[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9NRRadx-zY?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
You probably got the general idea from yesterday’s posting of the first of our five holiday music videos, but if you missed it and don’t feel like following that link, in a nutshell: in December 1994, we released “the Bells of Yule”, a music disk featuring a central 5-part suite of seasonal .MOD music composed on an Atari ST. It was sent to all of the BBSes, and when they dried up, it disappeared, seemingly forever… but in 2014, Cthulu made his personal copy available to the composer, who had since lost the originals, and in a remastered form, they were sent out back into the world once again, greatly fortified with other holiday computer compositions.

Now it is Christmas 2015, and we are following up this Lazarus-like feat from last year by making music videos for each of the five parts, one daily in the run-up to Christmas Day. We have drawn on the rich history of computer art, public domain and underground, to provide a wintery potluck of hundreds of pieces of thematically-appropriate fellow traveler works in a textmode, low-resolution idiom; part 2’s visuals draw specifically on brief, single-screen (or “25-line”) pieces of ANSI art – full attribution of the participating artists (and gosh golly, there sure are a lot of them) can be found at the end of the video. Merry Mist'mas – share and enjoy!

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

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d5gbddtQcg?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Last year, we shared a number of posts commemorating minor holiday celebrations we had made in our computer art idiom during our original, 4-year run from 1994-1998, culminating in the re-release of the long-lost “Bells of Yule” music disk, remastered, enhanced and considerably fortified for a total 1h45 runtime.

One thing that I thought would have been “nice” would be to provide relevant visuals, but what with all the time I spent drafting infofiles that fall, the time bank was empty when the right moment came along to promote this music disk… so we went without for one year. But we did not forget!

Now, a year older and seemingly no wiser, we have raided the collected vaults of the history of textmode art, public domain and underground, ASCII, ANSI, ANSImation and more, ferreting out literally hundreds of brief holiday-themed works of visual art with which to present you a vintage slideshow, the best and most fitting possible accompaniment to the 5-part “Bells of Yule” suite composed in Winter 1994 on an Atari ST.

We’ll be sharing one instalment daily for the next five days; today’s features a focus on FidoNet/UseNet style ASCII art, notably focusing on the works of the disappeared ASCII master jgs (Joan G. Stark), with a cameo appearance by ldb (Laura D. Brown). Merry Mist'mas! Share and enjoy!

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

[gallery]

How many Mistigris alumni and special guests are vending goods available for your purchase this holiday season? Huh… probably quite a few. But they have not all brought the matter to my attention, and consequently I can’t offer up a complete gift guide for your enjoyment. Instead, locals please consider the following invitation from local artist Alexander Bell, who opened MIST1015 (appearing first, alphabetically) with some of his unique ASCII art-screenprinted oil paintings. And yes, the artist addresses the question on everybody’s mind: “I’ll have a number of textmode influenced artworks on offer as well.” (Not necessarily the one pictured; that’s just an example from MIST1015 8) Don’t wait for Boxing Day! Here are the details:

Dear friend,

I would like to cordially invite you to come to my studio this weekend for an open studio.

What: Open Studio Sale
When: This Saturday Dec. 19th, from 11am - 6pm
Where: #26 - 108 E. Broadway Street (the grey door next to the Burrard Arts Foundation Gallery)

It’s that time of year when I need to clear some things out, so prices will be discounted. I’ve pulled out a variety of work ranging from:

works on paper, panel, canvas, digital prints, screen prints,
very small to very large
watercolors, oil paints, drawings, sketches, photographs
new works and old works
$10 dollars and up
Come find a holiday gift for a friend, or perhaps something for your own home.


For more information please take a look at the facebook event page. Please feel free to forward this message to your friends if you think they would be interested.

As well, a number of other studios will be open in the building selling a variety of arts and crafts. Open studios also include:

Anita Sikma Design, Lacar, Kaw, Lindsey Hampton, Karenn La, noon, Daub + Design, Christopher Rodriguez, Rox x Rox, Locomotive Clothing, Feest, Brine Adams, + treats, hot refreshments, cheer

I would like to wish everybody the best of the season; health and happiness in the new year.

