iMPERiAL

For five brief months in 1994 (April-August), iMPERiAL (16c) tied up a lot of emerging computer art talent in two of Canada's most artscene-active regions (BC and Quebec) by temporarily merging [the Lower Mainland]'s NWA (New Wave Artists) with la Belle Province's [GRiP/AD (Graphics Revolution in Progress / Art Division)]. It inherited some anachronistic and extraordinary qualities from NWA, notably its continued support of [tracker music] and [lit] (and indeed, NWA and iMP were helmed by The Narccissist, not only a courier but also a lit writer, a real outlier) in artpacks when other groups had been moving away from those mediums. Consequently, it is the first place that Mist founder [Cthulu] ever released any work in an artpack, and it gave him some strange ideas about how things in the artscene could go in regards to the absolute primacy of [ANSI art] that went rather contrary to all established practice literally everywhere else.

Organizationally, running one group with dual hubs located many time zones and thousands of kilometres apart, only accessible through costly [long-distance] phone calls or illegal [phreaking], resulted in communication between the two halves of its administration brain being very thin on the ground and ultimately led to its dissolution. Upon its conclusion, most of its upper-echelon talent ascended or lateral-shifted to other contemporary big groups (eg. NATiON, UNiON) and eventually (Mar 1995) GRiP stirred itself from the ashes and resumed where they left off pre-merger for ten more packs.

To those of us left behind in area code 604, we no longer had any local outlet in which to release our computer art, so a new group had to be established. Very quickly we scraped together Mistigris, organizing in competition with the similar efforts [Patriot] and [the Clan] (the two of them eventually uniting as [RAiD]) and [WBT (Wild Buffalo TamerZ], hoping to recapture some of iMPERiAL's top-shelf talent and a bit of its magic. (In practical terms, despite attempting to position ourselves as successors to its legacy, there was very little continuity of anything any artpack consumers hoped to see. Mist's founding myth of inheritors of iMPERiAL's legacy largely exists only in the imagination of Cthulu, outside of which it has always been basically wholly mythical. The one place we definitely followed in its footsteps, however, was in the uneasy establishment of disparate wings in Vancouver and Quebec, a problem so splendid we decided to repeat it verbatim!)