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Welcome to the mistfunk wiki!

This wiki is an attempt to make sense of the life and times of the Mistigris computer arts collective, which originated (as what we now call Mist Classic) in the cyberspace underground of the early '90s. At that time, we made announcements through the KiTHE e-mag, our members hobnobbed on the KiTSCHNet echomail network, and most of them drew their ANSI art screens in our house editor, PabloDraw -- which is still under active development today, even if many of us have since migrated over to [Moebius], [DurDraw] and [text.0w.nz]!

Mistigris was descended from iMPERiAL , which was itself descended from NWA , all organized out of area code 604. Some of our historic fellow travelers and contemporaries in 604's artscene included Integrity, Cenobite, and Hallucigenia, and our colleagues in the wider artscene community included underground artgroups ACiD, iCE and CiA. (Today our peers look more like Blocktronics, [Impure], HPM and [Pizzatoe] and other blast-from-the-past time travellers like Lazarus Blocks, Fire Graphics and [Fuel].)

To help make sense of things, we get to use this wiki to under one roof explain quite a bit about historic dialup bulletin board systems (our first WHQ was The Screaming Tomato) and the IRC (and other contemporary pre-Web Internet technologies such as FTP sites) -- the original virtual milieus for the underground PC computer artscene.

As seed stock to help tell the wider story of the underground computer artscene (and situate it in its proper context alongside the demoscene, the Public Domain BBS scene and the cybercrime milieu that made us underground) we have leaned on entries from The Artscene Dictionary, a fragmentary glossary of relevant terms cooked up circa 2004 but never publicly shared until now. Also, we have dragged in a number of related Wikipedia articles at risk of removal on that site for later reference to edit down and help tell our mutual story.

(We could drag in the contents of the latest WIP TABnotes' TABDEF file, circa 1998, kicking and screaming... but maybe a link will suffice at this time.)