Creators of iNTENSE Art (cia)

Founded around July 1993 by TriDenT and The Orangutan Supreme, CiA absorbed the US ACE crew within a month, gaining Tron, Sudden Death, and Rude Boy, and started its own pack numbering at #5 because ACE had already done four. From there the institutional building was relentless. By September 1994 CiA had absorbed CAE, Imperial, and pieces of Reactor. Through the mid-90s CiA ran one of the deepest division structures in the scene including ANSi, RIP, VGA, Lit (Scrollz, eventually a webzine), Coders, Music, ASCII, Telecom. The CiAVIEW viewer shipped with packs; later the Iniquity BBS software shipped through CiA's coding department. The 1998 CIA Viewer ("Wiretap") was a serious technical achievement; the joint pack with Blade and Dark Illustrated planned for Dec 1998 was the kind of cross-group event that only the top tier organized. By August 1999 Napalm was openly deemphasizing ANSi/ASCII "dwindling production scene-wide" and Nov 1999 announced the web-first transition with Scrollz, hazmat, chaos teams as a multimedia umbrella. The 2000 packs went HTML-only. The brand kept going through 2001 but the institutional weight was migrating to the web. CiA's hazmat sub-group continued through 2000 as the ASCII outlet under t-bob then Offset's lead. CiA is one of the scene's great institution-builders. An art group that thought like a corporation, absorbed weaker peers, and produced the technical infrastructure most other groups borrowed. They never had ACiD's mythology or iCE's marquee names but had the structure, and for six years it worked.

first/last release: 1993/09 - 2001/02
years active: 1993 (3), 1994 (17), 1995 (18), 1996 (13), 1997 (18), 1998 (18), 1999 (39), 2000 (4), 2001 (1)
(sub)packs released: 131
smallest/largest pack: cia-50-c/ciapak20
lifetime artworks: 4450
lifetime lines: 154 889

average # of lines per artwork: 57
average # of artworks per pack: 34
longest serving member(s): napalm (1993/09-2000/11)
most productive member: cia (357)
extensions: CIA (1081), GIF (237), COM (7), APP (1), NFO (22), BAK (4), EXE (38), DIZ (24), ICE (1), 1 (4), 2 (1), 5 (1), ANS (61), TXT (43), MOD (17), ZIP (85), CFG (1), NOW (1), C!A (1), HLP (1), DOC (4), S3M (37), MEM (2), SIT (1), ASC (651), BAT (4), LIT (248), RIP (132), LGO (553), PCX (7), JPG (597), BIN (14), CAB (1), ESS (2), FLI (2), NCY (1), MDI (1), C%! (1), ADF (17), BMP (2), XB (9), GST (9), RMX (1), 1ST (1), AVI (1), HTM (3)

links: www - wikipedia