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THE WOMEN OF feMIniSTIGRIS. (Pictured: art that could only have come from women, as none of them include any washboard abs, stoic grimaces, or lit spliffs.)

Happy International Women’s Day! The underground computer artscene was not traditionally known as a great place for the ladies. I mean, you could ogle them by the yard as Gen13 supplanted Spawn as the most popular subject of ANSIfication, and Integrity (WHQ: “The Ho-Zone”) rose to success on an official internal policy of maintaining a strict minimum quota of “babe” pictures, decorating the artscene with wallpaper you might expect in the break room at a car repair shop. (Given a starting point of the Image comics revolution underway then, was this a foregone conclusion? As in the Sensational She-Hulk before, the only major title there in which women were treated as anything other than eye candy was The Maxx, and even there if you ignored the word bubbles – admittedly the first place I’d ever been exposed to the names Steinem and Paglia in print – Sam Kieth could easily exude a kind of En Vogue syndrome… whose empowering messages were reversed into objectifying ones when you hit “mute” on the music video. Does the artscene have a Bechtel test? Sure: how come none of Alison Bechdel’s comic strips ever got ANSIfied?) If you had a male gaze, you were in luck. But all there was to gaze upon was fiction and fantasy, right? Well… it turns out that there were a handf^H^H^H^H^Hfew women active in the artscene, primarily known as the girlfriend of x or the wife of y… not due to any failures in their own right as talented artists… being overshadowed by one’s man is just something that naturally happens, right? (Ask Frida Kahlo.) Tabaqui did good work; Kitiara was an amazing force to be reckoned with! And Superchick was, well, super. But where were the rest of them? Why such under-representation here when women were so at the vanguard of video art and net.art? (I, uh, don’t have any answer to that last one.) In PD circles, ‘90s textmode art was dominated by women – jgs in ASCII and Ebony Eyes in ANSI. Raquel Meyers lords over PETSCII and teletext, Keira Rathbone is the typewriter art hero of the day, and Jennifer Daniel just got ASCII stickmen printed in The New Yorker – but never released in an artpack! What kept them out of the realm of the underground elites? (Or am I answering my own question?)

The BBS world was one where you could largely be as anonymous as you wanted to – while the uptight Fido zone coordinators might require registered users to send in photocopies of their drivers’ licenses in order to access their private directory of Cindy Crawford swimsuit .GIFs, that kind of trail was exactly what you didn’t want haunting you in the legally grey area of ThE uNdErGrOuNd… so no one needed to know your real name, location or sex unless you chose to share them in a message base or at a meet; those kinds of details weren’t what we were about, and could in a sense be considered actual liabilities: we weren’t here to represent how we existed in the real world, it was supposed to be an escape from all that!

As BBSes withered on the vine and the scene shifted over to the IRC some of that privacy was lost: despite the given assumption that There Are No Girls Online, dudes (a/s/l?) were constantly sniffing around (a/s/l?) looking for a hint (a/s/l?) of evidence (a/s/l?) to the contrary. Hackers and crackers are devious sorts, skilled at connecting dots from trails of breadcrumbs, and so now that I have your home phone number, surely you wouldn’t refuse a friendly offer of a coffee date, would you?

Mistigris served as a refuge of sorts, an island and oasis for outliers of various stripes; on top of our stubborn resolve to continue including computer music in our artpacks, we were notorious for providing a home for lit writers when the rest of the scene was prepared to turn its back on them, and (perhaps not unrelatedly) we also counted quite a few women beneath our umbrella. I don’t know precisely what factors lent us this preeminence – beyond lip service to egalitarian and democratic rhetoric (meaning that Cthulu agonizingly consulted with everyone before doing what he wanted anyway), I can’t think of any policies we consciously enacted intended to provide this effect, so it may have just been dumb luck. (I can’t take any personal credit for it, thinking back to the time long, long ago that I followed Bast home uninvited from a meet like a complete creep, resolving to be bold and get to know this fascinating and troubled writer better… and staying on my best behavior of course, especially after observing her mantleplace overflowing with 1st prize trophies from Tae Kwon Do tournaments. I must thank her after all these years for not turning me into a grease stain on her carpet. But I digress.) If I had to speculate, it might be related to Mist’s long-toothed message echomail culture, increasingly as time went on fostered on bulletin boards whose system operators and network coordinators were women (the heavy-lifting Happyfish and Etana to be specific): so straight off the bat, the cyber toilet seat stayed down.

