The evolution of Digital Art - Part 1: The Demoscene

Preface
Digital Art has attracted me since ever, most of all realtime animations. With the existence of processors, this new form of art was born. Fiendishly clever programmers have been (ab)using processors for creating artistic audiovisual output with no other purpose than beeing nice! I decided to write a serie of articles about the evolution of Digital Art.

This first article is dedicated to the demoscene, one of the most interesting subcultures of pure digital (realtime) art. The demoscene itself is a wide topic, some people have even written a whole book about it, and you will find many online articles (e.g. Thomas Gruetzmachers 'PC Demoscene FAQ') dealing with the topic. In order to keep things concise, I will try to give my own brief summary.

The demoscene has its roots in hacking the copyprotection of software (preferrably games, first seen in the late 1970s), and adding little audiovisual teasers called 'cracktros' at the startup of the corresponding software. Such cracktros became very popular on the C64 and on the AMIGA. Besides cracktros, some programmers founded groups who concentrated on programming audiovisual effects only, rather than hacking. All this groups - most of them consisting of programmers, musicians and graphicians - formed the demoscene.

Since the 1990s, demoscene groups are challenging each other at well organised parties with whole sequences of stunning audiovisual effects - called intros and demos. Intros have to fit into limited filesize boundaries, while the much bigger filesize (~x10) filesize of demos gives the groups more freedom in adding content that is hard to compress (e.g. vocals in sound, images and short video footage that can't be generated synthetically, etc.). However, many intros (e.g. 'Heaven7', '.the .product', 'Zoom 3' or
'Candytron') proove again and again that 64k is enough to create impressing and stylish digital realtime artwork!

Rather old, but probably the most famous (DOS-) demo ever is 'Second Reality' made by Future Crew in 1993. Looking at the 'Second Reality' today (e.g. through Demoscene TV) might not look that impressive anymore, but in 1993 the graphics and sound simply were revolutionary. The success of newer demos such as e.g. 'The Popular Demo', '195/95', 'Planet Risk' or 'Iconoclast' much depends on the artwork made by the graphicians (which are not seldom the programmers themselves!) as well as up-to-date (but from a technical point of view not really revolutionary) 3D/2D-Engines.

However, some productions still strike with remarkable coding ideas ("the code IS the style"), such as e.g. 'We Cell', or the intro 'Bugtro'!

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to enjoy ancient demos from the 1980s and 1990s under Windows 9x/XP, Mac or Linux. Some groups (e.g. 'Doomsday', 'fudge') have meanwhile ported their demos to win32 executables, other old classical demos such as e.g. '303' & 'Tribes' can be run fine under Windows XP using emulators. The DemoDVD project concentrates on the creation of DVDs, in order to playback old and new demoscene candy with an usual DVD player.

The releases of the demoscene are countless, and many others had deserved to be mentioned here (e.g. releases of the groups 'Mandula', 'The Black Lotus', 'Calodox', just to mention a few).

For more news and archieved releases I recomend to visit www.scene.org!