TeklordZ

Named after William Shatner's regrettable SF novel series, this Hawaii-based artgroup was founded by Smooth with some serious demo and graffiti fundamentals, dropping its first preview release (its artpacks were called "Artiphakz") in July of 1994. Its WHQ was Smooth's BBS Dungeon 2, and its official echomail network was iFXnet. The emag Emigre was also tied to their community. Smooth started strong but quickly ts (much later aka mattmatthew) ascended through its ranks to take on a dominant creative role and relieve him of administration of the crew.

Being based in Hawaii, for reasons of geography their scene was isolated and different to synch with larger underground artscene communities, as much of North America was asleep when its artists logged on the IRC after work. Being based on the West Coast, we in Mist got to enjoy some interactions and moments of cultural exchange with them, and they also enjoyed a kinship with their colleagues in Australian artscene crews such as Maeve Wolf and Squidgalator/2. There was a lot of fun, casual talk of someday merging Teklordz and Mist (we joked that if we could fold Fire in as well (as we did in March of 1995!) we could name the resultant group MisFiTZ) but ultimately they ran their course on their own. We aspired to do a Mistigris World Tour stop with them, but dropping their last, uh, Artiphak in January of 1997 meant the timing just didn't quite work out. We saw some submissions from longtime TeklordZ member Kyo after they wrapped up.

In their two and a half years of activity, they logged at least 26 releases (some later "repacked" with small updates or variations) of various kinds, so their time in the scene was well spent! I don't know if I personally would have the discipline needed to log the basement computer hours if I had Hawaii in my back yard.