Mistigris
Encyclopedia
Mistigris was an artscene
group founded in late 1994 by Cthulu of Vancouver
, British Columbia
, Canada
.
The group primarily operated out of BBS
es within the city's area code 604 (with a significant outpost in Quebec's area code 418) joined across suburbs and provinces by the group's echomail network
known as KiTSCHNet. In addition to numerous music disk
s, games, loaders, BBS utilities, applications (such as the PabloDraw
ANSI art editor), issues of their house diskmag KiTHE and other one-off projects, Mistigris released thirty-five artpack
s between October 1994 and June 1998. Though initially identifying with the card-playing conceit of a variant of poker after randomly selecting the name from a dictionary, in later years its mascot became an alley cat.
The group emerged to fill a vacuum left by the collapse of local supergroup iMPERiAL
in September 1994, immediately striving in a semi-anarchic fashion against the similar efforts of competing local groups RAiD and Wild Buffalo Tamerz (WBT). While these competitors ceased operations in fairly short order, in RAiD the foundations were laid for the January 1995 founding of ANSI
-only supergroup Integrity
— an immensely popular project which would serve to be an ongoing slow leak deflating MiST of its upper-level ANSI artists, leaving it primarily known for its specialty focus on tracked music (courtesy, early on, of members of local netlabel
s Digitallusions and EuphoniX
) and "lit
", mediums generally overlooked or passed over by the artscene's text-graphics enthusiasts but eventually leading Mistigris to its highest achievements in domination of the 1997 "Blender" IRC competitions.
(The tradition of the "April Fool's Pack", an annual prank release where members would produce material far outside of their area of expertise, doubtlessly did nothing to assuage opinions regarding the quality of Mist's ANSI art division.)
In an attempt to address the rash of defections to Integrity, Mistigris experienced a tentative, abortive and ultimately unsuccessful merger with American
group Fire
in March 1995, and later a far more successful wholesale incorporation of local group kRAP. Mist's history was also rife with borrowings from postings and material created by members of the local TABNet (The Adopted Bastards Network) community.
Diversifying its portfolio in the event of its uneasy relationship with textmode art finally and catastrophically concluding, Mistigris adopted collaboration as an external policy as well as an internal one, pursuing co-operative releases with local music-tracking and demo groups such as Digitronic (later known as Trideja), Sonic Equinox and The Immortal Syndicate, and fielded representatives at numerous demoparties
such as New Media '95, Naid '95 and '96 (where the massive six-group 604 Music Disk collaboration was to debut), Crash '97 in Calgary (where Mistigris members placed in four categories, winning in two) and even at Assembly and Evoke in '99, following what hadn't yet been acknowledged as the final official release.
Thinking outside of the box, in 1997 Mistigris engaged on what they called the "Mistigris World Tour", where instead of releasing their members' art within their own packs, the artists released en masse in other groups as a virtual tour of sorts, each successive tour stop to be indicated by an illustrated riddle-poem. Groups who cooperated in this tour concept included Blade
, Fire
(as well as its music division, Radiance), Dark
and Fistful of Steel
(FOS) (and, some time after the fact, the Project). Cthulu had plans to tour with several smaller groups as well (Ophidiac
, TeklordZ
), to help mutually raise each others' profiles, but as he put it, "the groups kept dying" before tour arrangements could be finalized.
Mistigris itself ultimately came to a close in mid-1998 due to numerous factors, among them mass graduation
by its membership from high school
into a world of distractions, disagreements between department heads regarding quality control, and an ongoing inability to retain the membership of its most talented active textmode artists. (An over-full final pack was actually assembled, some of its contents even today queued up and awaiting packaging, but its release was delayed until more textmode art could be drummed up... a condition that would never be met, complicated by irrecoverable data loss following a hard drive crash during a botched Linux installation.) Proving most lethal, however, was the undermining and final collapse of the 604 area code's bizarrely long-lived BBS scene due to the new local availability of affordable dial-up internet
access — when Mist's first world headquarters The Screaming Tomato BBS (TST) went down, it was replaced in short order by The Jade Monkey (TJM), but when TJM went offline there was no longer anywhere relevant for the local members to call in to. Mistigris' members had a longstanding strong presence on the EFnet
IRC (channel #mist protected, served and entertained by the bots Mr_Gris, Ms_Degree and daGRIZ), but a lack of an effective web strategy restricted group InterNet activity to idling, lurking and fruitless chatter, and in the absence of Cthulu's input during an offline spell following a change of address, the final few ounces of momentum were lost.
