Today on Mistigram, we have a very purple ANSI art logo (hm, a friend spilled iodine all over themselves yesterday – coincidence?) drawn by Xeryrus during his very brief stint in Mistigris in June of 1995. Graffiti styles + grape jelly?
For today’s sunny summer’s day, today on Mistigram, we offer up a coloured newschool ASCII by Weird, breaking up a complete “Mistigris” logo with a charismatic, leonine sun (ostensibly having a bad hair day, I don’t believe it). First released in July of 1997. Weird reports:
i was obsessed with this smiling sun motif in high school. i drew it all the time on paper and in ascii. if any notebooks from my high school days could be unearthed you would definitely see this sun. everything i drew had a smiling face on it. sometimes with a saturated blue cloud. someone asked me if that was the only thing i knew how to draw. it might have beeni should note that after that random person in high school asked if that was the only thing i knew how to draw, i became super self-conscious about it stopped drawing it.!
Today on Mistigram, this small and unassuming but semantically loaded piece of ANSI art by Handiboy for our 2nd anniversary artpack in October of 1996. Spicing up what is essentially a study of three spheres with personalised background panels (complete with frames!), extra texture is also imbued into the piece with selective application of ASCII art details. Keep your eyes on this young man, he’s sure to go far!
I know that the particular timing of Pride weekend varies from town to town, but our homebase of Vancouver, Canada just celebrated its Pride this past weekend and that makes a good opportunity to make this post! We don’t have a lot of rainbows in our back catalogue, but this excerpt from a massive July 1996 colly does the job nicely.
Its artist, Etana, has worn a number of hats over the years – from SysOp of DODEL (Dreams of Dark, Enchanted Lizards – for a time, acting WHQ of Mistigris), to founder of our successor artgroup Hallucigenia, to administrator of Keyframe: The Animation Resource… all endeavours which rate a blog post, but I’m here to mention her most recent undertaking today: Tilted Windmills – a social justice initiative that celebrates wellness, creativity and collaboration, with a focus on gender, disability and minority rights. But she puts it best, so please let me stand back while she sets the scene:
When I first conceived of the name of Tilted Windmills—some years before I met Stefan—it was from a place of solitary frustration. As both an artist and a woman with a disability, I felt very much like I was railing at the establishment from the outside edge and that my ambitions were viewed as a little “crazy”.
What? As someone with a disability, I somehow thought I should be able to live independently above the poverty line? Contribute to society at large rather than be seen as simply a burden upon it? Live, love and create passionately and with purpose? Clearly, I had some kind of Don Quixote-complex, so I thought why not simply go with the metaphor.
And then one day I sat down to coffee with a transgender man and started what continues to be a fascinating conversation about what it means to live a life outside the mainstream. Our worlds and our life experiences have been very different, but Stefan and I have discovered a startling amount of common ground in areas such as mental health challenges in the face of adversity, trying to make sense of the barriers and attitudes flung upon us by mainstream society, as well as just trying to understand our own place in the greater picture.
I have come to believe that as human beings we are far, far more diverse and spectacular than we have ever realized. Whether you are ablebodied or disabled, cisgender or living outside the gender binary, you are part of that diverse fabric. In founding and re-envisioning Tilted Windmills with my partner, we hope to clear a space for that extraordinary diversity to be supported, nourished and celebrated, to take this unique conversation that we’ve been having between ourselves and invite you to the table.
It’s 20 years on now and the online world is more and more congruent with its parent, the world… and whether you see it as having become a more or less just place depends on, well, a number of factors. Life is a complicated thing and the world is a complicated place, and so probably the answer is “both more and less”. But any way you slice it, it’s clear that there’s still much work to be done here before an online utopia is achieved – not just for the fair-skinned sons of privilege, but for everyone – and fortunately cyberspace is also able to provide a home for the conversation at Tilted Windmills (both at its website and its Facebook group)… perhaps containing the seeds of what tomorrow’s more just and respectful cyberspace might look like.
We originally released this piece in February of 1996, but it is as timeless today as ever it was then! Popular tastes simply have not yet caught up to his strange genius!
Today on Mistigram: this ANSI art logo, unmistakably by The Extremist, was just a small part of a much larger (500 lines!) multi-artist collaboration in the Fire tourstop of our Mistigris World Tour, but playing to Instagram’s strengths, we provide you the excerpt. Maybe you didn’t think that the word “Mistigris” had that many pointy letters in it, but he could always find a way to coax the points and edges out.
Today on Mistigram, this postmodern, deconstructed angel by our Hawaiian member Kyo – the computer counterpart, perhaps, to the album art to Nirvana’s 1993 album In Utero. It was released in May of 1997 in our Dark Illustrated visit on the Mistigris World Tour.
