- Mistigris MIST1318 artpack collection: self-portraits! -

By and large I don't request art on specific themes out of the loose cadre of
artists releasing their work under the Mistigris label; I just observe which
categories of topics are widely chosen among the creators and attempt to
retroactively curate based on the course they've all collectively already
chosen.  Typically this makes for artpack collections on pop culture themes --
when they're not creating (or who knows, perhaps while they are) turns out that
like the rest of us, they're watching a lot of TV and movies, listening to a
lot of music, and playing a lot of video games... but sooner or later, many of
them manage to hit on a specific topic that's perennial in the worlds of fine
art and modern art, a staple among the oeuvres of Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt
van Rijn, Frida Kahlo and Cindy Sherman, but one that curiously seems well-nigh
unknown in the realm of underground computer art: the self-portrait.

Why the rarity of the theme?  Surely the cybercrime-anonymity element of the
digital underground plays into its scarcity here, but that can't tell the whole
story here in a milieu where many of us have at one time or another composed a
reproducible "sig" or distinctive e-mail footer with which to certify our
artworks and correspondence with our electronic wax seal, peppering our
creations with our attributing initials no less than a graffiti writer who
inscribes their tag all over any unclaimed flat surface within reach.  Is it
that we feel our pixelated medium of choice is unsuitable for reproducing the
nuances of any but the most iconic and stylized visages with any kind of useful
fidelity?  But it's not wholly uncommon for underground artists to draw tribute
portraits of each other, so that claim rings a little specious.  Is it simply a
matter of choosing to focus on a preferred subject or aesthetic, which their
own appearance falls beyond?

Or is it as Cranksy suggested when invited to participate in this collection,
that every piece of art he makes is already a reflection on the essence of its
creator, immutably marked with the thumbprints of its maker to anyone who cares
to scrutinize it in any detail?  We may never know for certain.  Even among our
crew of creators here, with only a couple of exceptions self-portraits are
definitely far from the norm.  Ereneta practices weekly "mask Monday" selfies
to keep creatively limber (with only one historical Mistigris credit to his
name, he was brought on board here as a self-portraiture specialist, though his
main gig is storytelling... and to enshrine his nerd credentials for the
skeptics, he has a credit performing jaw harp on a '90s Lucasarts adventure
game.)  Starstew's incessant playful polymorphous creativity we have already
well established, and it's not unusual that his hungry muse may well gnaw on
him, the only subject at hand, until some other scrap of inspiration crosses
their path.

Some of these works are recent, dating to within the past couple of weeks,
while at least one of them goes back over 20 years (Mavrik's proposal for a
Mistigris Member ID card illustration, a prototype for the members section of
our '90s website that never made it.)  Some are quite abstract, while others
have a dogged fidelity to their subjects.  In most cases, it gives us pleasure
to present to you works celebrating their artists not only in subject but in
their distinctive personal styles, eg. 8bit_poet as a Susan Kare-style program
icon, Webersso.n as a fusion bead babe, xer0 as a human glitch, and Sentience
as a psychedelic kaleidoscope fever dream.  And so forth.

Many of you out there are no doubt suffering from artpack overload at this
point, with nearly every artpack-releasing entity out there having released an
artpack this month... we ourselves released MIST1218 a couple of weeks ago and
are on track to hit you with MIST0119 a couple of weeks from now.  This one was
just folded in here as a bonus between regularly-scheduled releases as it
wasn't quite as populated as one of our main-track artpacks... and because we
wanted to puzzle future artpack scholars trying to figure out what kind of
monthly release schedule we were following to come up with 13 artpacks in
2018.  Consequentially we've hit a species of artpack-packaging overload
also... so please forgive the lack of contributor bio infofile this time
around: if I'll ever get away with the "picture is worth a thousand words"
canard anywhere, it's here -- the images in this specific collection are only
all too eager to tell you all about their creators.

(And I must apologise to my colleagues for failing to get a self-portrait of my
own in here: busting my hump creating this month's heinous but resolutely
on-point FILE_ID.DIZ took up all the time I had allotted to making one, but
rest assured the best idea I had anyway was to take a screenshot of a broken
non-player-avatar-reflective mirror (apparently not yet a solved problem?) from
some late '90s FPS video game anyhow.  I give you the concept for free; the
execution is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Hats off to 67, Fuel and Impure -- December was lit!  Thanks for humouring my
highfalutin' concepts, and see you all in 2019!

- Cthulu, Mistigris founder, Dec 30, 2018.

www.mistigris.org