The Big Dig

Immediately following the release of the MIST0322 artpack, Cthulu reserved space in [LDA]'s Mistigris networked Moebius server for us to conduct a big, tall ANSI art experiment and attempt to collectively mint a sprawling megascroller (admittedly on a humbler scale and with a smaller crew of contributors) the likes of which Blocktronics knocked out of the ballpark a decade earlier (eg. 2013's [ACiD Trip] or 2014's [WTF4].) Beyond our TMNT joint in the FIRE0497 Mistigris World Tour pack and the [MISTFUNK] ASCII joint in MIST3YRA, we didn't have any such works in our recent catalogue. (The Textmode Friends actually busted out similar joints on a regular basis, but as they were not well integrated with the rest of the Mistigris community, we were trying to do the same trick they made look easy. Spoiler warning: it wasn't!)

A year later a number of Mist ANSI artists had drawn some fantastic but disparate segments that were meant to somehow coexist in a larger work, but they needed to be (again, somehow) integrated with each other in a way that made sense narratively and looked good. Cthulu further muddied the waters by editorially rearranging the seqence of some of them beyond his ability to situate them properly in a way that fulfilled the second criterion detailed above. Final integration of all of the disjointed segments took another six months, which really bogged down the momentum and enthusiasm for its release.

The proposed theme for this scroller was just to travel down into the bowels of the Earth, starting from a great height, so that the scroller might act as tremendous core sample of sorts, exposing all sorts of buried subjects that had been long hidden or forgotten. The ultimate work. released in the MIST1223 artpack, began in outer space before descending through the sky and past skyscrapers to a construction site excavation ("[under construction]" hole-digging iconography of the Geocities era was planned to be used as DIZ iconography for this work, tying in to its theme), where bones, fossils, treasures and underground animals could be seen. Still lower saw the scroller exploring subway tunnels and mysterious subterranean chambers before dissolving into a psychedelic fugue of pilots and magical creatures, before plunging through a dangerous underwater segment and emerging in a species of Dante's Inferno, travelling through several diabolical scenarios before coming to rest on a sinister figure and, finally, an elevator operator offering to take the viewers back up to the top.

Part of the initial formal concept of The Big Dig was an exploration of alternate underground computer art release paradigms, thinking about how the [Amiga] ASCII art community makes its releases in the form of collies rather than artpacks, with everything -- the art and its infofiles -- all integrated into one big datafile. Cthulu spent a lot of time fruitlessly spinning his wheels attempting to devise a FILE_ID.DIZ in the sky to inaugurate the single-file release with. Instead, we vented it as part of MIST1223 as a holiday celebration allowing us to start 2024 without it dangling over us like a the Unfinished Business of Damocles.

It was a lot of thing, and I would also be very surprised if we ever attempt such an undertaking again!