing), or a luser … forever! Because we feel passionately about supporting the economy of the beleagured country of Libya, all puzzles take the form of a redirected (or perhaps I should say usefully obfuscated) bit.ly URL leading to the next step of the puzzle, where the case-sensitive (and no spaces or punctuation marks) answer “YourCodeHere” to a given puzzle would fit in the form http://bit.ly/YourCodeHere . Every few days, we will be rolling back and “spoiling” early puzzles in the sequence to enable stymied truthseekers to proceed further in our nefarious chain of stumpers. And by the end of the month the M2K pack will be released to the public directly; this is your chance to enjoy nearly a month of exclusive access to our archive in exchange for your ineffable eliteness.
If you feel that there has been a malfunction or that a puzzle piece is not working fairly, as it should be intended to, please don’t hesitate to contact us (@mistfunk, cthulu at tabnet dot ca) to bring the matter to our attention. It should work, but it is not inconceivable that something we didn’t think of might be temporarily getting in the way.
On that optimistic note – you can find the first clue over here. Happy hunting!
GOT STUCK? Read through and skip directly to the second puzzle!
STILL STUCK ON THE SECOND PUZZLE? Follow up here and proceed to the third!
Alternately, forget the third puzzle, we spoiled that one for your convenience as well!
QUITE SOME TIME LATER, WE SPOILED THE FOURTH PUZZLE as well, allowing latecomers to this game to breeze through the gentler second half of our insidious riddle-clues.
Also, in short order, the fifth puzzle also was spoiled.
In keeping with the theme of the week, we went on to spoil the sixth puzzle the following day, though really, there was hardly any puzzling there to do.
Much the same could be said for the seventh puzzle.
And then there was the eighth, and finally, the ninth and final puzzle, all spoiled for your entertainment and edification. Now you can just go forth and enjoy the MIST2000.ZIP artpack without any interference.