Ladies we provided an outlet for in our first century included (but aren’t necessarily limited to):

• 
  Bast


• Binty


• Delire


• Eoanya


• Etana


• Flyingfish


• Happyfish


• Heyoka


• Lady Blue, who also hearkened from Kitiara’s milieu of RCA – maybe they had a few drops of what was in our water?


• Maeve Wolf


• Melodia


• Silver Angel


• Spirit Wolf


• Voi the Analogue Cat


• Weird


• and Zinnia Kray, all talented artists that any group would be fortunate to include among their ranks.

A cocktail napkin calculation suggests that in regards to gender parity perhaps as high as 10% of classic Mistigris members were women. That is, uhh, not very high, but you would be hard pressed to find a more major group with a better ratio. (Hallucigenia trumps us, I believe, being basically a group spun off by the hard-working ladies of Mistigris to continue having a supportive safe space in which to release their computer art when I could no longer reliably provide one. QC was a big wedge: pop psychology might suggest that women prefer to work collaboratively where men are competitive. I don’t know if that holds any water, but its myth at least is relevant to the subject at hand.) My suspicion is that at one time or another we hosted the majority of the artscene’s women, which is to say over 50% of them, and if you’d like to challenge this purely speculative thesis I will happily include at the bottom of this post a tabulation of all known women who released works in the artscene outside of Mistigris.

Following our revival, we’ve done better by this metric – representing contributors from eg. MIST1015, the ladies’ numbers come in quite a bit higher, including Mistigris appearances from women we’ve never featured before:

• Andrea Schmidt


• Brady Ciel Marks


• Claire Roberts


• Emily Suzanne Shapiro


• ideath


• ill-esha


• Jenn Ashton


• Jenny Ritter


• ldb


• Raquel Meyers


• Sara Ciantar


• and Theresa Oborn.

Counting ladies both classic and modern releasing in MIST1015 indicates that they make up 17 of its 66 contributors – a full quarter! I’m sure I myself am still guilty of the patriarchy’s microaggressions (at least I have stopped writing love sonnets to my disposable muses), but especially since becoming a father to two little girls (not that that’s the only reason to behave like a halfway-decent human being) I’ve tried to tread more carefully and just generally be aware of mindlessly repeating and perpetuating oppressive patterns baked in to the old system; when called on a piece of no-harm-intended sexist language (“FINALLY something to draw other than breasts”) in the instructions for my painstakingly revived Blender compo, I thanked the source and replaced it with an equivalent that everyone can enjoy. On being shown an astounding work in progress featuring cartoonish mammaries in the leadup to MIST1015 I congratulated the artist on his creative triumph but remarked (after quickly alt-tabbing away so as not to prompt too many awkward questions from the 3-year-old daughter sitting on my lap: yes, the artist simply hasn’t yet drawn the baby drinking from those, honey) that in order to avoid turning into a sausage party we’d already reached our quota of female nudes for that particular collection (because when you beg a guest appearance from CatBones, founder of the Xpak, you already know what you’re getting.) Baby steps: man-baby steps!