In its wake several disgruntled former Mistigris senior staff soldiered on for some months as Hallucigenia
, achieving unprecedented success in the acceptance of incorporation of traditional "real-world" artforms into computer art pack releases. Cthulu had already been seeking a local offline equivalent to the dynamic and creative computer artscene, networking with established adult artist and "iconographer" Dwight Atkinson and ushering Mist's cadre of poets into public readings conducted through the Sugar Refinery's Scrambled Angst series, the Edgewise Cafe's Teen Telepoetics program, and Hermit Books; from there he began coordinating performers for The Living Closet, lurking at the Vancouver Poetry Slam, and started a long career in event production at the Butchershop Floor and beyond.
Computer art scene
The phrase computer art scene, or artscene for short, refers to a community of individuals and groups that are both interested and active in the creation of computer-based artwork.-Early computer art:...
group founded in late 1994 by Cthulu of Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
.
The group primarily operated out of BBS
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
es within the city's area code 604 (with a significant outpost in Quebec's area code 418) joined across suburbs and provinces by the group's echomail network
FidoNet
FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems. It was most popular in the early to mid 1990s, prior to the introduction of easy and affordable access to the Internet...
known as KiTSCHNet. In addition to numerous music disk
Music disk
Music disk, or musicdisk, is a term used by the demoscene to describe a collection of songs made on a computer. They are essentially the computer equivalent of an album. A music disk is typically packaged in the form of a program with a custom user interface, so the listener does not need other...
s, games, loaders, BBS utilities, applications (such as the PabloDraw
PabloDraw
PabloDraw is a text editor for Windows, designed for creating ANSI and ASCII art, similar to that of its DOS-based predecessors; ACiDDraw and TheDraw ....
ANSI art editor), issues of their house diskmag KiTHE and other one-off projects, Mistigris released thirty-five artpack
Artpack
An artpack is an archive of computer artwork which is distributed in a compressed format such as ZIP or RAR.While most artpacks today contain either ANSI and ASCII art or hirez VGA, they may also include a combination of RIPscrip art, tracked or otherwise digital music, poetry and editorials, 3D...
s between October 1994 and June 1998. Though initially identifying with the card-playing conceit of a variant of poker after randomly selecting the name from a dictionary, in later years its mascot became an alley cat.
History
Minor artscene groups
This is a list of the minor computer underground artscene groups spanning from roughly 1992 to the present day.- 1 :* 123 "123 ASCII" : 2000-2004* 27 Inch : 2003-2004* 765 "The Girl Scouts" : 1996- A :* ACE : 1993...
in September 1994, immediately striving in a semi-anarchic fashion against the similar efforts of competing local groups RAiD and Wild Buffalo Tamerz (WBT). While these competitors ceased operations in fairly short order, in RAiD the foundations were laid for the January 1995 founding of ANSI
ANSI art
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments...
-only supergroup Integrity
Minor artscene groups
This is a list of the minor computer underground artscene groups spanning from roughly 1992 to the present day.- 1 :* 123 "123 ASCII" : 2000-2004* 27 Inch : 2003-2004* 765 "The Girl Scouts" : 1996- A :* ACE : 1993...
— an immensely popular project which would serve to be an ongoing slow leak deflating MiST of its upper-level ANSI artists, leaving it primarily known for its specialty focus on tracked music (courtesy, early on, of members of local netlabel
Netlabel
A netlabel is a record label that distributes its music through digital audio formats over the Internet...
s Digitallusions and EuphoniX
Euphonix
Euphonix was a professional audio company located in Mountain View, California, United States. Euphonix produced the first successful line of large digitally controlled analog audio mixing consoles in the late 1980s and has since moved on to all-digital systems....
) and "lit
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
", mediums generally overlooked or passed over by the artscene's text-graphics enthusiasts but eventually leading Mistigris to its highest achievements in domination of the 1997 "Blender" IRC competitions.
