Ý  ÜÜÝ ÞÛÝÜ ÞÝÜÛÛ²° °°°²ÛÛÛÛÝÞ° °°  °°     °°²Û²²°þ Þ°  ÜÜÜ   Ü ²²ÜÜ ÜÞ² ÜÜÜ ²²²Ý ß°Ý°ßß ÜÜÜÜ ÜÜÜÜÜÜ ÜÜÜÜ ÜÞ²Ü  Û² ßÜ   ÜÛÝ ÛÛÞ°ÝÛßÛß Ýßß ÛÛ°Ý ²ß ßÝ° ÝÜÞ° ÞßÜ ßÜ° °²ÞÛÜ ßܲ ÜßÛÞ²ÛÞÜ  Û²°° ßÜÛÛ²Ý ±²Þ Þ²°Ý ÝÜÜÜÜÛÛ ÝÜÜ °²Þ°²ß  ßÜÜß ßÛ²Ý Þ°  ß²ßÛÝ ÞÛ ß ²ß ßÞ²²  ۲߲ÛܲÛÛÛ² Þ±Þ²ÞÛÜßÜ Ý²²°°° °Ü  ßÛÜÛÛÝÞÞÛ°Ý Þ²Û °²± Þ°²Û ²Û° Ý°°  ÛÛÛ ßÛÛ²ß ÞÜ ßÞÛ ß±²ÜßÝÛÛßß²°²Ýßß ÝÛÛÛÛÛÞÞ °Ü ܱÛÝ Þ°Û ÞÜÛÛ ÛßÜ ²Ü °  ²²Û° ß Þ°ÞÜÛßÜ ßßÞÝ° Ü Û±±Ý °ÛÛÞÛÛ  ßÜ °²ÛÛß ÜÛ²Û ÜÛÛ²Ý Þ²Ýß²ܲÞ²Ü  ±±²²Ü   Þ°Þ²²° ²° ÜÝÜ ÜÝÛ²°Ý  Û°ÞÛÛÝ ßÜ ÝÜÜ ß۲߱±Ûß ÜßÞÝ ßßÞÛßÛÝÜ  °ÜÜßß²  Þ±ÞÛ²ßß ß Þ°²°ÛÛ Ý ÝÛ²ÜÛÛÝ°°°° ßßܲÛÜ ± ßÛ±Ü ßÛÝ Þß±±ÝÛÝ  ßÜÞ ß Þ±ÞÛ° ÜÜÛ ßÝ Ý Û²°Ý ÝÛÛÛÛÛ°²²²²ÜÜ ßÜßÝ ° ²ÛÛÝ°²Ý² Þ Þ±Ý²Û  ²ÛÞ Ý  Þ²Þ² ÛÛ²Ý ÜÝÞ °ÜÛÛ Ý°° ÜÛ²Þ²²°² °Üß ß ÞÝÛÞ²²Û²ÛÝ±Ü ÞÜÛÛÝÛÛ  ÛÛÞ ß  Þ²ÞÛ Þ±ÛßÜÛÝÞÜÛÝ°Û°ݲ² ²Û°Þ°°°Þ°°ßÜ ÜßÛÝ ° Ý°°²ÛÛ²²Û±±Þ±ÞÛ²²ß  ÛÛÛÞ Þ²Þ²Ý ßÛ²²²ÝÞ²ß ÛÛ²ÛÛÛ °ÛÞÞܲ² ßÜ°²Þ²²ÛÞß ² ݲݲ²²ßßÞÛÛÞ²Þßß  ÛÛÞ°°ÞÛÞÛßÜ ßß°Ý Üß²²Û±±  ÝÞÞ Þ ßßÞ²²ß Û² Þ°Ý°°°Þ² °°  ÞÛ²Þ°²Þ²Þ²ßܲÜÜ ÝÜß²ÜÝßß Ý ±± Þ ÜÜÝܲ Þ ÞÞ° ܲ²ßß  ÞÛÛÞ Üß°²ÞÛÞ°ßÜßßÜÞ²°Ý ÜßÝ ÞÞ ÞÜ °°ÜÛßݲ² Þ Þ Ü þ ßß ÜÛ²²Þ ß ßßßÞ±±²ßÜ Ý ÝÛ ÞÞ Þßݲ²Û²°ݱ± Ý ÝßßÞ  ß²²ÛÞ²°°ÞßÛÜ Ý þÞÝ ÞÝ ßÝ ßß ÞÜÝ°° Ý ßÞ   ß²°   Þ Þ ßÜÝ ²² ÞÝÝÝ ÜÜÞ   Ý Üß ßÝßÜ°Ý ÝÞ Ý°°Þ n! ß ²Ýß ßÝ °ÛÞ Ý²²ßß   ÞßÝÜßÝß ßÝß After some sixteen years away from it, I returned to Mistigris like a man returning to an closed childhood campsite off an old logging road -- outhouses caved in, hiking trails overgrown, firepits choked with broken glass from bottles of beer made by long-bankrupt companies. But what's this -- a glimmer from behind the bushes... parting the boughs we find a mossy old ATV in a hollow, bird's nest woven into the handlebars, mushrooms growing out of the seat cushion foam. But if this gauge is correct it still has half a tank of gas and -- woah, the mother starts! The half-tank took us far: it turns out I'd been sitting on an enormous hoarded cache of unreleased and since-lost digital artwork from the last century, and after establishing through social media that there in fact did exist an audience for it, I mounted that demon horse Nostalgia on a joyride spree of art distribution that very likely made for Mistigris' most active year of all time, a decade and a half after it died: Oct 31 2014 - MIST1014 20th anniversary artpack Nov 09 2014 - Mistic re-release Nov 30 2014 - Living Closet best-of-Mistigris artdisk re-release Dec 17 2015 - The Bells of Yule music disk re-release Mar 16 2015 - BLNDR48-60 Blender catch-up Apr 01 2015 - April Fool's pack Apr 14 2015 - Blender 2015 May 01 2015 - MIST3YRC re-release May 09 2015 - Radiance music disk re-release May 10 2015 - EuphoniX music collection re-release May 11 2015 - 604 Music Disk re-release May 13 2015 - Immortal Syndicate collection re-release May 15 2015 - Happy Fetus Records collection re-release Jun 13 2015 - M-9808, Mistigris' "lost pack", in progress when we died Oct 06 2015 - MIST2000 Oct 07 2015 - Scarecrow Poetics re-released Oct 21 2015 - Corroded music disk re-release Oct 30 2015 - which brings us to MIST1015, and the present. 18 releases! Plus we threw a lot of light (including rediscovering a bunch of our own material!) on the old Sonic Equinox collections, hiding in plain sight over at Hornet. But the joyride is done now, the ATV gently rolling to a halt after coasting on fumes down a series of sick jumps on gnarly hills -- that's all ancient history now. (Before I released it all, it was just a digital clutter ghost in a corner of my hard drive haunting me from upgrade to upgrade. Now, curated and preserved, it takes its proper place as history, and the spectres of wasted youth are laid to rest.) So, here we are. So much I could say! (Without counting infofiles or private discussion, I've written