The end of an era
Even fortified with the youthful vigor of kRAP, it was clear to us that Mist couldn't continue as though it were business as usual because the digital underground was steadily crumbling around us. As more and more people gained Internet access, fewer and fewer were calling into or operating BBSes, underground or otherwise. That meant fewer boards to draw promos for and fewer emerging artists looking to develop their skills in their local community. Microsoft Windows 95 was beginning to chip away at MS-DOS in a serious way (even if OS/2 wasn't), and the primacy of the textmode, command line interface computing paradigm was steadily losing ground. Even the primary movers at ACiD Productions, after achieving good initial results with the airbrush-tattooist-Photoshop whiz Catbones, rebranded as Artistic Creations In Demand and eventually spun off their ANSI division entirely as Avenge. If the underground was going to persist, it was going to have to do things differently.
Well, better or worse, doing things differently was kind of our specialty. From late 1996 through mid-1997, we undertook the Mistigris World Tour — every month, we packed up our latest creations and showcased them en masse as temporary guests in other groups' artpacks, like a large and jolly gang of artistically-inclined party crashers.
The decay in the scene all around us was apparent — several of the groups we made arrangements with dissolved before we could reach them with our life-giving art. Nevertheless, we pulled off this nomadic, collaborative endeavor for half a year with a handful of fellow travelers, including the Blade Nation, Fistful of Steel, a revived and ascendant Fire Graphics, and Dark Illustrated. Eventually, we felt we'd achieved enough exposure to new audiences and resumed making releases under our banner. Heading into 1998, we were about to enjoy an unprecedented spree of monthly releases, the challenging pace that all art groups aspired to maintain but few managed to achieve for long.
But how to stay relevant in changing times? For some of us, artpacks were no longer enough. We wanted our poets reading poems on stages, for our illustrators selling prints, for both of them publishing books. We wanted our musicians selling compact discs. The pro bono internship had lasted long enough, and we felt we were ready to cut our teeth on customers who paid with money instead of leech access.
Many of us were talented in traditional, offline, fine and performing arts and were following the developments in consumer-grade scanners and recorders, hoping to bring our sketches, photographs, and performances into the cyber realm. And the elephant in the room was that, of course, everyone knew at this point that the future—if there was to be one—would have to engage the burgeoning World Wide Web. Sure, we enjoyed a free Geocities homepage, but that was understood to be merely a placeholding foot in the door while we waited to figure out what the Web was actually for. By then, most of us were old enough to further develop our interests in creative technologies at universities or vocational colleges.
Everyone agreed it was time to get serious, except we didn't exactly agree on what that meant. Half of our collective felt that it was time to pivot toward tapping the strength of our real-world creations; the other half thought that it meant focusing on launching our strongest talents and cutting ties from the dead weight. Caught in the middle, there I was, painstakingly attempting to encode an artpack as a website complex in bespoke HTML that I only half understood. While interrupting our spree of monthly releases tackling this unexpectedly slippery challenge, the group tore itself in half; the real-world contingent rebranded itself as Hallucigenia and enjoyed a short but sweet run. The "strongest talents" contingent had been counting on getting its pick of who would be retained and who would be dismissed, and concluded that the talent remaining in the stable was not enough to uphold a viable community of digital creators. So, they noped out. The website was nearly completed, but the group had dissolved and the audience had dispersed. The final Mist Classic release was never completed in its time and never saw the light of day until our revival on the occasion of our 20th anniversary in 2014.
Things may have played out differently in other area codes, but our experience was that any time there were multiple artgroups active in the same turf, it was always with an eye toward one of them becoming or shoring up their position as top dog or, at the very least, they were biding their time until the opportunity arose. In contrast, area code 604 also hosted an oddly bountiful assortment of tracker music crews, all enjoying doing their own thing in their lane, none of whom seemed interested in raiding their colleagues or squeezing them out of competition. EuphoniX made rave-inspired music for the Amiga community. Trideja was a species of musical Atari ST user group. Digitallusions was essentially a sole proprietorship. The Immortal Syndicate focused on making tools and music disks targeted at the demoscene. SONiC EQUiNOX operated more like a tracker music club, and Happy Fetus Records was a kind of Luv-A-Fair club night afterparty.
They all had their own traditional biases toward computing platforms and tracking software (Impulse Tracker vs. FastTracker II), but they were all aware and appreciative of each other's work. They freely remixed each other's songs, shared each other's samples, and happily collaborated temporarily with each other and us at the TrackerFix compos we hosted and the 604 Music Disk we jointly presented at the Naid'96 demoparty as the New Media Group.
So, where was their drama? It may come down to the immediate nature of the presentation and reception of visual art may have lent that medium more to hot takes and summary judgment. Music and the multimedia presentations of the demoscene demand more patience and consideration — you can't, after all, figure out how much you like a piece until you get all the way through it. But ANSI screens were easy to form an opinion about — almost instantly. So, in the time it took a nerdy basement-dweller to listen to a single Protracker MODule, that same rude punk could have already dragged you and all your friends through the mud just for not appreciating your ANSI art as much as they felt they should.