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!

MIST0524 mosaic

 Mistigram: here's a sampling of the variety of subjects and artistic approaches to be found in the new science fiction-themed MIST0524 artpack collection, featuring original art as well as fanart of celebrated franchises, in vintage computing graphics formats such as #ANSIart, #teletext and #BBCMicro hirez graphics.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Sep 22, 2016 at 2:03pm UTC

Another piece of très ‘90s vga (hirez / high resolution) artwork by syncr0w (who I just found, will keep you posted with developments) entitled “Psychosis”, released in our 3rd anniversary artpack in October of 1997. Not only does it contain two Mist logos, but I’m also a big fan of all the 1s and 0s. Do you think they spell out a secret message?

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Sep 22, 2016 at 2:03pm UTC

[gallery]
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!

[gallery]
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!