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I think it has more to do with intent. If your goal is to design a program or build a network to accomplish a certain task, that is engineering. But if your goal is to make an impression on the viewer, to say something, to induce emotion, to do something other than just run network cables or perform a calculation, then that's art. If it also happens to be a usable program or network, then it might be functional art.

Look at the demoscene. For many years programmers have created demos, which are generally ten minute graphical presentations set to music. They're sort of like music videos. The good ones take a huge amount of skill to create, both in coding and design. A good demo has aesthetic and often musical value and has a strong effect on the viewer. Demos are definitely art; they just happen to involve a great deal of technical skill as well.

Two good demoscene-related sites are http://www.ojuice.net/ and http://www.scene.org/ .

-John

Yes, indeed. Don't bother going to The Gathering if you're looking for a demoparty. Go to events like Breakpoint instead. Breakpoint is the biggest demoscene only party around, so no gamers. There are lots of other, smaller, demoparties, too, if you don't like a crowd. Check out the party list on Orange Juice for more info.

Yes, indeed. Don't bother going to The Gathering if you're looking for a demoparty. Go to events like Breakpoint instead. Breakpoint is the biggest demoscene only party around, so no gamers. There are lots of other, smaller, demoparties if you don't like a crowd. Check out the party list on Orange Juice for more info.

Whenever I see articles like this, it bothers me a tiny bit since the demoscene has existed for over a decade earlier than machinima has, and the artform is much more interesting and sophisticated. Yet demos get hardly any recognition from mainstream media because they don't appeal to the common denominator (probably because the art of the demoscene is so nebulous and abstract). Where is the coverage of the stunningly beautiful engines and music of the demoscene?

Then again, coverage of the scene would probably drive it further underground and/or stifle its creativity. Okay, forget I said anything.

pouet (demo archive with discussion): http://www.pouet.net

scene.org (pretty much all demos since 1993 ...) : http://www.scene.org

those three have plenty of links to other sites too. nearly all platforms still have strong demo scenes active, from the Oric (no really!) through to the Atari Falcon (and ST/e)

you don't have to be a programmer to take part either, if you can pixel or weild a graphics tablet, knock up a catch chip choon or an entire mp3 album you'll fit right in.

you speak of the scene as if it was past tense ... i think you'll find that you are wrong!!

the scene is still going quite strong! :D

Not to nitpick, but many oldschool coders (Finland, Sweden, etc. - the demoscene) also called it "assembler" when leaving out the "language" qualifier. It was called Assembly Language, ASM, assembly, assembler, etc.

Check out the demoscene. Not really previously unexploited media so much as using an existing and well known medium in an interesting way.

For Europeans, Nectarine is where it's at for retro Amiga/C64/PC demo scene and old game music.

I agree. That was the ugliest website I've ever seen. Even Microsoft knows that if you can express something with just text, use text! Every frickin' word in the menu system was a graphic. Nasty! Not only did it take forever to load, but the required bandwidth to support a bunch of people all grabbing each and every one of those useless little graphics was insane. And that background graphic..?! It all added up to the website constantly being slower than ... (And it didn't help that all the pages were dynamic, too. Talk about shooting yourself in both feet.)

Anyone who's consdering web design, take the Blender site as a case and point example of what NOT to do. (Another good example of poor web design, where the site would've been cool if the creator hadn't gone little graphic happy, is OJuice.net, but at least they have a "Light" version..)

Demoscene - Music, Gfx, DEMOS!

The largest computer artforms is the demo. These demos are music and gfx wrapped into a small package.

There are contests around the world called "Demo Partys" which give awards on best gfx, best music, best demos in sizes (64K,etc), 1 hour to compose tunes with a set of samples, best mp3, best Gfx, most genuine.

Many of these artists and musicians are working in the game industry or entertainment industry. Many of the older 64/apple/amiga game musicians are working for the largest game companies, creating tunes for your games you play today.

Assembly - The largest Demo party in the world
OrangeJuice - Demoscene information center
Google demo directory.
Nectarine - 100% scene music radio!
Crystal Melon - Famous cracktros (minidemos) many converted to Shockwave so people can view them. (They were on a c64 and Amiga!)

If you interested in video game, demo music, mods (4 channel) music, is like a midi with the wave files included.
Check out
Nectarine - 100% scene music radio!
Mod Archive
Google Mod directory
Aminet AmiNet mod archive.
C64: Back in Time CD Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish, Chris Hülsbeck, Peter Clarke - Music Game Gods.

They have It's called 3DMark.

The group who wrote the classics "Unreal" and "Second Reality" known as the Future Crew, started a little company back in '95 called Remedy. You may have heard of their game, "Max Payne". Well anyway when they first released a benchmarking tool called Final Reality (sounds like Second Reality, eh) it was such a success that Remedy spawned off the Mad Onion. Think of it as commercial demos.

