Not two weeks after we released MIST1016, and already another collection is battering at the gates, demanding to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. This is it, folks, the collection for which we’ve been soliciting, gathering, stockpiling, and bottling up & shaking art for over six months now. Due to qualitative changes, what you end up with is somehow more than a mere six monthly artpacks would have been: it’s a massive monument of computer art, and we have skimmed some excellence off of its top to share with you in this video. The actual collection will follow this weekend. In the meantime, here’s a four-minute highlights reel for you to enjoy. (And if you find you’d like to spread the word, you’ll probably have better luck with the copy up on YouTube.)
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Sunday, October 30, 2016
Trick or Treat! Our Hallowe'en-styled 22nd anniversary (!) artpack (you may recall its awesome teaser trailer from a couple of weeks back) is officially released, and is now available for local download at http://bit.ly/mist1016 … there is some ANSI and ASCII art, by old hands and a few new names to boot, plus our ongoing investigations into other genres of textmode art (PETSCII, Shift-JIS, and a ton of teletext!) Also lots of #inktober sketches, drawings and paintings, plenty o’ varied hirez, even music… and of course it wouldn’t be a Mist pack without some lit!
Mar 10
I passed a man.
He wasn't human.
Like a rapidly-decaying Jack O’ Lantern (yep, got one of those too!), don’t let it get past optimal seasonal freshness – grab the whole pack today and get your Hallowe'en started right!
(Featured in this post: FILE_ID.DIZ by Nail, Ambush by Raqel Meyers as ACIDT*, Happy Helloween by reNM8R, Albina by Elin Jonsson, Hellboy teletext by Horsenburger, Strange Weather by the Mythical Man, Haunted House #inktober sketch by Bonemouse, Click or Treat Shift-JIS by Kalcha, Just Because You Are Afraid Of Me Does Not Mean I Am Dangerous #inktober sketch by Theresa Oborn, Castlevania by Whazzit. (Oh yes, and the poem is by Crowkeeper.) But everything in this collection is Hallowe'eny, this is just a sampling to demonstrate its incredible diversity!)
Monday, October 24, 2016
Get your loot bags ready because we’ve got homemade goodies to share, mostly razorblade-free! In the lead-up to our annual anniversary artpack release, due to the season we always see a certain quantity of spooky art submitted. Last year it was a significant portion of the artpack – this year we elected to simply split it off into a more thematically-coherent collection all on its own.
So the creepy MIST1016 artpack is headed your way in one week – descending upon an unprepared populace on Hallowe'en – and to get you warmed up for it, we present a sampling of its eerie contents (but not 33rie contents, he has no time for that stuff anymore) in the form of this multimedia slideshow preview! (The annual anniversary artpack will follow in November, so fear not… by which I mean, only fear this extremely terrifying Hallowe'en computer art!)
Friday, April 29, 2016
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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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.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XphjBd9UebU&w=480&h=360]
Friday, April 1, 2016
I know, you were worried, we were running out of time. Well fear no longer, in the closing minutes of April 1st, Mistigris was able to make good on their strange tradition (their traditional strangeness?) and release their very serious April Fool’s artpack. Filled with strange sights and even stranger sounds, you can’t get anything else like it anywhere else (, and why would you want to?)
Duo Daughters, the gauntlet is cast. Sure, you have more ANSI lying around the cutting room floor, but can you come up with a more bombastic arrangement of Bohemian Rhapsody?
All right, my droggiewogs and krattiwats, it’s been a while but you can’t
keep a good man down, or us either! It’s MIS to TI GRIS, because MISEUPHRATES
would be a little too strange even for us. We’re back in effect in 2016 –
down but not out, out but not up, up but not in, in but not inverted.
Inverted, but not upside-down! OK, I give up, keeping track of all of these
lies is too much for me: Mistigris – in effect in 2016, upside-down, with the
former contents of our collective pockets all over the floor. There, are you
vultures happy?
We have been hard at work pushing at the boundaries of computer art:
there have been several intriguing developments since our ‘90s heyday. Did
you know that there science has discovered a 17th colour? Drilling down, our
researchers discovered several more, and we look forward into harnessing their
powers in artworks of the so-called “higher resolutions”. There is, um,
potential for a marijuana joke there, but I can’t quite make it happen.
Moving right along, there are plenty of other things we can’t quite make
happen, but do we let that stop us? Hells no! And we aim to prove it,
painfully and repeatedly! There’s a lot of nasty stuff (where by nasty I mean
wicked, and by wicked, I mean terrible, and by terrible, I mean downright awful
and unpleasant and overall time-wasting) in our April artpack, always the very
apex of our annual art production schedule, with block-cocking music beats
(including a masterful rendition of an eternal classic by the manly and very
heterosexual Freddie Mercury and a song sung entirely in Klingon! mamI’
DaneH'a’? nItebHa’ mamI’ DaneH'a’?), award-winning ANSI art, textmode art
portraits of our guiding lights, our heroes, mentors and idols, epic lits of
awesome emotionality plumbing the very depths and most darkest most innermost
recesses of the insides of (ok, it’s a colonoscopy), FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER IN
AN ARTPACK ANYWHERE a choreographed dance routine that’s totally infectious (so
don’t forget your facemask, rubber gloves, and a dental dam!), and totally
gnarly photography. Oh yes, and hirez pieces fortified with dad jokes.
