k1
igris
MIST0517 infofile
Lots of news for the infofile, but before I begin -- hey, wow! Take a look at
that beautiful ANSI art logo! Drawn for us by Blocktronics regular
Knocturnal, released in the recent Fuel 21 revival artpack. And a hearty
welcome back to Fuel! Fellow travellers from 95-98, these textmode artists
from the Low Countries checked in a little after we hit the scene and conked
out a little before we did the first time around, but now that weve well and
truly blazed the trail for zombie artgroup renewal of activity, I hope that
we will be seeing more of them! But I digress.
And now, Ill talk a little about Mistigris for a change. Would you believe
that this is our eighth consecutive monthly artpack release? That was a
difficult feat to pull off even in the age of Mist Classic, only surpassed
once, our all-time high of nine consecutive artpacks -- the regular schedule
consistency the one thing our stable of artists had been clamouring after for
nearly four years -- achieved immediately prior to our crashing into
smouldering ruins for 16 years... and basically unimaginable today.
Mistigris: the improbable we do immediately, the unimaginable takes a little
longer. Will we be jinxing ourselves by tempting the gods and daring to tie
this career high for a second time? How long has it been, anyway, since
anyone released eight consecutive artpacks? A: I did some research, and it
looks like iCEs long spree of regular monthly artpacks -- which will itself
most likely never again be met or exceeded -- wrapped in 2002, making it a
cool 15 years since any artgroup has enjoyed a monthly spree the likes of
which were currently improbably forging ahead with. Well,
/incoming/MIST0617 is already looking pretty punchy, but its true that, for
instance, a sudden disappearance of Horsenburger might disrupt our personal
best record-breaking achievement on the very eve of its attainment.
That is why we have had him and his family moved for their own safety to the
special fortified Misti-bunker deep below the British countryside with a case
lot of J0lt Cola that stuff doesnt expire, right? I mean, not until it
eats through the bottle... and a pallet of Illarterates patented
Meatybitstm to sustain them during this critical and delicate transitional
period. If you press REVEAL on any of his teletext creations over the next
few months, youll find the pieces crammed chock full of hidden messages
clamouring for someone to come rescue them from our nefarious art factory.
But we all must suffer for our art, right?
Ahem. Speaking of unfunny tangents, of course in April we released our
traditional Fools pack of course!, meaning that some of the pieces in this
artpack have been waiting up to six weeks to be shared in some context of
nominal seriousness. Of course, other selections in this collection have
been cooling off for months or even years before being curated out of back
catalogues to appear in this artpack, so by that metric six weeks isnt
looking so bad! We released two more music videos since our last newsletter
very nearly three, but -- gotta save something for May, I suppose! which
you can enjoy over at our YouTube channel. Also in April we presented
another installment of the currently annual Blender IRC compo, to good
effect! Hopefully well also be hosting another Tracker Fix music
competition this year -- probably in June -- but we have yet to set a date
and notify the musicians, so youll be hearing more about that one down the
line.
Thats about it for our official activities, but of course our members are
out in the world making splashes. Since March Illarterate has been involved
in no fewer than two teletext group gallery shows over the past three months
-- Block Party in February and Glitch in April -- making my decade-plus
struggles to mount a textmode gallery show look somewhat anemic by
comparison. And yet, surely it would have been less work than releasing
eight monthly artpacks in a row! If you were lucky enough to take in the
exhibitions, you would have gotten a preview of some splendid teletext work
from past Mistigris favorites such as Raquel Meyers, Polyducks, TeletextR and
Horsenburger out on a supervised weekend pass OK lets not insist on
revisiting our least funny gags as well as appearances from artists you
havent yet seen -- but will -- in Mistigris artpacks such as Jellica Jake
and the celebrated man behind Digitizer, Mr. Biffo.