Uhh… what he said!

[gallery]

I have so much yet to discuss: I have MIST2000 puzzles to spoil; I have MIST1015 artworks to discuss… I have a holiday multimedia extravaganza to hype! But in keeping with my mandate to not let timely matters get away from me… I have a concert to plug by a Mistigris alumnus. Oldschool Misters might remember him as Handiboy or Haquisaq; you last saw him in MIST1014 under his modern sobriquet of “bryface”, which not only hints at his real name, but lets you know that yes, he has a face. (He is also represented in MIST2000, so I’d better get around to cracking that nut for the benefit of all of you lazy gadabouts who refused to do so for themselves.) Though he had a deft handle on sample use back in the ‘90s, he has since refined his masterful art down the manupulation of pure square, sine and triangle waves, and you can hear him leading the way to some retrofuturistic palace of wisdom in a chiptune idiom. I praised his musical achievements before, and I guess his turn has just come around again.

Here, it’s nearly Christmas, enjoy a seasonal video of his handiwork. (Er, I mean haquiwork. Uhh… workface.)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQPCr95vkJM&w=560&h=315]

And now, the concert details:

Thursday Dec 17, 8 PM
Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings)

Music and Gaming Festival’s GAME OVER event series is coming to the northwest at the Rickshaw theater. $15, 19+

Performances by:

bryface
————————————–
bryface composes and performs chipmusic using real game hardware: his most recent project, “VARIOUS TOPICS”, is a full-length album written solely using, of all things, a 1980’s Nintendo Game Boy. But this music is a far cry from the nostalgic, simplistic video game stereotypes of yesteryear – watch bry demonstrate prowess in a multitude of modern genres such as House, Electro, and Drum and Bass, all using nothing more than the sound coming from the Game Boy’s antiquated 4-channel sound chip. bry’s music has gained notoriety throughout the worldwide community of chip musicians for being highly sophisticated and forward-looking, yet deeply rooted in oldschool demoscene aesthetics.

The Runaway Four
————————————–
The Super Smash Bros. of video game music! The Runaway Four performs video game music in the form of themed medleys, tying songs together from all different games. A regular at local conventions including the Vancouver Retro Gaming Expo and Nerd Fest, this band is known for performing high-energy sets and long, expository audial journeys. They can also be be seen frequently around Vancouver collaborating with other geek-themed performers like Geeks vs Nerds, and they always keep a healthy stock of medleys uploaded on their YouTube channel.

missingNo.
————————————–
Founded in 2011, missingNo. has played venues from house parties, to clubs and local conventions, to some of the largest video game music gatherings in North America. missingNo. boasts a full horn section that injects a heavy soul-fusion influence into their arrangements of classic and modern tunes and they’re consistently blowing away the crowd with their big sound and ability to draw out the inner child in their listeners. Their first album, Warp Zone, dropped in 2013. Epoch, the band’s next studio recording is slated for digital release in Fall 2015. Their music is available for sale on Loudr, Bandcamp, iTunes, among others and is also available for streaming on all major internet radio sites. Be sure to track them down on YouTube and Facebook to track down their latest videos and music releases.

Freaky DNA
————————————–
Freaky DNA plays his own NES-style chiptunes from the Retro City Rampage album which currently has 200,000+ plays on Bandcamp. Previous live shows include Osaka, O’Porto, Brooklyn, Banff, Zürich, Seattle, Toronto, Norwich, Newcastle, Berlin, San Francisco, Amsterdam and other locations around the globe.

Late-breaking update: Bryface tells us that he will have merch at the concert! We never did end up making the Mistigris CD sampler, but this … is probably quite a bit better.

also, at the venue i’ll be selling a collection of most of my existing / unreleased works on SD card! not only will there be .MP3’s but also a handful of tracker files and other music source file equivalents.