In conclusion: hats off, ladies, I’m sure it hasn’t been easy getting to this point in your computer art practice, with pushback every step along the way, from the dismissive dudebro clerks at the computer store asking technical questions from your tag-along boyfriend when it was you who were the one dropping a grand on your first new desktop machine, to the fedora-clad nice guys who were hoping for some kind of payment-in-kind for their tokens of seemingly freely offered technical support, to being uninvited from raids with your guild until you “grow the balls” to take part in the VoIP coordination (and all the victorious teabagging you consequently miss out on), to the run of the mill trolls, MRAs, GamerGaters and pick-up artists harrying your every movement online and who won’t take “buzz off” for an answer. Thanks for sharing your art with us. (Art: where we can imagine a future where things are better.) I can’t embed Happyfish’s on-point Tweets about how relatively culturally non-toxic we’d somehow managed to make Mistigris for the ladies due to the protected and private nature of her account (a woman securing her social media account against unwelcome visitors? How extraordinary!), so the last word is left to me and my pledge to continue working on boosting my gender ratios and curbing my micro-aggressions so that someday we can just get down to the business of making amazing art on computers without half of us having to take that order with a side of eating unfair treatment and smiling. We were the idealistic kids of computer art: we were supposed to improve on the institutions we were riffing on. The computers now are faster and display more colours – time to prioritize making participation a little more user friendly.

(So: which artscene ladies managed to carve out a little niche outside our small circle of light in the pervasive gloom?

• Amber Coal,
• Pinguino,
• Superchick
• …?)

Edit: RaDMaN chimes in with: The Ladies Of ACiD! (“I believe this is the complete list from ACiD, my apologies if I’ve forgotten anyone”)

• Adya
• GoatGirl
• Gwydian
• Jikan
• Kitiara
• Psylocke/Jamiesan
• Sara/Azayaka
• Sarah Connor/Severina
• Sprite
• Tabaqui
• Winter Rose
• Yoyo

. And at least one more:

• Sadist had Idler/disnie who was also in PLF, a girl who drew interesting stuff and was a real sweetheart IRL.
  Atleast one more example ;)

So far: Mistigris, 28; rest of artscene combined, 16. Bring it on!

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So, when Mistigris sailed off to Avalon (until it was needed once again) in mid-1998, I was left (no passive voice, my friend: I left myself) a little high and dry for lack of a creative milieu (and, specifically, one I was at the centre of.)

I’d nearly completed my metamorphosis from juvenile penner of doggerel to “mature” composer of sonnets to a fully-realized published auteur of existentialist prose poetry (well, you saw it coming in the final few Mist packs; CT-*.LIT in MIST2000 represent a fully transformed writer: one who just isn’t very much fun anymore) and made my way to the nascent Vancouver poetry slam stages, where I obstinately refused to retool my divine visions to cater to hoi polloi by making them accessible and, y'know, enjoyable – even a poem about how great something was would have to contain some little speck of rot at its heart, a hidden knife to be twisted in the closing line. The good news is that I had found my voice as a writer! The bad news was that that voice … was that of depression. And verily I’d ardently cultivated an ability to hold forth on any subject and tease out the saddest and most devastating inconvenient truth it harboured just beneath its surface. (Wake up sheeple!) But despite this uncanny knack, it didn’t exactly make me any friends; I didn’t quite ascend, skyrocketing, through the ranks of our local spoken word community, speaking my harsh truths to power. (Mostly I just made old ladies uncomfortable at open mics with my intense negativity.) In short, poetry wasn’t doing me any favours – it wasn’t leading me on grand adventures or even getting me laid. And worse, the cultivation of my dire voice had me looking at the world through arse-coloured glasses, actively pursuing the heartbreaking in order to appease my strange muse. (Hi, is the new issue of Acme Novelty Library in yet?) The best I could hope for from the poetics of depression was a deeper and more profound depression – oh boy! So with some trepidation I set the poetry aside (never really to fully pick it up again – I pivoted to creative non-fiction with a poetic voice, but concluded that most of those poems didn’t really need to be written: however completely they encapsulated the experience of being me, I already knew what that was like and no one else cared.)

So that was it. Maybe I could get a job, find a nice girl and get over myself. But no: I was nonetheless an effete longhair, and if I wasn’t writing poems I had to foppishly be doing something creative. But what? Well, what did I do before I discovered BBSes? It just so happened that I’d studied classical piano for some 15 years, beginning at the likely premature age of 3. But due to the curriculum of the Royal Conservatory of Music, it wasn’t a creative education so much as an indoctrination; students were taught to reproduce, not interpret, and I had burned out on it not long before burning out on the artscene (and, indeed, burning out generally for the better part of a decade.) But I knew I enjoyed music – seeking inroads into the computer as a compositional tool had been one of my entry points to the artscene, and though I couldn’t in 1999 see a future for tracker music (sadly, just as mine was beginning to grow almost listenable) I figured that my future would be more filled with tunes than with poems.

