We turn 24 this month, which is basically generations and generations,
dynasties, well over a lifetime in cyber culture, and here we are releasing
artpacks every 30 days like were 15 again only more fervently, as we could
never sustain a monthly-paced refractory period when we were kids. From where
are we siphoning this strange energy? Somewhere locked up in an attic
somewhere there must be the Artpack of Dorian Gray, a stained cardboard box of
Jacquard power loom punch cards whose data, when programmed into the correct
piece of museum equipment, produces Jack Torrances proverb or perhaps random
garbled line noise, never ending and never repeating spelled out across as
long a bolt of fabric as you might care to weave. But I digress. All work and
no play make Jack a dull boy. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. All
Its an uneasy place, writing an October infofile, at once well-practiced and
unprecedented. I wrote substantially on the occasion three times in the 90s,
because our establishment happened to coincide with this month, and now four
more times in the new millennium, as we followed the occasion of our founding
to lead the way for our reunion-cum-revival. For two of those years, our
October artpack was our main project representing an entire years work, so
there was much to report on. But since October of 2016, weve been diligently
minting a release on a monthly basis, which helps to enforce a 30-day sandbox
around current affairs. I may well have more weighty pontification to share
with you in the infofiles of next months artpack, as weve been fruitfully
postponing anniversary festivities to November so as to allow us to usefully
focus on keeping October focused and spooky... we shall see. In the meantime,
theres the standard housekeeping I can attend to in a businesslike fashion!
There are a couple of new names popping up in this months collection:
Pixelmancer is a fake-out, a stalled attempt to compartmentalize the
explicitly dark glitch compositions of 192.168.10.13 beneath a new and
considerably easier to remember label also, we are proud to present a piece
by the engineer of Twitters glorious @PETSCIIbots, Cal Skuthorpe, who was
given the idea of following up on their procedural generation by applying
similar Facemaker techniques to Jack o Lantern faces by eavesdropping on a
little public chatter with Polyducks... great ideas are easy, anyone interested
in picking them up and running with them is more than welcome to! And weve
long been sitting on some spooky pixelart compositions by the irreverent
PixelFart: at long last their hour is finally at hand.
Also in this collection, above and beyond representation from our standard
rogues gallery, weve been graced with a little material by very sporadic
contributors LDA thanks for the FILEID! Simple but essential!,
OrdinaryPixel and Unseen Fate, plus a substantial stash of vintage spooky
stuffs from Halloween specialist Macbin and and guest appearances from
longtime artscene colleagues Catbones and Zeus II.
Bonemouse is in full effect taking on the drawlloween daily drawing
challenges yet again, while our fresh meat Manuel Vio is undertaking
@judebuffumpixels similar blocktober2018 spooky Instagram pixelart daily
drawing prompts in full PETSCII mode. Our membership has also been cranking
out a great deal of blocktober2018 ANSI art, but youll have to take my word
for it as its sadly the wrong kind of scary 8
And were pleased to share with you one piece of bonafide zombie computer art,
this months token musical offering: Onyxs Tomb of the Equinox, a tracker-
music composition composed for a Sonic Equinox demogroup context back in 1995
and never used. Well... finally used!
What else is there to report? Many Misty events took place over September, as
you must know from reading our last artpacks infofile I dont assume that
everyone reads them, rather the opposite, but I expect that the type to read
one of them probably reads them all: our digital picture frame of visual
computer art on musical themes astounded, delighted, bemused and baffled
patrons at the Echoes Ripples art exhibition Horsenburger breezed through
his month-long ARDtext residency, capping it off with a victory lap through an
emergency visit to the hospital fortunately, hes been so strong an advocate
for the NHS they couldnt let him down and the single largest contingent of
Mistigris members ever participating took on a demoparty through the remote
submissions of Buenos Aires Flash Party, forcing through sheer numbers a
teletext category to be split off from the general text art compo, also
taking prizes for loaders, PETSCII and ... the unbearable lightness of being
Polyducks. You will be seeing most of these pieces in next months artpack,
but we couldnt wait on the timely kudos to Illarterate, Horsenburger, Jellica
Jake, Manuel Vio and Polyducks.
Speaking of timeliness, dont forget that the teletext Bloktoberfest Block
Party is taking place at Wigan STEAM Oct 20-21st, where you can hobnob with
such luminaries as Illarterate, Horsenburger, Raquel Meyers, Alistair Cree and
TeletextR with copies of his handsome new teletext coffee table book hot off
the presses! This Block Party will be hosting an art competition of its own,
open to remote entries from international text artists unintimidated by the
eXtReMe constraints of the teletext medium -- full details at
teletextart.co.uk/bloktoberfest-2018-teletext-art-competition-now-open
Our final order of business is reminding you how and where to find Mistigris
artpacks. If youre reading this, presumably you figured it out, but currently
nothing is clear: our favorite online artpack viewer, pc.textmod.es, has
unaccountably gone silent, failing to host our August and September and lets
safely assume October, making for a whole season omitted artpacks.
SixteenColors remains lost in the wilderness, leaving artpacks.org as the last
, conspicuously least feature-rich public web gallery left standing. Other
artgroups appear to be cobbling together stopgap private web viewers to
support their releases exclusively, but thats an awfully walled-garden way to
be part of a scene. Even if we wanted to serve up our artpack contents in
that fashion, we dont have the IT knowhow at the table presently. In the
meantime, we will continue our campaign of trying to ensure that all artpack
contents are available in web-friendly formats going forward by surfing around
at mistigris.org/packs/ ... its all there.
Plus of course October marks the one-year anniversary of our switching into
high gear on social media, going from daily posts to sharing several pieces
from current releases and our back catalogue every day... so regardless of
whether or not you can figure out how to browse our artpacks online, well keep
pushing out the art at you multiple times daily on Instagram and Twitter as
@mistfunk and on our public Facebook group at facebook.com/mistigrisart
This concludes the MIST1018 infofile. Sorry it wasnt terribly spooky, but
hopefully the rest of the art in this collection will make up for it!
Mistigris 2018 - never ending and never repeating
//V /
//I //
// /I , / -
// I / ,
//,--, ,--, / / Y /
, Y /
.---. : -q
L, . .-. .-. /
,..,., RIP RIP .-.
, : RIP
/ . ,---, ldb
- - - - - - - - o