This year I finally went to the demoscene!
The demoscene is a subculture I have long viewed from afar with a mixture of awe and, to some extent, confusion at their baroque history and injoke culture. They were, I imagined, where the true, deep wizards of graphics programming lived; the people who lived for the art of making cool shapes on the computer.
Now I’ve been to two demoparties, MountainBytes and Revision (writeup still in progress)!
I really like what I found. But how did it compare with my fantasy of the demoscene? And what prelininary observations do I have here? This ended up growing into such a big piece that I spun it off here.
What?
An enraptured audience behold demos at Revision.
A plain description would go like this: it’s a computer graphics subculture mostly revolving around the creation of realtime-rendered music videos under strong creative constraints (such as tiny executable size limits, or using very old computers like the Amiga). The focus is on pushing the limits of the machinery in expressive ways. Around that are other related computer arts, such as shader livecoding, tracker music and executable graphics, and also less niche types of digital art (paintings, renders, synthesiser music) created by members of the subculture (sceners), who submit their work to competitions at events called demoparties.
But to really get down to it, what is a subculture?
The more abstract answer is: the demoscene, like most subcultures, is an evolving cluster of ideas and motivating narratives, and the fabric of social connections between its members. Something belongs to the demoscene because the participants interact with the existing demoscene, and consider what they’re doing to be a ‘demoscene’ activity. Since the boundaries are kind of fuzzy, that can lead to friction when not everyone agrees what the demoscene is about… something we’ll get to later.
The demoscene has a long history, splitting off from the warez scene (yarr harr) many decades ago when demos were primarily produced to introduce cracked software that was distributed at ‘copyparties’. While that’s distant history now, some of the terminology such as ‘intros’ remains.
Where?
Europe mostly, with the largest demoparties happening in countries like Germany and Finland. But not exclusively: there are demoparties in Japan, Argentina, Australia, Canada, the States to name a few places… However, sceners exist in many other places as well: I have heard of sceners in Japan, the States, Thailand… and we had one pair of sceners travel all the way from Hong Kong to attend MountainBytes, which was awesome.
So far I’ve attended just two demoparties (though I hope to attend many more). Revision in Saarbrücken, Germany is the largest demoparty of the current set of active parties; MountainBytes in Cham, Switzerland is a much smaller party but run by many of the same people. You can find out about various others on demoparty.net.
Who
Pretty much without exception, everyone I have met in the scene has been lovely, generous with their time, enthusiastic… I get on very well with this bubble.
But you definitely notice some stuff about overall demographics. The prototypical demoscener is someone who lives in Europe, is engaged with computers from a young age, and has enough time off and money to go across Europe and look at shapes on computers. Which implies… above a certain age, it’s almost entirely white men. But there is a significant generational divide: the younger (read: Millenial) demosceners are much more likely to be a white trans woman instead!
You can read into this whatever you want; I don’t mean to pull this out as a gotcha or something. Most of the social factors that make this happen are pretty upstream of the demoscene. The change of demographics is a small start, but a positive one.
Why?
That might answer concretely what I’m on about—but the deeper question is why the demoscene fires me up so much. And like, what it means, man.
Let’s start with the real big positives.
the friends we made along the way
The demoscene is known for its astonishing feats of computer engineering: ‘that should not be possible’ is how people often react when they first encounter a sophisticated sizecoded demo. Given that people tend to only look through the highest-rated demos by established groups, they may come away thinking that this is mainly what the scene is about. Perhaps, if that is what you were expecting, you might feel a bit nonplussed looking at some of what I credit in the party writeups.
But I don’t think ‘technical wizardry’ is actually a sufficient explanation. The demos are the surface reason; what makes the demoscene work is actually the social glue it provides to a bunch of weird autists—something I say as a proud weird autist. You go to your first demoparty because you are curious about the strange little art pieces; you go to your second demoparty because you made some really good friends who have the bug you do, and you want to see them again, make something together; to celebrate each others’ passion and learning.
prototype for the future
That said, it’s not just about ‘here’s a cool thing my friends are doing’ (though you’d be forgiven for thinking so after the 10th scroller).
No: I believe the demoscene, and other insular creative scenes like it, are a prototype for a form of creativity that can last beyond the current era where art is so closely tied to profit and copyright.
Nobody makes demos to make money. Which isn’t to say the scene is completely free of money—the parties themselves have to spend a lot of money, paid for by tickets and industry sponsors. But nobody is making the art for the money. Nobody is doing it to get a career at a big company, or make a living off commissions, or anything of the sort. So there’s far less of the grindset shit!