I owned a piano, but it lived at my parents’ place; indeed they had told me that we would not be moving it until my lifestyle stabilized and I could expect to be maintaining the same residence indefinitely, because moving (and then tuning) a piano is an expensive proposition. So I stewed in contemplation of what instrument is enough like a piano that my 15 years of training could help me to transition? For years I went in circles figuring that I’d need some kind of synthesizer keyboard, but worrying about what capabilities I would need it to have, fearful of buying The Wrong Model and ending up unsatisfied with my new creative interface. Then, one week, I was exposed to three fateful accordion performances, and it struck me: an accordion is kind of like a piano. At least, half of it is.

So I found my way to the accordion. I had moved right out of computer art, seemingly for good, but still had one foot in performance poetry, getting on board with a 2005 group literary revue (spearheaded, incidentally, by the same fellow who blazed the trail for my first phone call to an artscene BBS: guess he was just a thought leader!) for which I provided words, music and dramaturgy: That’s My Brain And You’re Killing It! The show was a bust, garnering enough audiences in its 5-night run to cost all participating poets only $50 each for the privilege of having taken part, but a funny thing happened during our tour of promotional previews… (actually, several funny things happened: at the Song Slam at Cafe Deux Soleils, we paraded off stage singing our anthem and disappeared into the bathroom, growing quieter and quieter, leaving the night’s next performer to begin their act… only to return 5 minutes later, growing back up from a whisper, emerging full-throated seemingly still chanting our inane lyrics, interrupting the performer-in-progress. But I digress.) At January 2005’s monthly “Raw and Cooked” works-in-progress event at the old performance art hub the Western Front, the poets performed a handful of their most splendidly strange poems, and after they exhausted their slice of the evening… they were followed by a duo of consummately cultivated punk, singers who couldn’t sing playing instruments they couldn’t play, exuberantly and with impeccable accessorization. And they needed an accordion (and, y'know, someone who knew how to play music) as part of their ensemble. Happily, the performance poet association was a temporary one, and so I was happy to moor my ship to their landing and see how much fun we could have on shore leave.

Turns out, it has never yet ended! Because our outsider format (initially: sea shanties and early ‘80s goth and industrial on accordion, banjo and ukulele) wasn’t an obvious fit for anywhere, we got to go everywhere as a species of variety spice, from festival stages to guerrilla gigs in illegal venues (hello, McBarge!) and just highly memorable oddball gigs like the opening of a tattoo parlour. (While we weren’t able to turn our nerdy background to the same good use that eg. bryface has, we weren’t totally dissociated from it: early memorable gigs included VIVO’s Video Game Orgy, and a ground floor association with Vancouver’s chapter of Free Geek – “I will support your endeavors in whatever way I can… with an accordion” – eventually put us on stage with Richard Stallman!) A functional band demands a certain quantity of administrative duties – setting rehearsals, making and distributing song arrangements, booking and promoting gigs – and it turns out that these were not entirely dissimilar to the divers & sundry thankless tasks that made up being senior staff in an underground computer artgroup! (Unlike the artscene, it turns out that being in a band actually pays, too! Terribly, but it’s not entirely sunk time – only mostly.) And like running an artgroup, there are always personnel changes to keep on top of. It’s not that members quit, but they just, y'know, stop sending in submissions. Then there are the finances and keeping track of everybody’s pirate codenames (so, as you can see, not much has changed. Greetings from “Blackbox Squeezebeard.”) And Mistigris always had trouble maintaining a web presence (finally addressed!) but we never had to deal with Wordpress pharma hacks!

