MIST1124 call for submissions

 Mistigram: and now for something completely different -- we're not showing off art (well, thanks for this nice logo, @grymmjack!) but rather, we're requesting some of it!  Our crew is celebrating its 30th anniversary at the end of this month, and we want to give everyone the opportunity to take part in the festivities and party like it's ... 1994.

If you have something specific in mind, we're very interested to see what you've got -- but if you could use a prompt to get the creative juices flowing, we have some suggestions:

1) We will be circulating an uncoloured, unadorned #Mistfunk logo outline and challenging the typographers among you to shade/colour/finish it off _in your own style_, hopefully yielding compelling variations on a fun theme.

2) There are thousands of artworks in our 30 years of back catalogues, and we would love to see some creative remixes, remasters, radical re-interpretations, skilled restorations and postmodern deconstructions of your favorite classic works from our back stacks.

3) As though you just fell through a time wormhole into 1994, draw up a promo for the same kinds of things we used to advertise in our packs -- the KiTSCHNet echomail network, Kithe e-mag, our WHQ the Screaming Tomato BBS (or its successor The Jade Monkey, if you prefer), or the PabloDraw ANSI editor (still under active development!)  Or maybe you have a different cyberspace lost cause of 1994 that you'd like to give a last huzzah to -- a favorite MUD, newsgroup or GeoCities neighbourhood ... here's your chance!

4) If you care to open up the Moebius ANSI editor and join our networked server for the making of collaborative #ANSIart, in keeping with the #phreaking and #telephony roots of the underground computer artscene, we're hoping to collect a wide assortment of small ANSI vignettes of famous people, real and fictional, from TV, movies and real life, all taking part in a conference call on landlines, mobiles and cellular phones.

Please try to get your subs in not long after Nov 23rd, because we've gotta release this beast the following weekend!  If you have any questions, you know where to find us!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XphjBd9UebU?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=375]

I have embedded it at the bottom of the initial call for submissions, but in case you don’t see it go by again, you should know that today I spiced up the plain dry bread call for submissions with a classic loader-style annoucement of our upcoming artpack, complete with scrolly bars and music from the recent Tracker Fix competition. Hope it scratches a retro itch!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

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.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XphjBd9UebU&w=480&h=360]