Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Admittedly it’s hard to draw ANYTHING in the ANSI medium – and it’s hard to draw as abstract a concept as “love” in any medium! So how do you draw an ANSI of love? (No, Tumblr, that’s a rhetorical question, not a poll I want to include in this post!) Plasticised Rob Liefeld Image Comics combat dolls there are a-plenty, but in a sense that’s nearly as far from the heart of the matter as one can get!
Here are a few takes on related topics from the period 1994-1998. We open with a collaboration between Tincat (illustration) and Lady Blue (poetry): so there wasn’t a lot of visual art we released about love, but there sure were a ton of love poems! (I had one entire wall of my bedroom plastered with ones I’d written over the course of this period. Each one was encoded with a simple message immediately apparent to its recipient: warning, do not engage.) This one could have used a bit more proofreading, but between the words and the image, it suggests an intriguing enough point of ambiguous emotional intensity: if love is right, then why does this feel so wrong?
A bit less ambiguously is Mr. Flibbles’ unabashedly adolescent celebration below: we, the men (and lesbians) of the ANSI artscene, don’t love a specific woman in particular – we just cherish their entire class. As embodied by signage iconography from public washrooms. How romantic! Well no, but still… awesomely punk rock. No apologies!
The next two pieces enshrine the perversely personal as embodied by the French expression “vive la différence!” The monstrous hand-holding was a guest piece by DJ Moses Risin’ of Happy Fetus Records, SysOp of The Pelvis of Elvis BBS, while the following piece – the ones whose cups runneth over – was a witty take on excess and objectification by Etana. How deep is your love?
One more punk rock kick to the teeth – hey, this was the ‘90s, heydays of eg. seeing L7 playing the annual Rock for Choice festival – is an explosive chance meeting between a sperm and an egg in a restaurant, a loaded visual metaphor by Haquisaq. Love and consequences!
Finally, I’ve embarrassed everyone else with their juvenilia, so it’s time to rake some of mine across the coals. You never saw this one in a Mistigris artpack, as it only ever appeared in INT-0496.ZIP – as the header suggests, a release of our local arch-nemesis group Integrity. Their policy was to release ANSI art only, which meant that instead of merging profitably they would just periodically skim the talent off of one of our departments. Consequently it was a bit of a coup to have a lit appear in one of their packs. The house style was pictures of “babes” (I believe this is Vampirella?) and through chats between myself and Darkforce on their WHQs the House of Style and the Ho-Zone (keep it classy, guys), we negotiated the illustration and release of this piece in their artpack. (A pity it’s so middling!)
N.B. – “The Girl With Electric Fingers” kissed me once over the course of our 10-month relationship, then went on to be a sex and sexuality columnist at her university newspaper. Gentlemen may not kiss and tell, but poets take inspiration wherever they can find it, and are prone to making mountains out of molehills.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Friday, February 6, 2015
Thursday, January 1, 2015
Happy New Year’s Day! This illustration is a cheap trick, I confess – I reversed the direction and palette of Tzeentch’s “Sunrise in Cyberspace” used to illustrate the previous post’s remastered recording of “1995: A Rave”, to illustrate that song’s January 1995 remix by Marauder of EuphoniX, taking the huge leap from Atari ST to Amiga! (Us MS-DOS listeners could only stroke our chins and scratch our heads.) The remix has also been 2014-remastered by Melodia, the original composer of the original version of the song, formerly of Mistigris and Digitallusions and now releasing music under the Empress Play imprint.
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As with the previous song, please allow me to reiterate – these are remastered re-releases of New Year’s-themed electronic music we initially released in the MIST0195.ZIP artpack archive back in January of 1995. And with this, our spree of holiday-themed re-releases necessarily must draw to a close for a time. We have more data archaeology to conduct, and vast realms of unreleased, unseen and unheard computer art of the 1990s to package, present and release in 2015. Who knows – we just might even make some new computer art, too!
