Cyberspace art scene of the area code 604
or my lost youth as an underground elite in a textmode cyberscape
Recollections by the MiSTiGRiS artgroup founder Rowan "Cthulu" Lipkovits
It's a truism that many people, when asked in what period music, movies and games were at their peak, will invariably name whichever year they happened to be around 15 years old, and most plugged into current developments in popular culture as a way of learning about the greater world in which they live. When I was 15 I was regularly staying up well past midnight in front of a desktop computer, trying to evade busy signals coming through the phone lines and connect to computer systems administered by cybercriminals, all in the interest of celebrating through the emerging field of computer art the exploits of Canadian and international crews of hackers and crackers, many of whom were also 15 years old. My golden age was spent in an area code 604's corner of a vibrant virtual frontier space that flourished for a few intense years in the mid-'90s before fading away forever.
In these recollections, I’ve tried to faithfully reconstruct the online textmode cyberscape of area code 604 and illustrate it with artworks from the period. I can’t predict which details you, the reader, will find interesting or useful, so when in doubt, I’ve thrown everything in. As Carl Sagan famously said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
Chapter 1: Warez BBS — a glimpse of the digital underground
Chapter 2: ANSI artists — the interior decorators of the seamy side of cyberspace
Chapter 3: We can all be elite
Chapter 4: Mistigris — a collective of equals
Chapter 5: Regional BBS art scenes
Chapter 6: The end of an era
Chapter 7: Mistigris artpacks at a glance