over 28 thousand words on the subject over the past year. That adds up to a lot of haiku!) But I'll be brief, because -- accustomed to the luxury of taking years to gather my thoughts on artpack matters -- I have run out of time. Every time I've sat down at the keyboard this year to share computer art, I've had to try to sum up a sprawling expanse of time -- 15 to 20 years, sometimes more -- in order to establish any kind of context to explain what I was sharing with the world and precisely why it looks so very ... historical. (I say "try", as I have enjoyed limited success with the objective of summation.) Now I just have one big last heap 'o art to explain, all of it -- if not necessarily hot off the presses, at least new-to-me and new-to-you. The artpack's many faces can be explained by its representing the culmination of a few waves of solicitation: initially, I figured that I'd echo my method from last year's 20th anniversary, and round up submissions from my rediscovered colleagues from the Mistigris crew circa 1994-1998 again! But it was looking as though many of them may have had only one last artpack huzzah left in them, and given it up last October, leaving them hollow and artless. (Sorry, but sometimes the truth hurts!) But having extended myself thus far, I wasn't going to cancel my plans and disappoint those few who had expressed interest -- I would just have to widen the net. (Here I do need to pause for a moment and thank those original Mistigris members with whom I was working over 20 years ago who represented somehow in this collection: Crowkeeper, Etana, Flyingfish, Happyfish, Ice Cream Emperor, Maeve Wolf, Otnoo Ishphoo, Whazzit, and the tireless Melodia without whom this collection might not have been possible.) So Phase B involved a systematic attempt to get the word out to other oldschool computer art fellow travelers from the artscene and demoscene, and other parallel communities of retro-tech creative types. There were some expressions of interest, but this approach took a long time to translate into actual submissions rolling in... so long that I had already progressed through to Phase C: extending the call for submissions to members of each of the numerous other creative communities I'd been involved with since Mist wrapped in 1998, which included in turn (you can stand up as you are called): * performance poets intoning their verses in smokey bar backrooms, * culture-jamming bicycle activists, * noders at a turn-of-the-century proto-Wikipedia, * East Van's most varied variety show series, * founding a political party, * running an art gallery by consensus with a collective of 20 artists, * enthusiasts of homebrew text adventures, * that old anarchist bookstore, * hitting up all the open mics promoting my open stage series, * programming and operating several shows on community radio, * traveling the rural West in a penniless political country band, * establishing an annual festival for punk accordion music, and * documenting historical video games. (among others.) Not all avenues ultimately yielded submissions to this collection (on the plus side, more artscene outsiders will be interested in seeing what I came up with), but it stands testament to my unsinkable recruiting drive that I managed to drum up submissions to this once-thought-troubled artpack from over 50 individuals from every walk on the creative spectrum. Have I built Mistigris back into a viable organization with thriving departments? Not exactly, but I was able to shake down a lifetime of friends and acquaintances for a respectable showing here, at least once. Maybe some of them will be interested in the work of their