Increasingly in the present, nobody is making demos expecting exclusive control over copies. Creations are shared widely on scene websites and meticulously archived to be available even decades later. Even more so, in the younger generation especially, they’re sometimes open-sourced. Tools, like executable packers, are also collected and shared on sites like 64k-scene and sizecoding.org. The demoscene wants to live.
All human communities have our weird status hierarchies and dramas, and the demoscene is no exception here: the competition framing has led to much posturing over the years. But it is a subculture that seems to understand that the process of art-making is something very much like a game. It’s not hooked to the product release cycle, but explores 30-year-old hardware with just as much enthusiasm as ever.
There is no separating the demoscene as it currently exists from the tech industry. The demoscene was born in the era of widely available personal computers, and the new school is fed by the computer graphics industry and the march of gaming GPUs. But, it represents to me elements of a way out, in an era beyond capitalism—and in the present, a way of relating to technology that reappropriates it for our own use, with our own meanings…
intimacy with computing
The demoscene broadly celebrates deep understanding and left-field creativity. And for me, it is one of my favourite things in the world to take a system created for one purpose and put it to some completely different one, especially a ‘useless’ one that is purely expressive. To find a thing that should not be possible in a given domain and find a way to do it, not entirely unlike a weird machine. A very hacker ethos, and the demoscene is certainly a hacker art subculture.
It is an interesting interplay of abstraction—general techniques, mathematical structures—and specificity, like the choice of a particular platform with its many nuances. It is, in other words, about understanding something on all levels, and knowing it more and more intimately.
Demo-making can be compared to other niche digital artforms like speedrunning, artistic line rider levels, rocket jump videos etc.: they’re all about creating a new space of interaction with something, with its own texture and contours to explore and turn to artistic expression. In a way it can be compared with fan subcultures, too: taking a product of the mass capitalist system (computers, TV shows) and repurposing them.
How things are made is important. Process shapes your understanding of the world. What makes an art form compelling to me is not so much how superficially pretty the results are, but what it’s like to make.
Actually the line rider thing could be informative. Let’s expand in that.
Demos and lines
The line rider scene involves making musically synced levels in the game Line Rider, a game which sports a deterministic physics engine allowing you to build a course that directs a little sled guy around the place.
As simple as this sounds, this involves quite an extraordinary amount of technicality complete with its own opaque jargon: quirk, manuals, kramuals, etc. With the proper control technique and enough effort, you can move Bosh and the sled pretty much arbitrary distances and directions, which means Line Rider turns into an animation tool. Most tracks will still start with the familiar convention of, well, the sled sliding around—but build up into complicated dances and elaborate vistas, all meticulously tied to the beats of the song. Many of them often function as lyric videos as well.
They essentially meet all criteria to qualify as demos (real-time music videos). But they don’t belong to the demoscene, because nobody takes them to demoparties: it’s a separate scene with its own priorities.
I observed a curious thing in the Line Rider scene, as a very occasional visitor: over the years, the tracks drifted from explorations of technical mastery (such as ‘quirk’ tracks) to applying those techniques for expression on social/personal themes: trauma, abuse, transness, plurality, colonialism etc. And like. That’s wild, right? It’s Line Rider. But this is the form of expression that spoke to them, and there is absolutely no denying the passion that goes into it.
I went to check in on Line Rider Review and quickly found the latest page in a back-and-forth of long, reflective, historical essays on invocation of 50s imagery in relation to a story about dementia which gets… quite deep into the self-reflection on how we interpret art at all. Is that academic and political style the ‘flavour’ of the line rider art scene? Or just a niche but prolific corner of it? Who exactly constitutes the line rider scene, anyway—regular track makers, drive-by Youtube commenters? Is the shift in subject matter driven by reaching the limits of ‘mere technique’ in Line Rider?
So far as I know, there is not similar critical writing made in the demoscene!
Instead, I’d say roughly that the demoscene centres technical exploration and playful humour. The aesthetics of demos have changed a lot over the years: a modern PC demo will feature much more subtle colouring, bokeh, etc., more intricate effects, etc. But the themes of demos have not changed so much. Certainly, a lot of trans flags may be seen now, and tend to be well-received. And some productions, like Killer Piller which I will discuss in some other article on the Meteoriks, will try for a more direct narrative or theme. But for the most part, demos tend towards abstraction. The medium in this case is very much the message.
note from the (near) future: This article prompted some discussion on Discord. I was linked quite a few demos which fit the pattern I described in Line Rider: personal projects on emotive subjects. Notably, there is a difference between votes at parties and praise on Pouet. It is not entirely fair to say that the interests of the demoscene are so exclusively technical: the scene is large enough to encompass a variety of styles, and the line between ‘art’ and ‘technical’ continues to be something actively debated. I’ll leave the rest of the article unedited, to revisit in more depth in the future!
