Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms

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Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms
April 9, 2012 1:18 PM   Subscribe

Wired called them, digital graffiti and John Carmack spoke of them at QuakeCon 2011 but they remain little known. A recently released full-length documentary (download) gives a portrait of the creative digital subculture from 80s to the present day.

Previously: The 'demoscene', Please insert disk 2, I am bit tired of blobby things, though, 96k of hilarity, The Demoscene is alive and kicking and Live Coded Demoscene.

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The demoscene began as part of the warez scene, where small introductions (shortened to intros) were added to the cracks, later combined into a single word, cracktros. These intro became more complex until some were not longer being added to the front of cracked games but released in their own right.

Members have been documenting the scene in various way for some time, creating databases of demos, such as pouet and the Commodore 64 scene db, creating news sites like scene.org and bitfellas. Preserving demos, with projects like the three volume mindcandy collection (previously and also) or online with demoscene.tv and capped.tv. Others like Tamas Polgar have been giving presentation's The Complete History of the Demoscene from 2005 and The Art of Pixels: from sprites to Photoshop from 2006.

mefi's own Jason Scott produced a series of posts in 2007 giving an overview of the scene:

Rhizome did something similar in 2010

With the Finnish broadcasting company, YLE produced a documentary series, made by the artists themselves covering the 90s-00s, also broadcast in 2010.

Music has always been a large part of the scene since the days of the SID (previously) and the chiptune scene with radio stations such as Nectarine (previously) SceneSat Radio and kohina just playing demo tracks alongside archives such as KeyGen Jukebox, MOD Archive or Chiptune and CD compilations like Demo Vibes.

With others taking a more reflective look at remix culture in the Demoscene (slides), how the demoscene fits into the larger culture, asking if demos are the working class of Computer Art?, producing academic research and starting organisations, questioning the current state and future of the scene. Subjects much discused at demoparties.

This weekend sees two of the larger parties take place, The Gathering and Revision. Assembly (earlier, previously) another of the well known parties take place in the summer. Normally weekend long events, where demosceners gather to socialise, watch the latest demos, compete in the various competitions and attend talks covering aspects of demo creation. Many of the techincal presentation's are available online, giving a look into the techincal process of creating demos, either in general terms:

or for particular platforms, such as the C-64:

WebGL and JavaScript:

or modern PC rendering:

and some videos of typical intros and demos:

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