[gallery]

In any artscene anthropological digs, lit (short for “literature” – poems, fiction, rants) maintains its traditional scene status by getting the short end of the stick. Due to biases inherent in our delightful Web 2.0, images (textmode, vector and high resolution) are very easy to share, needing only a conversion if indeed any treatment; music is less trivial to put up, especially if initially distributed in tracked form, but still very possible. Getting programs to work (or at least demonstrate their output) in-browser is a hurdle but not an insurmountable one. But displaying period text – which should be the most seamless medium to share of all, much as it was considered the easiest (and least “skilled”) computer art form – is rarely, if ever, undertaken. This is a shame, because it was one of our traditional strengths (but, y'know, one of those strengths that is also a weakness.)

Ironically, while (some of) our practitioners of other art forms have kept on chugging along, most of Mist’s lit writers, deprived of the primarily textual cyber medium in which they reflexively expressed themselves, fell by the wayside as writers… to the point where we had a hard time finding any to put in our recent revival artpacks. But but but… it simply wouldn’t be a Mist pack with no lit! (That would be like an ACiD pack without the WE-WILL.SUE disclaimer!) So I had to go a bit further afield and headhunt some relevant words to include in our collections.

Jim Munroe (not all of our contributors rate Wikipedia articles about them!) was never part of the artscene, though he did write for the digital underground. While we were active in Mistigris making artpacks, he was also here in the 604, working for The Media Foundation as managing editor of the influential Adbusters magazine in its heyday. But before then, he was putting together e-zines in the newsgroups and small press scene of Southern Ontario – I asked him if he knew any members of Dark Illustrated, but though they were in the same place, they were not active at the same time. (Fo shizzle he knew BBSes, though – one of them provided the initial textmode setting for one of his video games, “Guilded Youth”.)

His time in Vancouver informed the setting of this third novel, 2002’s Everyone in Silico, a slice of West Coast near-future dystopia. (He’s been working with SF themes regularly, a bit of a Canadian Cory Doctorow (whoops, as Jim reminds me – Cory IS the Canadian Cory Doctorow), but instead of Boingboing, he established the Perpetual Motion Roadshow, a small press indie tour circuit I helped prop up the Vancouver end of back in my days at the Butchershop Floor art gallery.) As I approached him regarding permission for us to reprint an excerpt, we found my timing was perfect, as he was discharging his back catalogue of novels and graphic novels as temporarily-free, forevermore-pay-what-you-like ebooks (hot off the presses: Therefore Repent!, a story of magical hipsters hustling in post-Rapture Chicago while avoiding angelic death squads.) The Vancouver setting and cyberpunk tone of Everyone in Silico made it the perfect candidate for appearing in our artpack – how revelatory, for the kids who grew up in William Gibson’s cyberspace matrix (not just sharing the byways of imagination, for Gibson lived and walked the same streets of Vancouver as we did – we joked more than once about how we should look him up in the phone book and pay him an unsolicited late-night visit, imploring him to autograph our cybernetic implants… and, oh geez, I will just have to write a follow-up post about William Gibson later on) to finally see their own home rendered in some sour future form, not just the world capitols of Tokyo, New York and SoCal. Here we are, we have a future also! It’s not great, but at least we rate mention! Is Vancouver a world class city? Who knows, but the 604 is in effect!

I need not excerpt the excerpt here – you can read our chunk in the artpack, and of course you can also access the entire work as an ebook now for … name your price. Jim’s always got several exciting projects on the go – novels, comics, games and also films (Ghosts With Shit Jobs: required viewing) – and his latest project is recently-launched, a Torontonian historical mystery audiobook puzzle app for iOS, Wonderland, described as a walking stimulator. Jim Munroe doesn’t need an artgroup, he by himself is a veritable creative industry! Check his work out, because for every work I highlighted here, there are three more I was obliged to skip over for conciseness.

[gallery]
I’ve been remiss – other duties have called me away from my sacred charge of talking up specific works and individual contributors to our groundbreaking mega-artpack MIST1015 back at the end of October (to say nothing of earlier releases I have yet to discuss), but I have good excuses… some of these duties have involved further and ongoing Mistigris projects. But some subjects are timely and are left idle at the risk of irrelevance!