In part, this may be because demos are usually made by teams, not individuals. And it may also be because of the demoscene’s long history locking it into a certain tradition we want to honour. Context, too: demos are played to a large room of people. And in Line Rider-land, most tracks are produced for existing songs, rather than composing new music as part of the track, which means that the whole history of music can do a fair bit of emotional heavy lifting! (On the other hand, demos benefit from direct collaboration between musicians and coders/animators: it is a music scene in its own right.)
For my part, as someone who finds technical aspects of art a place I am most at home, there is something I like about the demoscene’s hard focus on the medium itself. I don’t think demos, or animated films in general for that matter, are interchangeable with some other artistic brush (expressive tool). At the same time, I want to make stuff that moves people, that makes them feel something and says something that feels important. If I wanna put so much effort in, I want to make it more than a passing fancy: wow, that’s crazy that they pulled that off.
You can actually see some of this argument about what demos should be playing out in the comments of classic 2001-era demo fr-08 the product on (ever-dramatic) Pouet. Responding to criticism about the artistic value of the project, kb (a respected scener, still active) remarked:
but the demo scene has always been for showing off skills, be it those of coders, musicians, or graphicians, and I DO hope this will never change. Even for full-size demos, this should be the fact again… there are so many well-designed demos which i can’t watch because it’s made by guys with a nice feeling for design, but not even the most basic skills you’d need for doing flat shading. And IMO, this does suck.
And the fact that also 64k demos are rated only by their “artistic” level (as if any of them would reach a level which real “artists” wouldn’t laugh at) does quite scare me off.
I don’t want to make any assumptions here; kb may have a different view of it after another 24 years! The scene of 2001 is not the scene of today. And none of this is to say that there aren’t some weird, personal, kinda esoteric demos out there. Many such, in fact—you’ll see some of them in the demoparty writeups.
But what does the scene look for when they vote for their demos? This is surely something we will argue about until the scene dies out entirely. One speculative theory is a combo of cohesiveness, variety and technical achievement/novelty. This is surmised in part from comments on Pouet which might say be that a demo is insufficiently varied in its effects, that it ‘just’ slow camera pans etc., that an effect is not new, that the visuals do not really match the music. Is that what gets votes at a party, though? I’m less sure: I need to spend more time in the scene to figure out its ‘tastes’. (Probably varies a lot by party, as well!)
And demos which express narrative and theme are respected. Some winners at Revision recreated a short film in 64k, created an analogue-horror scene complete with jumpscare, made tribute to Dune, or shot a high-effort B-movie pastiche. Others expressed personal feelings around subjects such as death. An appetite is there to tell stories.
The creative texture of demomaking
By necessity, intros (sizecoded demos) tend to use procedural geometry over 3D models; software synths over recorded instruments; procedure over data. Geometric shapes are easy to create, human figures or other representative things hard. This is all part of the ‘texture’ of the sort of art you can express with them, just as the camera tracking Bosh and black lines in a white void is the central motif of Line Rider.
The space of possibile expressions in demo-land is highly unconstrained in that nearly any audiovisual presentation generated by a computer program could be a demo. Which means, conversely, there are far more roads that must be built to find our way to interesting places. A new technique (raymarching, for example) will be discovered, imitated, and become part of the evolving ‘language’ of the scene, providing a scaffolding to reach for demos that were unthinkable before. But often nobody will have done exactly what you are trying to do, and you must invent your own tools to get you there. This abstract description is true of all art forms—but the demoscene’s particularly unsettled state, the immense complexity hiding within computer code, is a big part of what makes it an interesting artform to me.
So this is the terrain you’re making expressions within. From there, as in all art mediums, we engage the feedback loop: context and process on the one hand, your thoughts of what you wish to express on the other. By the time you have created a demo you will know the space of possibilities around that demo very well: problems you had to solve, variations you could have chosen, unexpected inspiration that emerged from the tools.
I’m certainly a graphics nerd, and learning computer graphics has shaped how I perceive and interact with the world in much the same way as learning to draw did, or learning to play music. A whole space of meaning opens up when you pursue these things. It is hard to communicate this to someone who is not in the milieu: why I am now so fascinated by the reflections in a puddle of water, why I get excited about a new technique for global illumination. Silly nerd.
The trick must be to connect this space of abstract, technical exploration to the space of signification and emotion…
Comments