(The tradition of the "April Fool's Pack", an annual prank release where members would produce material far outside of their area of expertise, doubtlessly did nothing to assuage opinions regarding the quality of Mist's ANSI art division.)
In an attempt to address the rash of defections to Integrity, Mistigris experienced a tentative, abortive and ultimately unsuccessful merger with American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
group Fire
Fire (Artscene group)
Fire, later known as Fire Graphics, was an underground computer artscene group that released ANSI, ASCII, and high resolution artwork from 1994 to 1998.-History:right|left|thumb|230px|Fire "[[Image resolution|hirez]]" artwork....
in March 1995, and later a far more successful wholesale incorporation of local group kRAP. Mist's history was also rife with borrowings from postings and material created by members of the local TABNet (The Adopted Bastards Network) community.
Diversifying its portfolio in the event of its uneasy relationship with textmode art finally and catastrophically concluding, Mistigris adopted collaboration as an external policy as well as an internal one, pursuing co-operative releases with local music-tracking and demo groups such as Digitronic (later known as Trideja), Sonic Equinox and The Immortal Syndicate, and fielded representatives at numerous demoparties
Demoparty
A demoparty is an event that gathers demosceners and other computer enthusiasts to compete in competitions. A typical demoparty is a non-stop event lasting over a weekend, providing the visitors a lot of time to socialize. The competing works, at least those in the most important competitions, are...
such as New Media '95, Naid '95 and '96 (where the massive six-group 604 Music Disk collaboration was to debut), Crash '97 in Calgary (where Mistigris members placed in four categories, winning in two) and even at Assembly and Evoke in '99, following what hadn't yet been acknowledged as the final official release.
Thinking outside of the box, in 1997 Mistigris engaged on what they called the "Mistigris World Tour", where instead of releasing their members' art within their own packs, the artists released en masse in other groups as a virtual tour of sorts, each successive tour stop to be indicated by an illustrated riddle-poem. Groups who cooperated in this tour concept included Blade
Blade (Artscene group)
Blade, also referred to as The Blade Nation, was an underground computer artscene group that primarily released ANSI, ASCII, and high resolution artwork from 1994 to 1997, and during a brief time in 1998.- History :...
, Fire
Fire (Artscene group)
Fire, later known as Fire Graphics, was an underground computer artscene group that released ANSI, ASCII, and high resolution artwork from 1994 to 1998.-History:right|left|thumb|230px|Fire "[[Image resolution|hirez]]" artwork....
(as well as its music division, Radiance), Dark
Dark Illustrated
Digital Artists of a Rare Kind, later known as Dark Illustrated, or simply Dark was an underground computer artscene group that primarily released ANSI, ASCII, and high resolution artwork from 1994 to 1999. Though the organization did not operate as long as ACiD, iCE, or CiA, Dark was a very...
and Fistful of Steel
Minor artscene groups
This is a list of the minor computer underground artscene groups spanning from roughly 1992 to the present day.- 1 :* 123 "123 ASCII" : 2000-2004* 27 Inch : 2003-2004* 765 "The Girl Scouts" : 1996- A :* ACE : 1993...
(FOS) (and, some time after the fact, the Project). Cthulu had plans to tour with several smaller groups as well (Ophidiac
Minor artscene groups
This is a list of the minor computer underground artscene groups spanning from roughly 1992 to the present day.- 1 :* 123 "123 ASCII" : 2000-2004* 27 Inch : 2003-2004* 765 "The Girl Scouts" : 1996- A :* ACE : 1993...
, TeklordZ
Minor artscene groups
This is a list of the minor computer underground artscene groups spanning from roughly 1992 to the present day.- 1 :* 123 "123 ASCII" : 2000-2004* 27 Inch : 2003-2004* 765 "The Girl Scouts" : 1996- A :* ACE : 1993...
), to help mutually raise each others' profiles, but as he put it, "the groups kept dying" before tour arrangements could be finalized.