My projects typically have a lifespan, and some time after that runs out, I get the memo and regretfully move on. Mistigris ran out of juice in a period of grand upheaval after three years and a bit, but this delightfully unlikely, perpetually self-reinventing “jug band of the damned” The Creaking Planks has been an ongoing concern for over eleven years now (over 3 times the lifespan of Mistigris Classic!) with no signs of any reason for it to close up shop. (The most unlikely part was getting it going in the first place, playing the songs least appropriate for its instrumentation – which is basically, “any acoustic instrument allowed except for guitar.” Once the speed bump of its establishment was traversed, no further obstacle comes anywhere close.)

You heard a slice of us in MIST1015 with our unused demo for the mobile game Afterland (I was pushing hard to get some game art included in the pack for promotional synergy, but despite early promising signs it didn’t make it in) and the Planks arrangement (sans-Planks) of Dead Man’s Pants; you got a chance to see a couple of our curious posters in MIST2000 (and a few more of them here! some of them the best work of flyingfish, who was part of the BBS milieu back in the day and has remained a living link ever since) I had hoped to invite you to our 11th anniversary concert scheduled for the evening of January 29th, 2016, but I prioritized the timeliness of other tie-ins and … underestimated the amount of time it would take me to reflect back so many years and connect the dots leading to this point. So, uh, you missed it. As the date approached, I considered the poignant twist of the knife approach, ending the post with “and it’s tonight, too late for you to make plans to attend.” But I was too busy, y'know, playing that show, so I had to revise the knife further: “it was last night.” (scratch) “It was last week.” (scraaaatch.) “It was one month ago.” Well… OK, it was slightly over one month ago.

I’m being silly, since of course most of you on the Internet live far, far away from us and wouldn’t be casually making plans to visit in any event (but if you’re nearby, our next scheduled gig is April 22nd at the Little Mountain Gallery!), besides which the good news is that thanks to our recent orientation toward posting film clips from our rehearsals, you can enjoy us in the comfort of your own home, whenever is convenient. This unlikely number dropped basically the same week as MIST1015 and I was kicking myself at having lacked the foresight to fold it in to the pack (the one thing I left out, apparently) – it’s a sweet little demonstration that we, too, remember watching the movie “Hackers” in 1995 with a mixture of bemusement and a modicum of dismay at how much they got wrong. We’ll be resuming these as a regular series, so if you enjoy – please subscribe! Cheers.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoORTedaJlY

Tracker Fix 2016 samplepack

It’s made of all the bits and bobs that went into Claire Roberts’ “It’s Like A Collage” from MIST1015.ZIP … and if you find those really impossible to work with, a Plan B sample collection is available made from dismembered sound effects from classic C64 games.

Good luck working with them and please try to get something back in to me by the end of the weekend – cthulu at tabnet dot ca. Cheers!

Tracker Fix 2016 samplepack

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Not long after the call for submissions opened for MIST1015, it became clear that most of the former Mistigrivians who had emerged from their long slumber for MIST1014 had, upon seeing their gloriously 16-coloured shadow, been scared back underground and would not be joining us for another kick at the can. No problem, I thought, I’ve moved through plenty of creative circles in the meantime and maybe I can tap some of them! My first stop after the Mistigris train ground to a halt was The Living Closet and my inquiries to the former principal players of that (similarly long-defunct) concern resulted in some interest – most of which didn’t pan out (observation: present company excepted, people with children seem to be less vulnerable to the predation of nostalgia on their scanty free time). But one person – Claire Roberts – expressed interest which bore through all the way to a work submitted (and released) in MIST1015 at the eleventh hour.

Back in the ol’ LC days, she was a fire-breathing, belly-dancing painter, and in the meantime she had burgeoned her creative skillset (I know: painting, belly dancing, fire-breathing – you thought she already had all bases covered!) in all directions simultaneously, especially in our traditional field of computer arts during a long stint at local code shop Relic Entertainment. (Isn’t that always the way? First you stop releasing computer art, then everyone you’ve ever met becomes a computer artist. Fortunately for us I got back on the wagon.) Additionally, she had ascended through the ranks of an entirely different underground art community, one based out of the Black Rock Desert for a few days every year.

