.--. L , , , 1 , G
: : B , , ,
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- , , - , T
H , , ,
// , 4 , S
,- , 0 , I ..--
I am not the right person to compose an infofile for this extraordinary
collection of text art exploring the confluence of architecture and the
sacred. Twenty years ago, I lost a friend, a therapeutic sensitive, after
hearing that they lived in a converted church and replying that in her
situation Id love to install a toilet atop the altar.
A couple years later I found myself administering an art gallery as part of a
large artists collective, and after putting in the blood, sweat and tears to
make it the most intriguing cultural crossroads that we could, I got a better
appreciation for how a collection of studs, drains and electrical outlets
could take on sacred proportions through shared striving toward a common
vision of some intangible potential beyond physical materiality. Renovating
what would ordinarily have been a tear-down house last fall, I found myself
wishing that instead of all the hours chairing the gallerys events committee
meetings, I had logged some hours on its art committee, which found itself
perpetually re-framing, re-drywalling, re-mudding, and re-painting between
exhibitions, which oddly often featured art created on the medium of the
gallerys actual walls. At the time, we scratched our heads wondering why
they allowed so much extra work for themselves to be baked into the exhibition
plans later, we wished that wed developed some transferable trades skills in
our time helming the gallery.
I was only part of that collective because coordinating the release of
computer art, an activity that had itself taken on sacred proportions to me,
was temporarily off the agenda. Its back on now, though elapsing virtually
in cyberspace, meaning that this particular sacred practice has never had a
strong association with any kind of particular building designed to enhanced
its experiences. I suppose on some level my sacred space would be a
millennial Internet Cafe, or better yet, the 90s computer room, beige desktop
machines tethered to noisy mechanical keyboards wearing WordPerfect overlays
over the function keys, plugged in to bulky monitors framed by arcane
command-line mnemonics on post-it notes, housed on roll-top computer desks
alongside floppy disk file boxes, vital programs kept under lock and key. In
a drawer beneath the retractable keyboard tray would be some annotated
tractor-feed dot matrix printouts of BBS listings and expensive specialist
books with names like UNLOCKING THE POWER OF BATCH FILES. Sorry, Ive just
had a religious experience.
Consequently, it never would have occurred to me to propose the theme of this
collection. Fortunately, I had nothing to do with it. As a happy byproduct
of our recent focus on community-building, artists wed long signal-boosted
began getting enthused interacting under the same virtual roof, encouraging
and urging on each other to new heights, and like some kind of, dare I say it,
divine providence... this body of work began spontaneously pouring forth from
the fingers of littlebitspace. Basking in the sainted CRT glow of genius,
bystanders Dwimmer, Hayn9 and LDA couldnt help but channel some of the ASCII
light into their own keyboards. Dwimmer pulled in darokin to get lit is it
just me, or does every French artist secretly have a bucket list of their top
national cathedrals theyve been waiting for a chance to creatively
interpret?, LDA illuminated his old colleague cccfire, and I made sure that
ASCII specialists ldb and Otium had a chance to trip this light fantastic.
Now the mania has passed through us and weve put down the snakes and stopped
typing in tongues, but were excited to share this small but focused body of
work with those who werent in the room when it popped.
In addition to the strictly architectural works dominating the collection,
littlebitspace was moved to try his hand at some sacred typography, exploring
a handful of metaphysical topics calligraphically, in his ASCII art medium.
Theyre a little detour from the collections main focus, but obviously coming
from the same space. Youll know them when you see them.
In this collection, our artists have made buildings out of text characters.
Perhaps what we in the text art community have all been doing all this time is
using our collective keystrokes to fashion some colossal edifice, large enough
to encompass us and all our works for a quarter-century.
Or maybe not. Pardon this author, all he can make of keystrokes is over-
reaching metaphors.
A big thanks to the energized and motivated core of artists who came up with
this body of work, a product not just of Mistigris but also featuring
representation from Galza and the Legacy Krew. Keep your eyes open for
another Mistigris artpack in early May, on an annual topic in our traditional
style you can not only predict but demonstrate on your networked electronic
devices, and likely another unthemed pack of recent work in June. After that,
who knows! Our promised hiatus was brief but fruitful, and we look forward to
continuing to work beyond the restrictive monthly artpack form. In the
meantime, well see you at the Blender!