The demoscene will never die. It just keeps changing. To an Amiga cracker/intro/demo coder the scene has been truly dead since the early 90's. Try telling that to the sceners of today.

Major scene news site: ojuice

If you want to have a very good glimpse at what the scene is producing / as produced:
http://www.pouet.net
It's an everything2-type site..

For a music radio broadcasting solely scene music:
nectarine radio,
(Those three websites are very well integrated..)

and finally shameless plug on noerror. (scene music news)

The Gathering isn't meant to be so much a "gamer" party as it is supposed to be for the Demo Scene .

Good examples of what demos are are here if you have a win32 or DOS box around.

More parties like Mekka, Assembly, The Party and others exist.

The Gathering isn't meant to be so much a "gamer" party as it is supposed to be for the Demo Scene .

Good examples of what demos are are here if you have a win32 or DOS box around.

More parties like Mekka, Assembly, The Party and others exist.

stuffed the html link up it's here for those that can't bear using the keyboard =)
--

And go take a look at vip2 invtro. Trust me, you'll stop using past tense to talk about the demoscene.

Cheers!

Recent productions in the demoscene european demoscene should definitively be an interesting multimedia movement to cover. Demos and the demoscene have been around since the early eighties, and the repertoire of quality productions for every platform you can dream of out there should make for interesting viewing.

For people who've never heard of the demoscene before, it's a movement dedicated to building real-time multimedia production, usually with small memory footprints, with the aim to astound and show off a demo groups coding, graphic and music composition skills. Demos and intros (the main type of production of the movement) vary in size between 6-7 Megs (for recent productions) and 64k, (sometimes even being as small as 4 kilobytes !!) and can be described as the computerized equivalent of a "live performance". The scene has it's roots in the old Commodore 64 game cracking groups. Those groups usually attempted to show off their coding skills by adding small animated musical clips to cracked videogames, often accompanied by colorfull self-complimenting scrolling text.

It has since evolved into a huge European movement. Over 20 huge gatherings called demoparties now take place in different countries troughout europe, where demo groups compete with each others for prizes and recognition. Those parties are often lavish affairs, and are similar to raves with a bit of psychedelic computer trade show thrown in. The bigger parties 24 hours a day for 5 to 6 days non-stop, and are attented by thousands of computer programmers, graphic artists and musicians.

Demos have, over the course of the last few years, seen tremendous improvements, and can usually be described as "mindblowing". (For a good example of this, go download the VIP2 "invtro", it will *redefine* the way you look at realtime 3d rendering.) You can learn more about this whole movement by visiting the following sites: You will find the cream of the crop in demoscene productions at demoo!, where reviews for the most influential demos and intros can be found. For those wishing to learn how to create demos, cfxweb.net is a great place to start, you will find there tons of source code examples for 3d and openGL realtime 3d rendering. error-404.com is the definitive source for music creation using trackers, the scene's favored format (remember .mod and .s3m files?) For scene news and group lists, chat, etc, see pouet.net and ojuice.net. And as a last reference, my site, naid.net, also concerns itself with the demoscene but also covers anything related to the use of new technologies in the arts.

Well, here in slashdot, i cant hear one news from demoscene front , thats is weird, demoscene is about graphics open minded coding, if you want to see some code == art , go to:

Orange Juice

Demonews

If you never seen Stash, you can never imagine what you can do in 64kb!

I want a demoscene slashdot topic-logo !!

• www.scene.org - sort of a ground central for the demoscene today, the way I guess the Hornet archive used to be, though I didn't even know what a demo was when hornet was in business.
• Orange Juice, the self-proclaimed "demoscene information center, though I've never found anything useful there. Mostly pertanent to Europe, I think.
• The famous hornet archive, which shut down in 1998 but still seems to host something of an archive.
• A few budding Linux demo sites:
  
  • optimum.sourceforge.net
  • linux.scene.org
    
  
  

Quite frankly, this is the way I feel about it.

If you're interested in something more abstract and experimental, you may check the productions released this year at Assembly'2k, Spot by Exceed, the winner is for example a software rendered movie sharing some imagery with pixar movies, Art by haujobb is a 3d show in a dreamy museum, featuring unreal objects, (Lapsus/Maturefurk is sharing the same design) ...

Basically all the productions kicked ass. And this weekend just finished the LTP4 party, where we had a great fun seeing stuff like Antimoney/3state (a 1bpp, nicely designed windows 64k intro which works under Wine), Just a touch of funk/digital murder, a wonderfully keyframed music video, and lots of other lush stuff... (like Downtown / retro ac. and Purple / Orion)

• scene.org (epicentre)
• ojuice.net (news)
• demoo (demo selection)
• cde (demo reviews)
• pouet.net (demo database)