In another missive from the “better late than never” department, here’s another warning against cooking in a “best before” date into your computer art, because in a scene that has traditionally measured freshness in terms of 0-3 days, last year is ancient history. (Perhaps the best proof against staleness is to proudly wave the flag of an improbable anachronism such as Remorse 1981 – or the outright impossible Razor 1911.) And I know, sometimes serial numbers can be easily filed off, timestamp watermarks can be cropped out or photoshopped away… first you disappear the numbers, then you reverse the manual anti-aliasing in DP2E. But time spent amending old art could be time spent making new art, and suddenly this piece sucks away twice as much of your limited lifespan as you’d originally intended. Maybe to avoid the tainted stink of yesterday’s news, you just abandon the never-seen, mis-labeled art because you can’t justify the time to bring it back up to speed.
But I digress. Amending errant characters and uncooperative pixels is easy. Remodeling rooms and rolling back landscaping, that’s a mega project! Back up the truck and roll out the bulldozers! Back when cooking up MIST1014, I was struck by the notion of inserting Mistigris, Forrest Gump-style, into the history of the underground computer artscene – by which I mean slipping in references to us in classic video games. (This is an idea that hasn’t reached the end of the road yet; only this particular path has proven to be a cul-de-sac 8) In one case of my attempts to celebrate us through virtual land art (my own Spiral Jetty), I availed myself of a homebrew Java app (Super_Mario_Bros_Game_&_Builder.jar) that could be used, more or less, to generate custom levels for Super Mario Bros. So there we go – a hill here, a pipe there, a couple of platforms… et voila, Mario physically traversing a hostile environment spelling out our name in iconic, monumental form: MISTIGRIS, too big to ignore, hooked up directly to a mainline of nostalgia.
There were issues: the video lacked sound, and the cuts were a little too quick (gameplay videos spliced together because the level I had designed was simply too difficult for me to consistently play through successfully. Just couldn’t resist inserting that Hammer Brother!) Melody thought I was nuts when I asked for any fontists to comment on my kerning. And of course I had a lot on my plate, arraying my options before me while putting together our first artpack in 16 years and weighing over what to include and what to leave out. (The agony of senior staff: leaving yourself on the cutting room floor!) This particular work was, at that moment in time, merely half-baked (intended as one segment of a larger montage), so it was left on the back burner… where in short order it timed out, instantly expiring with its cloud-walking reference to MIST 2014 just as surely as if Mario’s timer had ticked down to zero.
There’s one more problem, however. In 2014 making a custom Super Mario Bros. level was a neat trick, possible only through the application of a somewhat obscure tool unknown to most. Sure, I probably could have gone into the guts of the data and re-generated the level, now reading MIST 2015, but it would not longer be a neat, “how did he do that?” trick, thanks to the release of a piece of software that singlehandedly doubled the number of WiiUs in circulation. I speak, of course, of … (here, I’ll let Reset Survivor of Blocktronics announce it:) SUPER MARIO MAKER!
Even if my level looked as good as the ones that program generated (which, ahem, it does not), now rather than being an intriguing and unique singular work of art, it was a mere grain of sand on a very large beach – one in which it compared quite unfavourably to many of the other, adjacent grains. I sweated over my user-unfriendly tools to come up with a passable proof-of-concept, and the marketplace of ideas (yes, DIY Mario levels… a great concept whose time has surely come!) overran me like an inventor who’d come up with an improvement on telegraph wires but didn’t present it to the patent office until the telephone system was already in place. (I do feel like this sometimes when I uncover a bug in SAUCE implementation while cramming metadata into files using Spoon.) Bryface recently participated in a Global Game Jam and even he got in on the act:
And so all I can do with this piece is dissect and analyse its circumstances, mourning my own perfectionist streak perhaps and presenting a stark warning to, y'know, gather those rosebuds while ye may. If there’s one lesson Mistigris has taught me since 1998, it’s “Don’t release tomorrow what you could release today!”
