Mistigris


Mistigris is an artscene group founded in late 1994 by Cthulu of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
The group primarily operated out of BBSes within the city's area code 604 joined across suburbs and provinces by the group's echomail network known as KiTSCHNet. In addition to numerous music disks, games, loaders, BBS utilities, applications, issues of their house diskmag KiTHE and other one-off projects, Mistigris released thirty-five artpacks 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

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. 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 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.
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 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, Sonic Equinox and The Immortal Syndicate, and fielded representatives at numerous demoparties such as New Media '95, Naid '95 and '96, Crash '97 in Calgary and even at Assembly and Evoke in '99, following what hadn't yet been acknowledged as the final official release of Mist Classic.
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, Dark and Fistful of Steel . Cthulu had plans to tour with several smaller groups as well, to help mutually raise each other's 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. 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 went down, it was replaced in short order by The Jade Monkey, 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, 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.
On Hallowe'en 2014, following some 16 years of dormancy, Mistigris released a reunion artpack commemorating the 20th anniversary of their first artpack release, and began undertaking a spree of releasing old, unreleased materials, new works, and re-releasing computer art collections that had become corrupted or otherwise unavailable since their release in the '90s. Beginning in October 2016, Mistigris worked with participants in a resurgent teletext art revival to begin a campaign of monthly artpack releases for an entire year, a feat without precedent in their earlier, sporadic, existence and not known in the artscene since iCE Advertisements stopped releasing artpacks in 2002. Since reviving, Mistigris has represented underground computer art traditions in wider media as elder statesmen, including curating episodes of the Art of Beatz and Bitcouver radio programs and having their creations appear in print in the "de l'encre et des tripes" internet zine and Volume 2 of the Masters of Pixel Art book series.

Notable releases