THUS demonstrating that unlike a one-trick pony like, oh, I don’t know,
the petulant upstarts at Duo Daughters (have they ever even heard of the
animated GIF? if they have, they probably pronounce it like “JIF” huh) we are
at least a two-trick… two or three… we are a tricky pony, a radical little
Shetland pony with the shaggy hooves, doing Tony Hawk moves on a little
skateboard. Go on, ask us about our Cutie mark.
In conclusion: computer art will never die! And even if it does, we at
Mistigris will never move on! And, uh, if for some reason we do, we will
always feel bad about neglecting it, in the middle of the night, pursued by
little phantom F1-4 blocks floating just outside the window. We will
castigate them publicly in the harshest terms, even though no one else will
be able to see them at all. We will be institutionalized due to what appear
to be untreated mental health issues. It will not end well for us!
- Mistigris 2016: It Will Not End Well For Us!
Sunday, November 1, 2015
What do you mean Hallowe'en is over? I’m not done sharing the spooky, monstrous computer artwork from the MIST1014 artpack we just released! Admit it, you still have a Jack ‘o Lantern on your front steps, so you should still be of a mind to appreciate our final lingering hauntings. (And then there’s Whazzit’s amazing accordion-playing ANSI skeleton animation, I can’t even fit that in here – but it’s starkly chilling, in a profoundly ridiculous way!)
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!
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Hallowe'en is here again and we are dressed up as … ourselves, 20 years ago. (Are any costumes possibly scarier than our own adolescences?) I know that trends and fashions are supposed to go in 20-year cycles – is 2015 the new 1995? (Microsoft probably hopes so.)
But I digress. You can find our new, 21st anniversary artpack MIST1015.ZIP at our new website at mistigris.org, or download it wholesale at bit.ly/mist1015, or view and hear (much of) it through your web browser at pc.textmod.es/pack/mist1015.
It’s a massive undertaking, containing over 100 files submitted by over 50 artists (including over an hour and a half of music!), representing works created from the late ‘80s to … late last night.
There’s no official theme (if “computer art” is a theme in 2015, it’s one so broad as to be unuseful), but due to the timing of our release, it naturally happened that a certain quantity of spooky, Hallowe'eny art accumulated in our incoming directory. We actually debated just releasing it as a separate Hallowe'en pack, but twice as many packs == twice as much administrative work, so to avoid killing our senior staff (what would be a more fitting Devil’s Night twist?) we opted to lump it all in as a sub-theme within the greater pack.
There’s lots to enjoy here – and even tomorrow, when the Christmas decorations come out, there will still be lots of non-Hallowe'eny material in there for you to continue enjoying. (And how does that joke go? “Why do programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas? Because 25 DEC == 31 OCT!”)
But in the meantime… Boo!
..Posted works: witchy animated .GIF by Janos Horak, Shift JIS by Kalcha, Amiga pixelart by $too, ANSI spider by Vordreque, ballerina spider by Theresa Oborn, Skullflower by Phatal, Zombies, Run! ANSI by Happyfish, DJ of the Dead by Vordreque, ASCII by ldb.
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BONUS: appearing in the artpack, though not with this track – electronic music master Ill-Esha has made a sinister electro rearrangement of Danny Elfman’s thme music to Beetlejuice, which you can enjoy at http://subdotmission.com/sub-freebies
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
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.Sunday, November 30, 2014
ARTDISK-.ZIP Mistigris 'best-of" compilation (re)release!
Tonight, after 16 years of dormancy: the second monthly public Mistigris release. ARTDISK-.ZIP was a “best-of” compilation – additionally featuring 13 previously-unreleased works – designed to act as a survey study for outsiders to the artscene, demonstrating a wide spectrum of different minimalist (and filesize-thrifty) approaches to computer art… and distributed in a limited edition of 10 floppy diskettes at a groovy real-world art party back in 1999: “The Living Closet” at “The Church of Pointless Hysteria”.
Only two of the ten floppies were taken home. (A new world record for least-viewed artpack?) During a premature attempt to rebuild Mistigris – before it had quite hit rock bottom – the disk was hand-converted into a web-viewable gallery in 2001 hosted on free (and subsequently withdrawn) Australian webspace and seen by roughly nobody… so the web gallery has been folded in to this archive as well for your local browsing convenience.
Technically a 15th-anniversary re-release – if you were one of the two lucky disk-takers – for the rest of you this archive represents an opportunity to enjoy the 13 hitherto unseen works and to renew your enjoyment of the other archive contents which, rest assured, you likely haven’t perused in quite… some… time.
(Coming up next: the 20th-anniversary re-release of the long-unavailable seasonal music disk The Bells Of Yule – remastered!)
