Blocktronics - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki
The ANSI art supergroup of the 21st century, from its inception in 2008 Blocktronics (sometimes styled 6lock7ronics or simply 67) had the strategic advantage of containing virtually the entire ANSI art community among its membership: all the best artists of the '90s who still had any interest in the hobby, fortified with the broadening of a little life experience and an absence of the toxic drama that plagued their affairs when they were teenagers. If you were going to be drawing ANSI in 2010, you absolutely were planning to release it in a comfortably dominant Blocktronics artpack, because why would you go to all the trouble of reinventing the wheel when a 16-wheeler is blasting its air horn right next to you?
Presumably for many of its members, it served as a relatively healthy way to experience a midlife crisis and temporarily revert to responsibility-free old preoccupations of our feckless youth, cheaper than buying a sports car and yielding fewer negative side effects than having an affair. They got together on networked PabloDraw sessions and cranked out the biggest and best ANSI art screens of all time, even if there was basically no one to draw them for anymore.
But having processed that midlife crisis, many of them returned to their happy place, did a victory lap, and then departed and continued on with their lives. There just weren't all that many '90s ANSI gods interested in revisiting their past glories, and when they moved on over the years there weren't really enough latecomers joining to compensate for the big absences in the room, which definitely couldn't be filled with the talents of the handful of emerging modern ANSI artists, who are too few and whose shoes are simply too small.
Blocktronics suffered an existential chill when BYM died in 2014, and then lost its agitated engine when enzo retired c. 2020. Subsequent senior staff attempted in vain to shake artists down for submissions, but the moment had passed and they couldn't keep it up at their high degree of quality. Following its celebration of the legacy of Fire Graphics, most of the remaining active artists in their stable continued moving in that direction and joined Nail when he formally revived Fire in 2021. (There's a bit of a running gag in Mistigris history, the optimistic and naive notion that as long as we're able to wait out and outlast our fellow travellers in the cosmic race of attrition we will eventually be in a situation to provide a home for some of the talent left high and dry by the shuttering of other underground computer art concerns, left with no other options. On the ground, this actually never happens, but in retrospect it's a little funny to see happen, like a clown who somehow manages to repeatedly slip on the same banana peel multiple times. The talent winding up with Fire, who we definitely killed dead on at least one occasion, makes the sweet irony all the more delicious.)
While they never formally wrapped, it is difficult to imagine what it might take to rouse Blocktronics from its doldrums.
When they were still running hot, Blocktronics released a lot of themed artpacks, several of which celebrated defunct ANSI art crews of the '90s (ACiD Productions, iCE Advertisements, [Apathy]), and launched a few [solo pack]s by Filth and several spin-offs including AMiSH, Sauna, and [Duo Daughters]. From 2019 through 2022 they released annual ANSI art calendars, a tradition upheld by Fire since.