artpack - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

ARTPACK

  1. n. A package of artwork, historically released on a monthly basis [when possible]. The very earliest artpacks contained only ANSI art but "now" [2004, but this had been true for over a decade] include ANSI, ASCII, high-resolution graphics, music, animation and/or executable code.
  2. n. What started out as an easier way to distribute artwork among BBSes grew into one of the most vibrant art movements online. Monthly "Art Packs", where groups of artists would release the previous 30 days' worth of work, started out as ANSI-related artwork but soon grew into anything that could fit into a .ZIP.

from The Artscene Dictionary

"artpack" at Wikipedia also has some good information, which I will mirror here in case it does not last there:

An artpack is an archive of computer artwork which is distributed in a compressed format such as ZIP or RAR.

While most artpacks today contain either ANSI and ASCII art or hirez [VGA], they may also include a combination of RIPscrip art, [tracked] or otherwise digital music, poetry ("lit and editorials, 3D [computer animation] and related software utilities.

The first artpack ever was The Acquisition, released by ACiD Productions in the early 1990s. Artpacks were originally released on a monthly basis by competing groups in the artscene, naming their files according to their month and year of release, i.e. ACDU0692.ZIP. Very few groups still carry on the tradition of monthly releases in this day, rather they opt to number their artpacks in sequence rather than by date, i.e. MIMIC50.ZIP, releasing their artpacks not according to any defined schedule.

In retrospect, artpacks are recognized as one of the primary reasons that the early [computer art scene] is so well preserved and documented in relation to other underground computer scenes from the same era.

...

To these definitions, I might add: what differentiates an artpack from an archived directory full of computer art? There are a couple of niceties to provide context to the collection and denote some kind of curation. Of course an artpack needs to contain previously unreleased* computer art (some would specify textmode computer art, or go for the jugular and explicitly say ANSI art, otherwise... is a music disk an artpack? In practical terms no one ever asserted that eg. ACiD's late all-hirez artpacks weren't valid artpacks, but similar claims started to be made after we at Mistigris hooked up an artpack hopper to the Horsenburger teletext firehose), ideally in abundance ... I would consider a pack incomplete without at least a couple dozen specimens. And yet a zipfile full of computer artworks is not yet an artpack -- those are just the individual pieces of corn flakes that go in the unmarked box, what about our metaphorical cereal box itself? Well, you need a FILE_ID.DIZ -- ideally containing a logo representing the contents, but at the very least a text DIZscription of what the archive (the FILE being ID'd) is about. And there would be some legal and nutritional information on the cereal box -- in an artpack, those are the infofiles: they would include a newsletter as well as a memberlist, which might also have a distro site list tacked on to it. If you wanted to go for gold, in the early '90s you could also include a list of greetz from the senior staff member assembling the artpack. And during a certain golden age period just before the mid '90s, an artpack would also include a couple of executable programs no respectable art group could be without but which we haven't seen the likes of for decades: your group's art viewer program, and an application generator.

*A "release" can mean different things to different people, but I think a lowest common denominator definition that the artscene could agree on would be that a piece of art would not be considered unreleased if it had already been included in a different artpack that had already dropped. Exceptions to this (understood to be already released but still permitted) would include [joint]s (all participating artists had the rights to include the collaboratively-created works in one of their crew's artpacks, even if this right wasn't rigorously used) and career or year-in-review (etc.) retrospectives. Art groups were allowed to reuse iconic livery eg. getting repeat use out of a logo in multiple FILE_IDs or infofiles across numerous releases over a period of months -- most wouldn't dare to do so, as it could give the impression of the well having run dry: "look at these lamers who didn't have enough blocks to rub together to come up with a second logo, so they're just reusing the first one and really, it wasn't that good to begin with!" And, of course, review e-mags would reprint already-released work because it would be difficult to review art from artpacks that hadn't been shared with the public yet!