packmates they discover here and seek to collaborate, and maybe some of them will be intrigued by our (long and boring) history and (borderline fetishistic) traditional aesthetic. Maybe this won't be the last Mistigris production, maybe it will be -- or maybe some of us will discover or remember that we enjoy working together, and will angle to find some way to continue doing so on another, non-artpack project. So, in some vague, hand-wavey way, that covers the past and the future -- but what about the present? What can I tell you about the contents of this artpack? In a nutshell -- it is vast, it contains multitudes. On the one hand, it contains art actively striving to reproduce the styles, approaches, and subjects pressed into service by the computer artists of the 1990s. ($too and JMD's submissions take it one step further and are actually "lost" works from the early 1990s and late 1980s, wholly embodying that zeitgeist by virtue of not being historical re-enactment, but actual history! They are echoed by Andreas Jansson firing open an Amiga emulator and seeing what he could do.) There is textmode art -- not merely the artscene staple of ANSI (including Happyfish's revived WIP that competed at the NVScene demoparty earlier this year, pieces from Nail's decade in the wilderness, and VileR's entire artscene-unknown body of work!), but also Shift JIS from Kalcha, PETSCII arranged on the Commodore 64's character set by Raquel Meyers, a titan of that scene, teletext by the undisputed master of that niche artform, Illarterite, and even the great forebearer of them all, typewriter art pecked out by Lord Nikon! (Because while we're going oldschool, why not be serious about it?) (It's a little funny citing serious oldschoolness in reference to someone whose handle necessarily derives from the 1995 movie "Hackers". 8) And in the "for various reasons, this would have been impossible to include in an artpack in the '90s" department, we also include some* digital video! In keeping with our roots, much of it features textmode imagery, including a demo of a fabulous multi-layer parallax scrolling engine that only runs through a BBS -- also included as an ANSImation for those able to enjoy it so natively. There is also Otium's panoramic photo spread of the retrotech lifestyle, and on board you will also find some varied animated .GIFs, demonstrating such diverse styles as a virtuous application of pixel art techniques, implementation of a henna hand design, modelling of a unique 3D object for use in Second Life, and the full skinning of a character model in real 3D for first life 8) ( * where by "include some" we mean "include redirecting web links to externally-hosted" 8) And then there is the music, over an hour and a half of our longstanding dark horse ace in the hole. One song uses a single sample, another is fully performed on real instruments, and there is everything in between. Really, the musical end is so substantial, everything besides could just be an afterthought. But NO! none of it is an afterthought! It is all welcomed and cherished and evaluated as belonging here, regardless of whether it would have been a good fit for an artpack in 1995. We contain much that would never have been seen in the classic period (its loss!): "real-life" art forms including photography, painting (I fully expect there will be some discussion, perhaps even debate, about Alexander Bell's use of silkscreened machine-generated ASCII art in his oil paintings), sculpture and even a textile work -- which as any student of history will rapidly assent, is the artform with perhaps the most computing science precedents. And we have submissions