Claire had never been part of the artscene back in the day, but something about the call for submissions piqued her and she diligently boned up on all the treasures of our past, watching hours of demos and reflecting to herself how easy those neat-o effects would be to achieve using her workplace toolchain (which would, doubtlessly, find it easier to crunch those particular numbers being hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the machines the demos were made to run on 8) She lined up an old computer nerd friend (we can be handy to have around, especially when you need a stereo system hooked up) to collaborate with her on a musical experiment, but he didn’t end up being available in time. The reason, however, that I am profiling Claire here today is not because she let that obstacle stop her, but instead she boldly went forth without her seasoned collaborator to create something in a wholly new-to-her idiom without any help or past experience: bringing art forth through sheer force of will alone – sheer force of will and Audacity. (That’s Audacity with a capital A.)

We released her musical piece, “It’s Like A Collage”, in MIST1015, and in homage to the gutsiness of its circumstances (Claire is gutsy: after I proposed to Mistigris’ collected music department that we put together an album for FAWM, we have nothing and she has made big inroads into one of her own), we have made its constituent recordings (assorted vocal noises and sounds from the kinds of musical toys you might find in your belly-dancing gig bag) the grist for our imminent Tracker Fix mill. She didn’t know what she was doing, but came up with something anyway; surely those of you who do know what you’re doing, given the same materials, can do no less!

(And in a neat case of synchronicity, just as her turn to be profiled was coming up in the queue here, a free mobile game she was working on was released to the public – you can find out more information about it here: The Fourth Phase, the snowboarding movie, the game.)

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This weekend, February 20th, 2016, we here at Mistigris are hosting a Tracker Fix challenge (and do please consider joining us!) We did a few of these “back in the day”, but all history regarding the event series is quite nebulous since the actual documents are quite thin on the ground. Computer music is where Mistigris and the 604 probably enjoyed their greatest flourishing, and ironically due to the INSANELY EXPANSIVE file sizes of WHOLE MEGABYTES, theirs are the cases where the files were least likely (regardless of how many BBSes we uploaded them to!) to be mirrored for the enjoyment of posterity. (Also culpable: those ghettoizing demoscene FTP archives which wouldn’t host music from artscene sources due to our tenuous whiff of scurrilous warez connections, and those exclusive artscene FTP archives which wouldn’t host music … at all! Or lit, but that’s a different problem for a later post.) (Mistigris, doomed to straddle numerous worlds, belonging fully to none of them.)

Fortunately, we are (party to) a loquacious primary source with a handful of related files and a long memory. The first Tracker Fix compo took place in the summer of 1996, hosted by The Pope of The Immortal Syndicate at his residence in New Westminster. There, a handful of tiny chiptune samples was presented to us and we took turns at the official compo music station, seeing what we could do with them for a half-hour before saving the results and giving someone else a try. I wasn’t a computer musician but I desperately wanted an “in” into that world, my long music education (since the age of 3!) making me interested in making .MODs since before I ever downloaded TheDraw or tried to make a rhyming poem about a BBS. But before the emergence of obviously dominant tools as standards such as Scream Tracker in 1994, figuring out for yourself what was going on involved a steep learning curve – understanding the relationship between the hex code scrolling down the screen and the sounds coming out of the speakers seemed a kind of arcane magic not dissimilar to looking at the punch holes on a player piano roll and understanding what to expect. (Admittedly, standard sheet music notation is no less arbitrary a convention, but that was the one with which I was familiar – and it was quite removed from anything one would see in a tracker program.) (OK, except for KingMod, a dead end in which I spent more than a little time. But I digress.)

What made the Tracker Fix so central to my personal mythology is that I attended, coming in and sitting down an outsider to the workings of computer music… and I left a champion, somehow achieving first place among several venerated seasoned veterans of the scene. (As it’s not something that’s happened often in my life, it made quite an impression on me, which explains why I’ve hung on to these files long after the archive in which they appeared is nothing but a faint memory.) After that point I could no longer claim to want to become a computer musician, if only I could figure out how it’s done. My cover of plausible deniability was gone. I’d leapt off the cliff and somehow flown! This equalizing compo format – which leveled the playing field in that its main test was of its participants’ ability to improvise, think on their feet and come up with something (anything!) based on what they’d just been served – might well serve as a gateway to further cohorts of computer musicians! Clearly we had to run more of them; as a crucible for forging new computer musicians and planting them firmly on their two feet, it clearly couldn’t be beat.