Antti Minkkinen (aka Unseen) contributed two of his paintings (and an ANSI logo for his scene project PEN15 whose name I am regrettably unable to satisfyingly explain) to the artpack, and now (and indeed, since November 25th… and until December 20th, so you still have a chance) you can see some of his other paintings hanging on a wall in an art gallery. That is, if you happen to be situated in or near the town of Tapiola in Finland. (If I know the computer underground, definitely that applies to a few of you!)

The exhibition has a website whose blurb I was invited to translate:

“This exhibition is of my most recent works. I rarely sketch during the process and I hardly think anything while painting. I never pick themes consciously while working but I often find myself exploring similar topics. I’m interested in honesty, authenticity and humour, and try to search for beauty, as mundane as it may sound. I want my art to, at some primitive level, narrate my experience with authenticity.”

Antti Minkkinen is a fine artist from Espoo. He has graduated from Vapaa Taidekoulu with a BFA degree majoring in painting. He works mainly as a painter but also in other medias like sculpture, video and digital art.

This exhibition was also the subject of a bit of media coverage which I, with the generous assistance of Google Translate, have tried to render comprehensible to non-speakers of the notoriously obtuse Finno-Ugric language group… with some middling success:

Antti Minkkinen reflects on the challenge of the concept of beauty
by Anneli Tuominen-Halomo

Artist Antti Minkkinen mostly paints, but also makes sculptures, videos and multimedia. His paintings raise a smile – there on the Studio Aarni wall next to a portrait are a couple of still lives of flowers. “The face started to look like an evening rose, so I painted it between two tables covered in flowers,” the artist explains.

The exhibition includes Minkkinen’s latest paintings, from which eyes, noses or tongues may emerge: Minkkinen has used “everything that can be found on the floor” to make the protrusions. “People have a dull perception of beauty - I have deliberately chosen random themes, but I see them manifesting the same topics.”

Through a lens of his interest in honesty, authenticity and humour, he has begun to explore beauty. Inspiration is all around – when he sees colors running together from garbage in the gutter, he remembers the shades and hues, then subsequently applies the color scheme to a painting.

The paintings in this show are all quite small in size. “A small canvas concentrates an idea down to be stronger.” Minkkinen says he makes quite a lot of drawings and some of the paintings emerge from the sketches. He always carries a sketchbook to take notes in case he sees an interesting subject of study, but with mobile phone use on the rise he finds more often a quick digital photograph is made for reference instead. “The works are often syntheses. If a part isn’t working, paint over it – you can’t afford to fall in love with your own work.”

For his own influences, Antti Minkkinen points at the Dutch Karel Appel, as well as Espoo visual artists Tycho Elon and teacher Tarmo Paunu.

Antti Minkkinen is an Espoo-based artist who graduated from the Free Art School in 2012. He is up for election as the representative for the Painters’ Union board.

The exhibition of Antti’s paintings at Studio Aarni in Heikki’s Square, Tapiola, will continue until 20 December.“

The photograph came from the article; the ANSI logo and the painting of the yelling man are from MIST1015, while the pair of bearded men are an adaptation of another of his submissions to MIST1015, tweaked by myself in an (unsuccessful) attempt to come up with some interesting visual effects (colour cycling, in this case) for the MIST1015 promotional video.

Unseen isn’t the only Mistigris contributor to exhibit his works in a gallery context; he probably isn’t even the first. (At least one of us is currently curating a gallery space!) Someday, we hope to curate and mount a textmode art retrospective gallery exhibition ourselves! (That’s an aspiration that’s been in the works since 2004, pre-dating any notion of reforming Mistigris, and which actually set everything that followed in motion.) Stay tuned for more highlights from our recent (and distant) back stacks, plus shout-outs to ongoing achievements by Mist folks past and present!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qz98KGIKc8?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