that also flirt with the stranger, more conceptual side of things: a visualization of a memory dump after an application crashes; an illustrated poem in the pantoum form, presented with musical accompaniment that ALSO follows the constrained strictures of that style of poem; a unique objet d'musique whose appearance and price is suggested but whose sound remains purely in the imagination of the dreamer. And also, this being Mistigris, there is some lit. Y'know, poetry and prose, that good stuff. (If you enjoy the excerpt of Everyone In Silico, a very rare depiction of a technological future taking place at our mile zero, then you can choose your own price for an etext of the full novel!) Despite weeks of preparations, I'm going a little bit crazy putting together and packaging the artpack, having been awake for nearly 24 hours continuously. So we are perhaps best served by my invoking my feverish futurist manifesto in this past April's Fool's Pack. After pages of nonsense advocating for the misuse and abuse of computers so as to breed a tougher computer user, I had to skip to the end as I found myself accidentally coming to a totally unfunny point culminating in its conclusion: that our electronic technology was initially devised for military pursuits, since computers were rooms full of women using slide rules to calculate artillery strikes, and the IBM men in their three-piece suits knew of several unorthodox applications for a counting machine; that a decade of our best university students pored over mainframes engaging curious optimization puzzles, as though they believed that the army-sponsored contests for the best crop dusting routines weren't in fact employed to more efficiently disperse napalm and Agent Orange among civilian populations. This bloody original sin truth behind computers and the InterNet compel us toward a single stark conclusion: that the most responsible thing to do with the technology is to misuse it, to misallocate the resources from their intended function, with art the world's greatest misallocation of resources; every CPU cycle not invested into setting children on fire is worthwhile. Computer art hence isn't just a novelty or a curio, but rather the only moral use of this equipment, ideally tying it up indefinitely for indulgent and frivolous pursuits. ... which brings me around, in a perhaps more justifiable way, to my initial conclusion, that: The first application for any new technology is to brutalize human flesh and crush the spirit; the second is to draw pictures of naked ladies. We only win if the latter outweighs the former by a significant margin. (So thank you, CatBones!) Thanks for the 21 years! - Cthulu Mistigris founder October 31, 2015  Þ°°²°² °°°°²Ü °²°ÜÜ° °²°²ÜÜÜÜ ÜÜÞ²²ÛÜÜÜÞÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ ÜÜÜÜ ÜÜÜÜÜß°²²²ßÛÛ²²ÜÜÜÜÞÛ Û²²ÛÜÜ ÜÜ°°ß² ÜÜÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÜÜÜܲ° °°° ÛÛ²Þ²Üß°²²ÞÛ°°±° ÛÝÜ°²ÛßÜ°°°ßÜÜÜßß Û²°° Û²²ÞÜÜÜß°²ÜÜÞ°²ßß ÜÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ²ÜßÜ ßÞ ßÜßßßÜßßß² ß²ßßßßßßÜßßßßßß°ßßÛ°ßßßßß°ßßßßß°ÞßßÛßßßßßß²² ÞÛÛ²²²²²²²²²²Ûß°°°ÛßÜ ° ß ° ÛÜ ßßßßÛ°° °°± Û ²ßßß± ßß Ü° ÛÜ ßßß±°  ßܲܰ°ÛÛÜÜ°°°°ÛÜÛÛÛ°°²Ý ²Û ÜÜÜ Û ²Û²²Û Þ²² ²²² Û ²° ² ²° ² Û²²°°  ÞÝ ßßÜß ßßßÛÛÜß²²²²°°²Ý ÛÛ°° ß² ° ÛÜÞÛÛ ÞÛÛ ÛÜÛ ÛÛ Û ²ܲ ÜÜÜÛ²Ü °°ÛÛ °°°°²²²ÛÝ ÛÛ²²°²²ÜܲÝÜÛÜÜÜÜÜ°Þ²Û°°Þ²²Ü°ÛßÜÜÜÜܲÜܲ²ÜÜÛÜÜ°ÜÜÜÝÞ°Ý ²°² ßÜ°ßÜÜܲßÛ²²ÛÛ ÛÞÜܲ°°ÜÛßßßÜ°²²ßßÜÞ°Û²ßÞ°°Û²Û°²ÛÜ Û²°° ÛßÛ °Û°²°Û°² ßßÝÜÞ²°Û°°Ü²² ܲ²²²ß  ÞÛßßß°²ÜÜ Þßßß² Ü°Þßßß²²ßßÛ²Ûßß²² ßßßß²²² ßÛÛÛݲßßÝß²Ý ßßÝ²ß²Þ ßß²²ÜÜÛÛßß°° n!  Þß °²°²° ßßÞß Üßß ßß° Û°ß Üܲ°² ßßßßÝßÞÜ Þßß°²Ü°°  ÞÜßÞÜÝß ÜßßßÜ°ÜÝ SAUCE00MIST1015 Infofile Cthulu, Nail Mistigris 20151031ÜVP IBM VGA