(But first, I had to clean up and polish my submission for public release, a job I sweated over intensively in some attempt to demonstrate to my new computer music peers that my placement wasn’t just some anomalous statistical fluke.)

It took quite some time to get another Tracker Fix together. All the parties thus gathered at the table, we threw the rubric of The New Media Group over our fractured affiliations and continued forward together with the 604 Music Disk. And then… there was the Mistigris World Tour. (Somewhere in here – March 1997, apparently – it seems we ran a virtual Tracker Fix, let’s call it Tracker Fix 1.5, using a Skaven / Future Crew orchestral sample pack, as evidenced by the sample comments in Freaq’s never-before-heard-publicly Naked and Running.) And then… well, maybe we could do without special projects for a little while, giving us time to get used to releasing artpacks under our own name again for a while. And then… we stopped releasing artpacks altogether. But, and here’s the important bit: we never consciously made a decision to stop making art! And as Mistigris had suddenly, sharply declined, similarly ascendant in regards to my creative productions was the local arts smorgasbord known as The Living Closet.

You think you see where this is going, but it’s not obvious. Poring over DAT tape archives from the the Living Closet presented at Malkin Bowl Aug 22nd, 1998, we hacked up bibs and bobs from performances at that august event (that’s right, it was in August!) and fashioned a collection of unruly, locally-sourced and unique samples with which to populate the long-awaited second coming of the Tracker Fix party. (Very specific memories suggest that samples included a chunk of “Devoted” by Perpetuum and a slice of Glenn Garinther intoning his anthemic refrain “I wish the… I wish the… I wish the world would just f*** off!”) And lo, we packed the living room of my own onetime residence, the TABHouse, down in Strathcona (now apparently a site on the city’s cultural historical register for reasons pertaining more to the landlord than to the tenants), and the entire Trideja crew rolled out in full effect setting up an array of Atari ST hardware out on the carpet, requiring us to downsample our awesome sound bites to something that could be conveyed off of the compo machine via sneakernet. I went on a run for pork steam buns and coconut buns from the nearby New Town bakery in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and much puzzled musical muddling ensued from upwards of a dozen local tracker guests. Highlights included a live tracker performance from Daemon (what’s his name, former co-host of The Sound & The Word at the Misanthropy Gallery with Andrea Papineau, who was friends with Happyfish’s little sister… it was all a muddle in any case 8) by toggling channels on and off to produce varying effects, but far and away the winner was Foolish Bird (soon to be aka Bad Feng Shui, with whom I concoct some confusing happenings at further installments of those self-same Living Closets), whose tortured (and apparently highly memorable) epic “Cat Scratch Magic” just went on and on, of a seemingly impossible duration given the constrained time available to write the piece. I suspect on some level he just painted his channels with broad swathes of effects and loopback points so as to ensure that his composition would continue along in a novel fashion without necessarily having direct input into what those effects would do to whichever channels were still playing when that skip back took place. Wave hands, genius ensues, clockmaker takes a bow.

So as to immortalize the live performance, all compositions were dubbed to audiocassette tape and feverishly delivered to a Living Closet event in progress at that moment at the Press Club (RIP) (which is how we can pin that Tracker Fix’s date to Nov 21st, 1998.) We hustled the tape in to the crowded room just in time for the intermission… but the house PA could play only CDs, not cassette tapes. Oh well. Shortly thereafter I suffered The Great Data Obliteration during a well-intentioned but sadly botched Linux installation, and all of my original copies of the songs went with it. They had never been released in a collection because, well, there were no BBSes remaining to upload them to, and the FTP sites, as noted above, were not welcoming to our material. I even contacted the Living Closet’s MC to see if he had hung on to the cassette tape, but of course he came up blank. This account must remain, then, the only evidence that this hugely successful event ever occurred.

