MIST1116/DIANE_SMITHERS-AIRPLANE

 Mistigram: Photographer @DianeSmithers never really understood what we were up to with artpacks (not the only one, I'm sure), framing our project as a species of 'visual art database' (well, she wasn't wrong!), but when I put out a call for submissions to my extensive community of colleagues from decades organizing real-world art events, she didn't let that bafflement stop her from throwing her hat in the ring and sharing some of her art photos with our online audiences. Her involvement with us doesn't rate even a footnote in her CV of incredible arts photography, but as everyone in Vancouver's live music and dance performance communities is taking a moment to process her sudden and unexpected departure, we also must acknowledge our brief time spent working with her. This photograph was included in the MIST1116 artpack collection released nine years ago.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Nov 3, 2016 at 6:32pm UTC

Covering all the bases, from computer art forms to fine arts to … well, one of the first of the modern art forms, photography! This MIST1016 landscape photo of Vancouver’s recent blood moon was taken by Diane Smithers (the watermark doesn’t lie!) and while photography is consigned to always play an unglamorous second fiddle role when in the same orchestra as Photoshop and After Effects, it can still be humbling when you realise that what you’re looking at on your computer screen isn’t purely an assemblage of electrons, but an actual representation of the real world! If she missed this shot after humping her camera gear up the staircase she couldn’t just reset the simulation!

(And for 604 appeal there, in the foreground, are the condos of Yaletown and Vancouver’s West End.)

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Nov 3, 2016 at 6:32pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Nov 1, 2016 at 7:52pm UTC

Mist Classic alumnus Whazzit has been busy brewing up some unprecedented stylistic mash-ups, colliding HD photography of landscapes and architecture with ANSI art figures. He just released a bundle of them in the Blocktronics Blocktober artpack, but beating them out by a nose in MIST1016 was this, his Hallowe'eny take on the subject of Castlevania, Konami’s eternal video game series celebrating the conflict between the Belmont family and the vampire Dracula. Here we see Simon Belmont and Drac facing each other down across an elegant chamber, while a small flock of bats rest and stretch way up high.

(Of course, my favorite part is that there’s an entire roast chicken hidden inside the third pillar from the left!)

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Nov 1, 2016 at 7:52pm UTC

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I first met Otium Man, aka Fille, back during my artscene European vacation of 1999 – a pilgrimage to Assembly in Finland arriving and departing via Amsterdam – when my travel companion God Among Lice (formerly of Fire) just HAD to attend the Pukkelpop festival in Belgium (so as to get a chance to see DJ Shadow, among many, many others.) I ended up surprising and delighting a couple dozen friends with his PJ Harvey ASCII t-shirts I brought back, extended as a deposit against unclaimed future computer art favours. (Heads up: in the final reckoning of things, all favours will be called in!) Otium Man and God Among Lice knew of each other due to shared affiliation with the largely Russian group HRG (Hellraiser Group), with Otium co-founding (with Iron Lung) its “Galza” ASCII division, which straggled on to 2005 (#20) and then arose from the ashes (#21) in 2011 largely as a solo project. (I might have done that with Mistigris also, but I didn’t because: no one would have cared. Sad but true.)

Demonstrating a remarkable largesse and openmindedness, Otium roped me in (twist my arm!) to contributing some poetry (sorry, “lits”) to the surprisingly political Galza 22 in early 2014, my first flicker of ‘scene activity in probably well over a decade (but just look what his re-awakened momentum has wrought!), and by October of that year I had tapped him for a guest appearance in our own revival artpack MIST1014.

Some time later, in 2015, he released Galza 23 (“Propaganda”) to the artscene, a stupendous collection of simulated PETSCII (the text mode of Commodore microcomputers) portraits of Communist icons… to some mild acclaim from the artscene and snooty disdain from Commodore enthusiasts, evincing an “if you can’t take us at our most computationally gutless, you don’t deserve us at our most richly textmoded” attitude.

Shortly thereafter, we “included” some works of his in MIST1015 in a medium for which he is not as well known in the artscene: panoramic photography. The framework required to display them in-browser refused to play nice when dealing with local files, so as with a few other filesize-heavy works, we represented a nicely-curated retrotechy selection of his photos as browser-redirecting HTML files, sending local viewers to remote locations (sorry, offline viewers!)

Judging from the traffic figures for the externally-hosted videos (barring Whazzit’s wildly popular ANSI movie of Dead Man’s Pants), we can only imagine that virtually no one got a chance to enjoy those photos, so this write-up is one more opportunity for us to urge you to check them out. The still slices illustrating the post are just the tip of the iceberg, static frames of moving, breathing panoramic vistas.

Then after we lured Nail out of retirement (first with BLENDER 2015, then MIST1015), he got on board to put some actual vintage C64 scene experience to use and spearhead a re-release (and draw that title screen pictured above) of Galza 23 in a form that would execute and display on actual Commodore 64 hardware, in which version it found itself celebrated and embraced by the same community who had spurned it when it was simply still images for display on modern machines. Packaging and presentation: turns out it’s surprisingly important! You can take it for a spin yourself (on your own vintage Commodore hardware, or VICE for the rest of us) if you like!

And that brings us up to speed with the history of Otium, his chance intersections with Mist and his ongoing related (computer) art projects. Stay tuned for more profiles!

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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!