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Happy New Year’s Eve! We made it through Christmas 2014 serving up literally hundreds of downloads for the re-release of our long-thought-lost December 1994 music disk The Bells of Yule, and as we approach the end of this year’s winter holiday season (12 Days of Christmas nonwithstanding) it’s apropos to draw things to a close with “1995 - A Rave”, a song released the month after (01/95) the original launch of the Bells of Yule music disk – before it was lost.
The song found itself remastered as part of Melodia’s push to release, well, the “Skeletons In My Closet” we already told you about in an earlier post, and as it was used back in 1995 to welcome the arrival of a New Year, we will be using it today for much the same purpose.
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(Pictured: “Sunrise in Cyberspace” by Tzeentch, representing a different kind of new beginning, included in the same archive as the song, MIST0195.ZIP)
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Here it is, the culmination of our multimedia Christmas presentations: sounds and sights to beggar the imagination. Well, ASCIIs and ANSIs, poems and meet reviews, high resolution works and all set to the strains of tracker music. December 1997, this marked a rare demonstration of Sylphid’s MAGnum engine for generating e-mags (electronic magazines).
There are lots of little details at the video description over at YouTube including a full credits roll; some of the highlights include a Christmificated menu set for the DoDEL BBS and a surprise soundtrack switch when we begin displaying artwork by Silent Knight.
Not every part of the program was 100% functional run through DOSBox in 2014, so a few poems which failed to load were magically inserted back into the video, scrolling by at a much happier 14.4k baud. Also a pair of monochrome logos from the pack’s FILE_ID.DIZ and infofile were tacked on as bookends, because the whole darned presentation was in a seasonal mode.
That just about concludes our look back at Mistigris’ Christmases past. The well has run dry! If we want to show you any new Christmassy computer art, we’re going to have to make more. Hope it helped to give you an oldschool Christmas for 2014!
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
No Mistigris December 1996 festivities due to the Mistigris World Tour in progress, but here’s a holdout from nearly a year earlier – January of ‘96, a straggler from the pack of Dec '95 pieces in yesterday’s post. This is a typically strange work by Grim Reaper aka Thanatos, so bizarre (happy holidays – enjoy my initials spelled out in urine!) that you just know it had to be his authentic work rather than some manipulation of a found source.
This is, of course, a representation of a scene from Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Theodor Geisel never spelled out “MIST” in Christmas tree ornaments, but this inexplicable omission was here addressed.
Sorry for the micro-post, turns out our December '97 multimedia Christmas extravaganza I was planning on blogging today was even more bombastic than I’d realized, and has taken longer than expected for me to get into a shape suitable for presentation here. Hopefully by tomorrow!
Monday, December 22, 2014
Christmas 2014 is nearly here! We won’t be able to mine the past for holiday material indefinitely, so we’re hauling as much out of the stacks and middens for your inspection and enjoyment as we can now: the remastered re-release of The Bells of Yule, Cthulu’s 2001 ASCII Art Christmas card… Yesterday you got to see & enjoy our Christmas 1994 intro and some supplementary seasonal ANSIs and lits, and today we magically skip forward a whole year, sharing the greatly-expanded Christmas 1995 intro released (belatedly) as DCXMAS95.ZIP in the MIST0196.ZIP artpack.
As before, this one was spearheaded by Dr. CPU, and now includes a straightfoward programmed “snowfall” effect as well as several ANSIs and a strange piece of high-resolution artwork… all to the splendidly strange seasonal sounds of Sentience, who was at this time releasing music as part of EuphoniX – lightly skipping over the complicated occasion of Christmas, he instead opts for the traditional tune “Old Lang Syne” as written by Scottish poet Robbie Burns… but in a super ‘90s electronic arrangement. (He is also responsible for the “Mist” logo on the bottom right of that scary Santa skull. Amiga users, they were all polymaths.)
Full credits in the YouTube video description! Merry Christ'mist!