_____ ____ ____ _____.___________ .\ \/ // |_/ _/\____/\ || _\___| | _/\ |\/ | \ || | | /\ ||| | || | | | / ||_____| |____| | | | | \_____| _____\__/ ____\____/ \__/ / / / \_____/ _____\__/ ____\____/ \__/ / / \_____/ _____\__/ ____\____/ \__/ / \_____/\__/\____/ \__/x0 MiSTiGRiS aRTPaCK 0917 Before everything else, there it is. Gaze upon its splendour. Isn't it great? Back in the Mist Classic days, we were drowning in iconography. We had so many logos we had to stick them together into "collies" to avoid cluttering up our artpacks with various & sundry exercises in branding. For better or worse, those days are behind us now. You have seen xer0's work here in our artpacks when he exercises his "glitch" muscles, yielding tormented cyberscapes that twitch and writhe to delight and dismay you, but you may not have been aware that he is also an accomplished textmode artist, and his works in that idiom appear in Impure and Blocktronics artpacks. Well, there's a little slice of it, right up on top! Most of what we do is a style of aggregation or signal-boosting existing works artists make for their own reasons unrelated to us as an outlet. So it's a valuable and much-appreciated service when artists take it upon themselves to donate the very materials -- our own branding iconography -- needed to elevate a zipfile full of graphics files to the hallowed status of an artpack. Without these little logos -- seemingly a trifle! -- it just ain't an artpack. And you need to know that xer0's above marks the final unreleased textmode logo we had waiting in the eaves, so we'd just like to put out into the world and manifest our intention to have someone out there in our audience hopefully draw another few logos so we can make it through the remainder of 2017 at our blistering pace! (I could invite people to make other kinds of submissions also; whatever you've got, if you're reading this, there's a very good chance we're interested in it... but I put my stress where it is because we won't have to pull the plug on our artpack production line for lack of what you've got. Doesn't mean it wouldn't class up the joint! We have an anniversary collection coming up in November, why not make a once-a-year effort to send in something special for it?) That's right, you read between the lines correctly, this marks Mistigris' 12th consecutive monthly artpack -- an entire year completed -- since the beginning of our spree in October of 2016. (And the semantics are really unfair, because really we've now had 13 months of releases, including Melodia's "1999" music disk in September of 2016. But a music disk, as many of my colleagues would be quick to point out, is no artpack.) This feat, of 12 consecutive monthly artpacks, has been unparalleled since the final 12 artpacks of the classic underground artgroup iCE in the year 2002. Very possibly there will never again be an underground artgroup achieving this milestone. (And I can understand why, it's a real grinder!) So enough about the bird's-eye-view abstract analysis... what is there in this artpack to interest you? Any trends you might benefit from my indicating? It's a bit of a hot mess, as our final "free play" unthemed collection before the spooky spooky Hallowe'en artpack coming up in October, but individual artists have followed their own paths with some consistency: You may get a better feel for Bhaal_Spawn's #gaminghaikus oeuvre, finding its footing as we run them in chronological order... Etana is on a regular spree with her paintings, we debut a new drawing style for Jordan Lyric, and further historical ANSI art offerings from the unseen back catalogue of Spitoufs... ... and then, of course, yes Horsenburger gives up a few "sets" of teletext portraiture including a suite of characters from 2000AD comic books, moments from Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, a gang of fools from the Austin Powers series, and a merry band of Beatles, met head-on by a couple of Kalcha's Shift_JIS pieces (and going head to head with Uglifruit for teletext domination of Phil Collins' face, something that I can state with great confidence has never before elapsed in the history of the underground artscene.) All that and more -- there's always a lot of worthwhile material in Mistigris artpacks, but if you want to see me write up every single piece, subscribe to the daily Mistigram posting at @mistfunk on Instagram. All right, so what else is up outside the confines of this archive? We have it on good authority that that a nice, foil-covered cyberspace-themed issue of the French fanzine De L'Encre Et Des Tripes hit the streets August 20th, including teletext work by Illarterate and Horsenburger and a collaborative illustrated piece about Anonymous (in translation for the first time!) between Cthulu and Otium, first released back in early 2014 in the 22nd Galza artpack. Illarterate's SETI workshops at Wigan STEAM are winding up -- there are two more escape room sessions from 10 am - 4 pm on September 2nd and 16th -- and Unseen Fate has another art exhibition of small paintings hanging until September 3rd at Espoo's Gallery Espoonsilta. Lord Nikon's typewriter art show also remains up at the Esche-Museum in Limbach-Oberfrohna through Oct 15... And hats off to bryface for mounting another Overflow chipmusic event! Due to curious timing, while this infofile is being written it hasn't yet happened but by the time anyone gets to read it, it will already be part of the recent past. But with the calibre of talent on board, its trajectory can only go in one direction. We're looking forward to reporting further on more of them into the new year. Until then... we have a terrifying Hallowe'en artpack to prepare for October, so let's slop on our Juggalo greasepaint and get down to our grim task. Mistigris 2017: a real grinder!