artgroup - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

Since antiquity, fine artists and craftsmen have worked in fellowship under guild systems. In the Renaissance they would undergo an instructive apprenticeship in the studio of a master, and in more modern times artists would practice their work in communities. A loose cannon or a lone wolf might well head out to nurse their genius to fruition in isolation without the debasing influence of lesser minds, but for the rest of us we mostly have made art among colleagues in possession of similar philosophical and aesthetic priorities -- belonging to the same school or movement as us, or (otherwise put) an art group. So how does an artgroup differ?

Public Domain ANSI artists worked in isolation -- the slow single-line BBSes of the '80s were not very conducive to online group projects. Indeed, creative computer-related group projects of the era tended to fall into two categories: business ventures taking place in realtime in rented office spaces, and online teams of outlaw specialists distributed across the world cracking, boasting and distributing commercial software. (There was a third flavour, of the university model train club variety, but I digress.) Until Aces of ANSI Art began bundling ANSI art by multiple creators -- with few exceptions, the first artpacks -- there were no groups (or crews or posses, to borrow a little contemporary hip-hop terminology) of ANSI artists, just echomail message bases featuring individual screens posted haphazardly, as they were drawn. AAA gave way to ACiD and suddenly a stark line was drawn, between those in the circle of these elites and the lamers left out... and if they couldn't get into ACiD, they just might have to convoke a group of their own as a [salon de refusees].

The grouped model demonstrated by the warez scene (and the demoscene emerging from it) could serve computer artists well, if they were interested in maximising the return on their hobby by forming a collective with like-minded ANSI punks and regulating which local BBSes in their area code would get to look extra-fancy. They could exchange tips and tools and inspiration sources with other practitioners of the art in a focused way, learning together, sometimes leaning on each other's stengths to cook up gestalt joint creations more virtuosic than any of them would have been capable of cooking up solitarily (... and hopefully they could also collectively negotiate some access to the varied riches of the computer underworld for their trouble.)

In the early '90s, artgroup membership would be highly contingent on who happened to be active living in your neck of the woods -- many area codes would have a major artgroup in their area whose membership was generally pretty tied to geography. Initially only groups with [phreaking] courier connections could rely on being able to harvest submissions from far-flung contributors, though this system would weaken substantially with the spread of affordable dial-up home Internet access (a double-bladed sword, enhancing underground computer artist networking as it steamrolled the local BBS communities which gave the underground computer artists a reason to make their art in the first place!)

Even if all the computer artists in a given area code got along together well enough to strive together under one banner, there were more computer artists out there in other area codes who you usually couldn't easily incorporate into your group, because no one wanted to pay the long-distance phone bills needed to allow them to call in to the same BBSes. So they would form their own regional crews. You would release an artpack, they would release one... uh oh, now they can compare each other's work, and hopefully be spurred on to excel and outdo each other. (Other options included raiding each other's membership, attempting to merge the groups, or just trash talking each other in your infofiles.) Now we didn't just have a group, but a scene: what we called the [artscene]. (And if you can't handle the elitism and petty politics, for your there is always the solo pack.)

Once everyone was on the internet and artgroup membership was no longer constrained by the bottleneck of making expensive long-distance phone calls, underground computer artists could theoretically join crews based on other criteria that helped distinguish one from the next. In practice, outside of geography there was usually not all that much to differentiate the groups from each other -- though you might be advised to join one based out of the same time zone you lived in, to maximise your chances of being able to socialise with your colleagues on the IRC in a coordinated fashion during off hours (ironically the advice worked the other way for BBS denizens -- the more locals you contended with, the likelier you were to encounter a busy signal when attempting to check in) ... unless they were a committed night owl, an artist in the lower 48 might have a hard time achieving realtime chat with their homies if they held membership in a group based out of Hawaii or Europe. (Granted, in Europe, South America and Quebec, you might also need to affiliate with colleagues who also spoke your language, though everywhere in cyberspace on the (under)ground a sullen Anglo teenage argot, spiced with nuggets of jive and hacker jargon, was the lingua franca.)