Mistigris itself ultimately came to a close in mid-1998 due to numerous factors, among them mass graduation
Graduation
Graduation is the action of receiving or conferring an academic degree or the ceremony that is sometimes associated, where students become Graduates. Before the graduation, candidates are referred to as Graduands. The date of graduation is often called degree day. The graduation itself is also...
by its membership from high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....
into a world of distractions, disagreements between department heads regarding quality control, and an ongoing inability to retain the membership of its most talented active textmode artists. (An over-full final pack was actually assembled, some of its contents even today queued up and awaiting packaging, but its release was delayed until more textmode art could be drummed up... a condition that would never be met, complicated by irrecoverable data loss following a hard drive crash during a botched Linux installation.) Proving most lethal, however, was the undermining and final collapse of the 604 area code's bizarrely long-lived BBS scene due to the new local availability of affordable dial-up internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
access — when Mist's first world headquarters The Screaming Tomato BBS (TST) went down, it was replaced in short order by The Jade Monkey (TJM), but when TJM went offline there was no longer anywhere relevant for the local members to call in to. Mistigris' members had a longstanding strong presence on the EFnet
EFnet
EFnet or Eris Free network is a major IRC network, with more than 35,000 users. It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network.- History :...
IRC (channel #mist protected, served and entertained by the bots Mr_Gris, Ms_Degree and daGRIZ), but a lack of an effective web strategy restricted group InterNet activity to idling, lurking and fruitless chatter, and in the absence of Cthulu's input during an offline spell following a change of address, the final few ounces of momentum were lost.
In its wake several disgruntled former Mistigris senior staff soldiered on for some months as Hallucigenia
Minor artscene groups
This is a list of the minor computer underground artscene groups spanning from roughly 1992 to the present day.- 1 :* 123 "123 ASCII" : 2000-2004* 27 Inch : 2003-2004* 765 "The Girl Scouts" : 1996- A :* ACE : 1993...
, achieving unprecedented success in the acceptance of incorporation of traditional "real-world" artforms into computer art pack releases. Cthulu had already been seeking a local offline equivalent to the dynamic and creative computer artscene, networking with established adult artist and "iconographer" Dwight Atkinson and ushering Mist's cadre of poets into public readings conducted through the Sugar Refinery's Scrambled Angst series, the Edgewise Cafe's Teen Telepoetics program, and Hermit Books; from there he began coordinating performers for The Living Closet, lurking at the Vancouver Poetry Slam, and started a long career in event production at the Butchershop Floor and beyond.
Notable releases
- imp-0894.zip - Final iMPERiAL release, August 1994
- mist1094.zip - First MiSTiGRiS release, October 1994
- raid1194.zip - First RAiD release, November 1994
- int-0195.zip - First iNTEGRiTY release, January 1995
- wbt-0195.zip - First Wild Buffalo Tamerz release, January 1995
- fire0295.zip - Final FiRE release, pre-merger, February 1995
- fire0895.zip - First FiRE release, post-merger, August 1995
- blde9612.zip - "Mistigris World Tour", BladeBlade (Artscene group)Blade, also referred to as The Blade Nation, was an underground computer artscene group that primarily released ANSI, ASCII, and high resolution artwork from 1994 to 1997, and during a brief time in 1998.- History :...
, December 1996 - fos-0197.zip - "Mistigris World Tour", Fistful of Steel, January 1997
- fire0497.zip - "Mistigris World Tour", Fire, April 1997
- dark0597.zip - "Mistigris World Tour", Dark IllustratedDark IllustratedDigital Artists of a Rare Kind, later known as Dark Illustrated, or simply Dark was an underground computer artscene group that primarily released ANSI, ASCII, and high resolution artwork from 1994 to 1999. Though the organization did not operate as long as ACiD, iCE, or CiA, Dark was a very...
, May 1997 - mist1197.zip - Compilation of Mistigris Blender entries, November 1997
- m-9806-a.zip - Final Mistigris release, textmode art disk, June 1998
- hal0698.zip - First Hallucigenia release, June 1998
- artdisk-.zip - Mistigris "Best-of" anthology distributed on floppy diskette at a Living Closet event at the Church of Pointless Hysteria, July 23rd, 1999
- prjct006.zip - "Mistigris World Tour" April Fool's release, The Project, August 1999