“Dead Man’s Pants” – the most intense of all our pack’s grim Hallowe'en contents… yet of eternal appeal all year ‘round! I’ve performed it hundreds of times for a decade, first arranged on the occasion of Vancouver’s first ZombieWalk, but even after all that time here was a new approach! A breakout hit from MIST1015, having been enjoyed more times than the artpack itself has – here it receives a much-warranted behind-the-scenes “making-of” interview (or… would “postmortem” be too obvious?) conducted in an impromptu fashion as soon as it was submitted:

Sept 5:

Whazzit> I have finished my submission for the Mist pack, I think.
Cthulu> So in advance, very rigorous!
WZ> You might remember, about 6 months ago I said I had an idea that felt more Mist than Blocktronics.

[shares video]

CT> holy swamoli, this is pretty incredible
CT> I can see why you needed to make sure I had some time and was sitting down before you unleashed that on me
WZ> Does it work?
CT> I only wish I could have provided you a better quality recording!
WZ> Haha that one was quite good quality, compared to the live ones I found
CT> oh yes, I have a long career of only being caught on tape doing my very worst performances
WZ> I would have asked, but, well, I wanted it to be a surprise. Also, I had no idea if I could pull it off.
CT> also I’m wondering if I could interest you in the album cut of my band performing the song, I have no idea how it would effect the synchronization
WZ> It’s synced quite specifically to this version of the song, besides which I like the simplicity of you playing alone on the accordion. (It means I didn’t need to draw a whole undead band ;)
CT> I’m curious what was the source of that audio track?
WZ> Um, that Louw down interview you did
CT> oh gee whiz, just about exactly one year ago!
WZ> I grabbed the video from youtube, then cut the song out, then trimmed the sound
CT> I always felt a bit dubious about the value of having conducted that interview, but at last it has been vindicated as well worthwhile!
WZ> It was a good quality recording, anyway ;)
CT> that’s an amazing tribute, I’m curious at a few technical aspects of it. you know what, hold on, I haven’t even finished watching it.
I had to restart and pull my girlfriend over to explain that I wasn’t just vainly listening to a recording of myself. It’s amazing on several levels. it kind of deserves to be entered into the textmode demo competition 8)
WZ> Yeah, looking at the rules, I don’t think there’s a category for this in the demo competitions.
CT> duh, wild compo! if I won it in crash '97 by fighting people with foam boffers, this has a much more legitimate place. Also, hats off – there are many incorrect ways of drawing an accordion and you managed to duck all of them.
WZ> hah that was one of the easier parts :D I just copied yours from that video.
CT> reference! it helps. artists be like, “sure I know how an accordion works”… then they draw something that could never play, hands strapped into immobility. damn, this is going to be hard for me to avoid spreading all around immediately, but it will just act as incentive to expedite the pack’s release.
WZ> I admit I have no idea what the left hand does… but I decided that wasn’t particularly important to the animation as a whole.
CT> the very attempt to render the instrument at that resolution is audacious. well whatever else ends up in the pack now, I can rest secure that we have one historic first for the books!
WZ> It *may* be the first accordion in ansi. I’m not sure. I imagine there are a number of firsts here :D
CT> currently searching for instances of the string “accordion” in 16c… hmm, three returns, one from last year’s mist pack, and two more from older mist file separators 8) if it is drawn anywhere, it is not described by its name.
WZ> It certainly hasn’t been the most popular instrument for ansification… I think we’d struggle to find a piano in ansi, for that matter.
CT> Hey, you could be on the vanguard of a sea change! drawing a skeleton and an accordion individually are tremendous feats, together it seems almost insurmountable! did you draw one and then draw the other around it, or draw them separately and superimpose them? there are just so many fiddly little fine details
WZ> Well, the skeleton came first - you’ll see the same rough picture a lot before he actually picks it up and plays it. I just took the picture I had, cut out the chest and added an accordion.
CT> but of course bringing them together after being drawn separately would present problems of keeping a consistent scale