After a big to-do like that, sometime later I attempted to compel lightning to strike the same spot a second time. That’s how things work, right? You try something, you repeat the successes and build them bigger and better. I tried to put quite a bit more promotional oomph behind it, and tapped into some exciting e-mail lists (I have memories of setting up NW-EELS with Foolish Bird, short for NorthWest - Experimental, Electronic Live Sound) … the only thing I was missing was the BBSes, as by this point they had all gone down for the last time. To make a long story short, a grand total of one visitor came by for Tracker Fix 3 sometime in 1999 – a hitherto unknown MIDI musician who I attempted to show the tracking ropes to in my windowless basement room, who very politely excused himself after I was unable to provide compelling answers for “how many other people are you expecting?” (“Oh, it was full up last time!”) and “When are you expecting them to show up?” (“Oh, real soon now I suppose!”). This was … somewhat more successful than other social functions, picnics and readings I attempted to present in this period, a sign from the party gods that I’d well and truly expended my social capital once and for all. (The would-be Tracker Fix 3 was set up with a … unique and distinctive sample pack derived from the set of sounds included with a stock install of the game creation engine Klik ‘n Play.)

At one further point circa 2003 I thought a nice set of Commodore 64 samples I’d mined from the High Voltage SID archive had some good Tracker Fix potential, sound effects I’d lifted from the soundtracks of old games while working on my arrangement of Perpetual Dream Theory’s “Now or Never” that was ultimately released in ACiD-100.ZIP … it was a great sample set (Here it is!), but I knew better than to get my hopes up and call another party. That humiliating lesson stuck with me for … quite some time. But, apparently, I haven’t in fact learned my lesson, since here we are again, only some eighteen years later! My age has basically doubled while I’ve waited to spring another Tracker Fix upon the world. Here we go again!

(Edited to add: the historical record has once again interfered with a neat story. I have found the original samplepack including the C64 samples and it proudly proclaims itself the official samplepack of TrackerFix 7. Also, I have found a couple of songs made by friends, visiting my home, using a hybrid melange of KLF samples from Star Control 2 and sounds recorded from dot matrix printers which historically bred and mutated in my basement, almost certainly at some “Tracker Fix” function. What does this mean: did I fail to learn my lesson and go on to host four more marginal functions? Did I shift over to the wholly virtual format far earlier? Sadly, I didn’t keep very good notes. We may never know for sure. On the bright side, it really doesn’t matter! Clique history: the stakes are incredibly low.)

Well, I stand corrected. Not one month after I speculated that a piece from a Mistigris artpack had appeared as the Sixteen Colours ANSI of the Day for perhaps the last time ever, and here we are again with one of our historical pieces endowed with the honour (the day after, what’s more, one of my post-Mist lits washed up in another AOTD by The Green Hornet of Dark!)

Misfit couldn’t adequately explain what he was doing rooting around in Mistigris artpacks from 1996 looking for ANSIs Of The Day, as that was all around a bit of a rough period for us – still recovering from our depredation by Integrity, not yet drunk on our infusion of Krap’s members. But if you had to pick one piece from this artpack, this was definitely the one to pick.

Mage (MZ-, because Mavrik had taken MA-) was on top of his game here (it’s not even the first time he’s represented Mist in the AOTD), having graduated from Mistigris, sharpened his talents in Integrity, and gotten them certified in ACiD (which Int merged into) before bizarrely circling around back home to toss us the occasional solid gold bone for reasons known only to himself.

He doesn’t know quite remember who the subject of the piece is – doubtless some instantly forgettable Image Comics goon, if noseless faces and fists larger than heads are anything to go by – but he is on the record as directly deriving inspiration from a piece also by him in an Integrity pack a year earlier; in both cases hands figure prominently, but the difference a year makes! “I liked drawing hands (and still do!), but wasn’t happy with much else in that first pic - the face, the background, the hair.”

Because I’m a poet, I would have waited until the middle of March to make an ad for the BBS “Ides of March” as my selection for the ANSI Of The Day, but we’ll take what we can get. Stay tuned for more elucidation into our affairs past, present and future!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJGiUj7aPuE?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=375]
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!”

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