A busy week
Rather, I should say, a week of great virality for me! Many things for me to hype, and many of them have reached many people -- but not quite so many that I'm not going to bother listing them here:
- One week ago, October 31st, better known to most as Hallowe'en, I officially launched the 21st anniversary artpack of my '90s computer art collective Mistigris. Exploring new territory for artpacks, we expanded the scope by pressing out into several related but new-to-artpacks creative fields: in addition to ANSI art (including works by hsifyppah) there were works in other textmode mediums such as teletext, PETSCII (the character set of the Commodore 64), Shift JIS, and even typewriter art. (Also, some machine-generated ASCII art silkscreened on to oil-painted canvases!) We also pushed out into hitherto artscene-untapped realms of visual art, including paintings, photographs, sculpture and ... textile. Writing, in the best Mistigris tradition, is given a nominal representation, and as for music... there is an hour and a half of it, some of which is truly great. Also there is some great digital video (about which more later) presented as part of the artpack, though externally hosted online for file size reasons. Though representation from traditional Mistigris members is slim (quite a bit more so than last year's 20th anniversary artpack) we do feature a number of guest appearances from luminaries historic and current, including works from members of ACiD and Blocktronics, and while most of the work is of a recent vintage, we also host some historical works that were never released, forgotten about, then rediscovered, to demonstrate just how things were done back then on eg. the Amiga -- four pieces date to the early '90s (pre-dating Mistigris' establishment) and one goes back to the late '80s, at which moment in time the phrase "computer art" was really aspirational.
There are three ways you can experience the art contained in this archive:- If you don't want to commit to wading through a monster download, we have a promo reel up at YouTube walking viewers through a selection of the pack's images and songs.
- There is of course full download of the (200+ meg) artpack through its hosting over at the new mistigris.org
- And also you can experience most of the pack's contents (images, words, music) through its web gallery over at textmod.es.
- At least one piece from the MIST1015 artpack has broken free and taken on a life of its own -- Whazzit's surprise animated ANSI music video for a solo performance of me singing and playing Al Mader's Dead Man's Pants. I never thought that I'd see ANSI art of a skeleton playing an accordion, but there it is.
- Last but not least, just prior to pack release my jug band of the damned The Creaking Planks sat down for our first practice under our new mission: cover song rapid prototyping for a YouTube audience, basically having fun learning lots of songs on a regular basis upon request. We got up two good takes on songs that probably aren't going to set the world on fire, and on a lark also recorded an acoustic rendition of Underworld's "Born Slippy", which you probably remember from the Trainspotting soundtrack. It is a suprisingly good fit for our instrumentation! Sadly, though, the batteries ran out in the cameras partway through, so you will have to imagine what we look like furrowing brows with concentration jamming through a new song.
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