Demoscene; A Look At The History Of A Digital Subculture
I love stumbling across documentaries on sub – cultures, places that breed in spite of, create new ways of doing things, are anti – orthodox, are bound by passion. This particular sub culture is called demoscene, a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer. The main goal of a demo is to show off programming, artistic and musical skills.
This esoteric group of computer nerds have been exploring and generating art with computers since the dawn of the affordable home computers in the early 1980s such as the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC and later the Amiga and Atari ST. I have never heard of them until now. Until I saw this documentary from Moleman called Moleman 2 – Demoscene: The Art of the Algorithms.
At it’s most basic the demoscene revolves around groups competing in real-time to generate graphics synced with music. Here’s part of the film blurb:
Computers provided an opportunity for the creator to produce visuals and sound effects and combine them to create the ultimate audiovisual experience, by using only the language of mathematics and writing program code, without physical interaction. As a result of such techniques, demos were born, and with them, the demoscene subculture. A demo can best be understood as a spectacular animated music video which is usually a few minutes long. And yet it’s something entirely different from a traditional video. Computer technics is the fastest developing part of our world, which produces more and more new opportunities for art. Moleman shows you now a digital subculture, where artists don’t use always the latest technology, but their aim is also to bring out the best from 30 year-old computer technics.
If you’ve never heard of it well here’s your chance to learn something new today
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