Vancouver was graced with another inspiring installment of the Overflow
chipmusic series, but bryface simply couldnt manage to rest on his laurels
and impulsively zipped across the pond for a series of performances in Europe
-- two in England, one in Italy, and one in Germany at the Revision demoparty
where he represented Mistigris in three categories and placed fourth in the
ANSI art competition! Hats off, young face! You can hear and see some of
these works inside this very archive... and not that you can tell to look in
this pack, but Creonix is also representing us in two categories at the
Multimatograf 2017 demoparty as this is being written! Now for a change of
pace, heres an annoucement not yet too late to be of use: those of you in
Australia may be interested to attend the Verse exhibition in the Melbourne
Pavilion May 4th, where Maeve Wolf will be exhibiting her paintings. No
longer will we be the sole audience to her unmitigated genius! Not that we
ever were, but... Note: due to the time zone differential, it is already May
4 in Australia. Make us proud, Maeve! But as for an exhibition you have a bit
more opportunity to enjoy... if you happen to find yourself in the vicinity of
Porvoo, Finland, through May 28 you can find some of Unseen Fates paintings,
among others, at a free exhibition up at the Galleria Kreutz entitled Kill
Your Idols. And I dont doubt that Jenn Ashton has had no fewer than a half
dozen paintings go up in various shows this month, but my finger isnt enough
on that pulse to report on them, alas!
And heres one tidbit of interest from the Mistigris homebase of area code
604: The Living Closet, the long-running East Van variety show series Cthulu
booked performers for following Mistigris sudden collapse -- in many regards
an analogue complement to his years in the digital arts trenches -- is
looking at reviving with a small, private art party the weekend of May 20th
at Claire Roberts pad, for her birthday. Do you want to be on the invite
list? Inquire within.
Now the big question is whether or not I have anything interesting to say
about the splendidly diverse contents of this particular artpack were up
inside of right now. Sometimes a theme or sub-theme will spontaneously emerge,
sometimes there are matters that demand elaboration. Some works Ill confess,
its pieces on video game themes get rushed to the front of the queue while
others get kept in reserve for special occasions. This collection should
feature a couple pieces of Star Wars art by Sentience and Etana, in honour of
... May the Fourth Be With You. In addition to the regulars keeping on
keepin on with their standard bread and butter, there is a subset in this
collection of some teletext artists taking on some existing works of fine art
with which you may not be previously familiar as subjects for teletext
conversion. Somewhere between the Swamp Thing and the Lemmy, you will find
them: Vallotton, Gertler, Vermeer, Warhol, Haring... some more famous than
others, but all worthwhile and, in a nutshell, all images we are proud to
present.
Additionally, were celebrating the arrival of Spring with some pieces from
Coffeehearts notebooks, and consolidating our pixelart spread to the textile
realm with two needlepoint / cross-stitch works, one the handywork of Awesome
Angela of Sleepy Stitch, the other painstakingly assembled over a matter of
months by Morgan Lee, yielding a classic piece of video game cartography.
Did someone say pixelart? Oh yeah, this month we discovered that we were
mentioned twice! in a book -- volume 2 of Masters of Pixel Art! After 23
years, Wikipedia notability finally achieved! Our appearing in this volume
came as a surprise to me when Pannekoekologist delivered it up as a birthday
present, as the books focus is on artworks from the great 8-bit home
computers -- the C64, Spectrum, Atari XL, CPC, MSX etc., all of which
predated our tenuous tenure in the scene. But there on p. 161 we slip in the
back door thanks to our superstar guest Raquel Meyers, whose PETSCII C64
piece from MIST1015 appears in beautiful print. And Pannekoekologists
crowdfunded backing of the book was also made in our name, meaning it is
printed there twice. Now we just kick back and wait for the mad props to
roll our way!
... waiting...
It was a nostalgic joke of sorts when we revived in 2014, but because truth
is stranger than fiction, we are proud to announce a Mistigris distribution
site affiliation extended on request to the iNK tWO bulletin board service at
telnet: bbs.inktwo.com port 23, run and operated by Smooth, founder of our
fellow traveller artgroup TeklordZ which ran from 1994-1997. This joins The
Guardian of Forever in our distro site list, which we should see about
populating with a few more BBSes representing other major retrocomputing
platforms.
And on that note, were done! I could not have anticipated that Id come up
with quite that much to say about the events of just the past month or two
hope our June infofile can be a little tighter!, but of course -- I am a
writer! In parting, we are ever searching for submissions, further
distribution sites, ideas, inspiration and support. Even if you cant send
us anything to put in our collections, you can help us a great deal by simply
boosting the signal when we have a release and sharing the announcements,
spreading the word about pieces. So please do your part to help remind the
weird wired world that computer art is a living tradition! See you next month!
- Cthulu
Mistigris founder
... still waiting...