The group primarily operated out of BBSes 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 disks, games, loaders, BBS utilities, applications (such as the PabloDraw ANSI art editor), issues of their house diskmagKiTHE 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.
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 netlabels 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 of Mist Classic. (Mistigris revival contributors have represented the group, competing and placing at contemporary demoparties beginning in 2015.)
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 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. (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-upinternet 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.
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 (and counting), 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 (2016) and Bitcouver (2017) 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
imp-0894.zip – Final iMPERiAL release, August 1994
mist1094.zip – First MiSTiGRiS release, October 1994
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 23, 1999, re-released digitally Dec 1, 2014
A bulletin board system or BBS is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.
The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual art, and musical skills. Demos and other demoscene productions are shared at festivals known as demoparties, voted on by those who attend and released online.
The computer art scene, or simply artscene, is the community interested and active in the creation of computer-based artwork.
.nfo is a commonly used filename extension for text files that accompany various digital scene releases with information about them.
ACiD Productions (ACiD) is a digital art group. Founded in 1990, the group originally specialized in ANSI artwork for BBSes. More recently, they have extended their reach into other graphical media and computer software development. During the BBS-era, their biggest competitor was iCE Advertisements.
Christian Wirth, better known by the pseudonym RaD Man, is an American computer artist and historian. He works in the field of ANSI art, a method of creating art using a limited set of text characters and color escape codes based loosely on the relevant ANSI standard.
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on bulletin board systems. 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. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape sequences that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the de facto.ANS file extension.
An artpack is an archive of computer artwork which is distributed in a compressed format such as ZIP or RAR.
iCE Advertisements is a digital art group founded in Canada by Many Axe in 1991. Although the expanded title is rarely ever used, iCE is an acronym for Insane Creators Enterprise. iCE, along with ACiD Productions, was one of the most prominent and critically successful groups on the underground computer artscene.
Remorse ASCII, or Remorse 1981, is the official ASCII sub-label of ACiD Productions.
Superior Art Creations (SAC) is an underground artscene group which caters primarily to and is well known within the warez scene. SAC members have made, besides ANSI and ASCII art, VGA bitmap graphics, tracker music, and a variety of other works. SAC's character graphics have also been used in bottles and FTP servers.
BBS: The Documentary is a 3-disc, 8-episode documentary about the subculture born from the creation of the bulletin board system (BBS) filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com.
Soulz at Zero (SAZ) was a lit group formed in 1994 by Jack Flack and The Stranger. SAZ released 25 monthly packs over a period of two years, beginning in September 1994 and ending in September 1996. The group took its name from a Souls at Zero poster Flack had in his bedroom at the time, with the trailing "s" in "Souls" changed to a "z". Soulz at Zero was so well known that their name was added to the "Elite Acronym List," which was used to separate "lamers" from "elite users."
Creators of Intense Art, or Cia was an underground computer artscene group that primarily released ANSI, ASCII, and high resolution artwork from 1993 to 2001. Along with iCE and ACiD, Cia was one of the most active, and longest lasting groups on the artscene.
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 influential and critically successful group. Dark was especially popular with Canadian ANSI artists, who made up a large portion of the member base.
Celerity BBS was a descendant of the freely distributed source of TCS BBS 1.43, and ultimately nearly completely rewritten.
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.
Fire, later known as Fire Graphics, was an underground computer artscene group that released ANSI, ASCII, and high resolution artwork from 1994 to 1998.
This is a list of the minor computer underground artscene groups spanning from roughly 1992 to the present day.
Aces of ANSI Art was the first group of artists specifically organized for the purposes of creating and distributing ANSI art. The group was founded and operated by two BBS enthusiasts from California, "Zyphril" and "Chips Ahoy", from 1989 through 1991.
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