Mistigris— a collective of equals
Much like in the "Logan's Run" novel by W.F. Nolan and G.C. Johnson , there was always a countdown ticking in the underground art scene. Most participants left the fold shortly after high school — many moved away for university, often to distant and inaccessible area codes, while those who remained quickly faced more immediate concerns like paying rent or trying to impress girls, neither of which was helped by releasing artpacks. (Briefly on the topic of gender representation in the underground art groups: most crews didn’t have a single woman among their ranks, creating a bit of a toxic and repellent boys' club feedback loop dynamic within the subculture. Mistigris, by contrast, played host to more women than the rest of the underground art scene combined. While addressing gender imbalance was never a stated goal, we partially did so anyway—an unintended but welcome outcome of the unconventional way we conducted our affairs.)
Big fish in the community didn't want to end their careers releasing their most accomplished work in an obscure farm team whose artpacks were doomed to go unnoticed by the wider community. So, the most talented artists were always looking to climb the status ladder when the path they were on reached a plateau; rather than remain big fish in a small pond, they wanted to take their rightful place among the elites of international supergroups. When iMPERiAL shut down, its top artists all sought to continue their upward trajectory by joining more prestigious groups—most of which operated over Internet Relay Chat—rather than settling for small beans local concerns. Those of us for whom that leap wasn’t realistic—particularly the lit writers, many of whom hadn’t fully realized that iMPERiAL had been one of the last major groups to support expression in that medium—we needed a local crew where we could continue to grow our practice. And if no one else was going to provide such a crew, we’d have to do it ourselves—ideally correcting some of the issues we’d witnessed in our previous groups. And so, Mistigris artgroup was formed in 1994.
Too often, underground artgroups functioned as tiny dictatorships in cyberspace—ideally benevolent, but you took your chances. They were typically steered by a small cadre of inspired tyrants who made all the decisions: overseeing mergers, recruitments, expulsions, and handling the packaging of artpacks. The creation of artpacks included injecting metadata into submissions and assembling the final ZIP file, which housed all the released artwork alongside a FILE_ID.DIZ, a member list, a distribution (“distro”) site list, and a newsletter-style infofile, where inarticulate, emotionally unfiltered teenagers held forth on the issues of the day (e.g., which cool new artists were joining and which lamers were being kicked out).
Most artgroups were led by senior staff who were either elite ANSI illustrators—magnetic figures to emerging artists seeking mentorship—or couriers, people who could independently produce or deliver the goods. If you were limited to local calls, couriers might be gatekeepers bottlenecking your ability to have your creative work appreciated outside your area code. If you were on good terms with them, they might encourage artists in their cadre to create promos for your BBS or other projects. But if relations soured, they could just as easily blacklist you, and your name in the underground would be mud. Worse still, if they decided it was time to check out and pick up a different hobby, they might go dark without notice, throwing their community into disarray. In a milieu where no one knew each other’s real names, phone numbers, or where else to find one another online, such disappearances could be difficult to recover from. And in some cases, they didn’t just walk away — they went out with a bang, alienating as many of their peers as they could while self-destructing, just to let everyone know how little they thought of you.
But we did what we could within the system. These arrangements were always tenuous, fragile, and inherently unsustainable. So when we established Mistigris, we deliberately framed it as a collective of equals, capable of governing itself without being tied to a glorious, terrible adolescent egomaniac who might well sink the entire ship during their curtain call. (In hindsight, this was a moment of idealism for our teenage proprietor, who had no practical experience attempting to work by consensus.) In practice, more decisions needed to be made than people willing or opinionated enough to make them. Some choices were made almost automatically, as was the case with the naming of our collective (Mistigris), our echomail network (Kitsch), and our electronic magazine (Kithe), all chosen through a Dada-inspired anti-art process of selecting random words from random pages of a dictionary. Other decisions required actual discussions. But over time, as others grew weary of the seemingly endless cycle of consultation, the burden of Mistigris' custodianship fell entirely to me.