heh, so does this mean that somewhere you have five animation cells of accordions in different positions floating in space? (thoughts for video material if I ever make good on my threat to do an accordion cover of Skaven’s Catch That Goblin!)
WZ> hah, 12 and that’s without the head movement
CT> plus the obligatory “accordion dropped slack in shock” pose
WZ> resignation, really At least, that’s what I was aiming for. “Damn it, it’s back. And now I need to look at the jeans? Gah. Stupid afterlife.”
CT> I want to show the video to the author of the song’s words, but he isn’t even online and no part of it will make any goddamn sense to him
WZ> Hah, yeah I just used the title as inspiration rather than the lyrics, mostly.
CT> My partner is like, “he put the pants on and now he’s happy, look how he’s smiling!”
I’m all, “he has no choice, he doesn’t have any lips. that’s not a smile, it’s a rictus!”
WZ> Hah, I actually made the decision early to allow him some movement for expression. You’ll see his eyebrows move in the first major scene.
CT> Despite the fact that I’m going on at some length about it, basically I’m speechless. I’m blown away. Did it change my life? Quite possibly. I think this will really open the doors of possibilities for others to follow the trail you’ve blazed.
WZ> Well, thank you. The whole thing was inspired by the song, really - when I heard it I immediately imagined a skeleton playing the accordion.
CT> see, everyone always imagines the skeleton playing xylophone, but that’s the unimaginative way out
WZ> I imagined it as a picture to begin with, but the idea of a video didn’t take too long to coalesce.
CT> but the work!
WZ> Hah! Yeah, it took a while. It was an exploration.. I began with a “can I do this?” attitude, then moved to “I have to finish this!” Make a picture, save it, tweak it, save it, etc… I really do not know anything about animation, except for what I puzzled out while doing this.. The whole thing was one big problem-solving exercise, really.
CT> I must know, did you just export your ANSI screen cells as static pngs and string them together in conventional animation software? It’s ansi animation but it’s not ansimation, y'know?
WZ> right And yes I made each frame according to whatever criteria I had, then put them together to figure out the timing of the sync
There are somewhere in the vicinity of 1200 frames in total. I went with 10 frames a second… easier to calculate.
CT> how many distinct different screens are shown?
WZ> I’m not sure exactly, but I’d hazard to guess about 800 unique ANSIs.
CT> egad! so incredibly labour intensive. I would never recommend anyone make an animation without tool assistance to fill in between keyframes, but the end result sure is impressive!
WZ> Obviously I wasn’t starting from scratch on most of them.
CT> you see, that’s why the Raimis would have filmed this using practical effects
WZ> hmm. Difficult. That would require a much larger budget.
CT> How long start to finish did you spend working on it? start of project : end of project or estimated hours logged?
WZ> oh, I wouldn’t know. I started pretty much as soon as I asked you about where to find the song/video months back.. in April? May?
CT> aha, that’s actually relatively quick
WZ> As for hours, I really don’t know. Maybe 100, but it’s hard to say. I tended to draw, get bored and take a break, come back for an hour….
CT> I was pretty floored that it shrunk down to only 15 megs, considering what a big chunk of that must just be the audio
WZ> The audio mp3 is 3.4 megs
CT> it all seems impossibly inefficient by artpack file size standards
then again, when we stacked the bells of yule music disk re-release with remasters in mp3, I think we bloated it from 1.5 megs to 300 8)
WZ> Times have changed ;D We can download 300 megs in 2 minutes now
CT> ok, I almost certainly have more questions but my partner is kindly suggesting I wrap it up as I have a long day tomorrow playing accordion in a recording studio for use in a video game (at last, living the dream!) in conclusion: wow!
WZ> Good luck tomorrow then!
CT> a perfect closing note for two old farts celebrating an extinct culture!
WZ> Oh let’s wait another 30 years before we accept that.

(The crazy thing is… this isn’t even the only ANSI animation he shared in MIST1015 – he also devised overlapping sprites for Kirkman’s tool-assisted parallax-scrolling mermaid tech demo “Under the Sea”. But that’ll have to get a post of its own – or you can enjoy Kirkman’s own notes on it!)

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