Putting the demoscene in a context

A couple of months ago, there were a couple of interesting attempts at introducing the demoscene to art-oriented audiences.

After the Alternative Party 2008, I wrote about the demoscene seminar held in the premises of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. Many of the participants (mostly the presenters themselves) then ended up writing articles which were published in the December 2008 issue of Mustekala, a Finnish art webzine.

One of the articles -- that is, elfh/inward's text about the development of the Spectrum demoscene in Russia -- was also later partially republished on a new and promising "8-bit" website called 8bittoday.com. Some of the articles have also been recently quoted in href="http://www.minedu.fi/OPM/Julkaisut/2009/Mediataiteen_mahdollisuudet__Selvitys_mediataiteesta">Finnish Ministry of Education study on the current state and future possibilities of new media art in Finland, which, among all, discusses the demoscene as a separate branch of new media art.

Another related thing that seized my attention in December was Rosa Menkman's summary of Anders "Goto80" Carlsson's
presentation he held at the HAIP Festival in Slovenia about the chip music scene and the 8-bit demoscene. A great deal of things in this summary seems to have been "lost in translation", i.e. mutated into somewhat hilarious misconceptions and inaccuracies.
Fortunately, after finding Goto80's own summary and having a correspondence with him I think I have been able to catch the message he wished to deliver.

In all, there was a lot of material to digest in all these texts, and the digestion process produced quite many thoughts, so be aware that this article will be quite long and covers a multitude of topics.

Which box does this stuff belong in?

Arguably the most difficult task in introducing the demoscene to any audience is, due to the relative self-sufficiency of the community, the task of fitting it in some pre-existing framework. I have noticed that there are basically four different "boxes" for trying to fit the scene into:

1. The "digital underground box", along with the mainstream hacker culture, open-source movement, political pirates and many Internet-based creative communities.


2. The "artistic movements box", in the same corner as experimental film and video art.


3. The "youth subcultures box", just between the punks, the graffiti painters and the LAN gamers.


4. The "trash box", which contains all the various clueless views that do not tolerate a deeper analysis, such as ones with obvious causality errors ("demos are primarily made for gaining employment in the video game industry").

Of the material I previously mentioned, Anders Carlsson's presentation represents the "first-box approach", whereas the Mustekala articles mostly go for the "second box". The "third box" was quite dominant in the nineties, especially prior to the mainstream penetration of the Internet and the cultural forms therein, and it still quite often used when discussing big "computer lifestyle" parties which originated as demoparties (i.e. Assembly).

I think each one of these "boxes" (or at least the first three of them) represents a valid approach, but none of them alone is enough. Thus, all of them need to be considered in order to build a complete picture of how the demoscene relates to everything else. Each "box" also has its own traps which can be hard to avoid.

It is also possible to talk about demo art without binding it inseparably to the scene. Computer programs that resemble demoscene demos can indeed be found outside of the demoscene context, and some even predate mass-produced microcomputers for several decades (i.e. the display hacks in the academic hacker culture).

Is it open-source?

The demoscene (along with the early software piracy/cracking scene where it comes from) pioneered quite many things which are nowadays seen as integral to the modern "digital subcultures". Let me list the ones I consider the most important:

• global unrestricted peer-to-peer sharing of digital data (albeit originally primarily with snailmail instead of electronic telecommunications)


• creating music and other types of art primarily or even exclusively for free non-commercial digital sharing (I think this is quite obvious)


• using elements taken from video games and other creative digital works in one's own creations (ripped game music in demos was commonplace in the early years, as was sample-ripping slightly later)

Anders Carlsson dubs it "the first digital global subculture", which I consider quite accurate.

It is far too easy to extrapolate from the known facts, however. Outsiders, having done such an extrapolation in their minds, are particularly eager to associate the concept of "open source" to the demoscene. Rosa Menkman, when referring to Anders Carlsson's presentation, writes: "Because most products are open source, remixing is very easy". This mistake shows how careful
"outreachers" need to be when talking about this fashionable concept -- especially at an event like HAIP Festival, which is centered around artistic expression in open-source media.

Also Jarkko Räsänen mentions this tendency of finding "open-source" connections in his Mustekala article, and both Räsänen and Carlsson use tracker music as a prime example of an "open source" approach on the scene: you can load a song to a tracker and have the same editing capabilities as the original author had. Carlsson even extends this concept to anything made with a machine code monitor or an assembler: the disassembly you're reading is the same code the original author worked on.

My own stance in this matter is still more or less the same as in one of my 2007 articles. In the early days, crackers were quite accustomed to reading and modifying other people's machine code, so practically all software was "open-source" to them, and similar forms of hacking could be applied. This is still quite far from today's open-source culture, however, and binary-hacking of other people's code is quite rare on today's demoscene.

Those who know about various "hacking" subcultures may very well assume that an open-source ideology and a total freedom of "remixing" are the logical conclusion of anything that grows out of free digital sharing. The demoscene, however, is an example of a digital subculture that took a
totally different route -- one that emphasizes the author's own vision and talent -- resulting in a radical do-it-yourself attitude to which many "open-source" ideas (such as derivative works) are alien. Rosa Menkman refers to this attitude as "originality dogma".

The freedom of distribution is embraced on the demoscene mainly for the maximization of one's own (group's) fame via the maximization of the potential audience. Even many of the outreach efforts (such as presentations, lectures and articles about the scene) can be explained as part of this "quest for fame". If you spread the word about the demoscene to other people and make the productions more accessible to them, you are also more likely to get your own work appreciated.

Still, I disagree with Räsänen's view that the source code is usually hidden because of "jealousy". In my opinion, the main reason for this is the do-it-yourself attitude (or "originality dogma") itself: most sceners simply do not need or even want the source code, as they think it is "cooler" to do all the stuff on their own (or, alternatively, think it is
"lame" to use a piece of code whose inner workings they don't understand perfectly).

Source code, whenever it is available, is supposed to be handled with respect, primarily for technical inspiration and learning material. Whenever something is copied, the original author must always be credited. This differs quite radically from the culture of unrestricted use, remixing and bastardization one can find in the open source culture as well as today's Internet culture, including popular websites such as Wikipedia, YouTube and 4chan.

Does it fit in the art world?

The question whether demos are art is an old one, but it still continues to divide people. Anders Carlsson, for example, has chosen to present the demoscene as craftmanship rather than art. Indeed, the "crafty" aspect is still quite strong, and many sceners dislike their works being referred to as "art". However, there's also a big portion of sceners who have "true"
artistic ambitions and sometimes even a willingness to receive appreciation from the "mainstream" art world. Quite many sceners have even studied in art schools, which has lead them to a position from which to compare the two worlds.

Jarkko Räsänen (whom I remember as having been in wAmmA but whose handle I can't recollect) is one of the demoscene-affiliated people who have been studying in the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in the recent years. In his article in Mustekala, he mostly compares the demoscene and some areas of the art world, based on his studies and first-hand
experiences.

As for social aspects, Räsänen finds similarities between the demoscene and the various audiovisual technology hobbyist groups he learned about when studying the history of experimental film and video art. These hobbyists had their own happenings, competitions and workshops, and especially the stories about dedicated club activity of Finnish narrow-film
hobbyists of the seventies brought the demoscene and demoparties in mind.

A strong common denominator between these art groups and the demoscene, according to the article, can be found in the self-sufficient attitude: the creators and the audience are the same. The esthetic criteria are those of the creators themselves, not anyone else's. Sometimes, a work "leaks" out of the community, and these leaked works are labelled as "underground".

As for outward appearances, Räsänen has found similarities between demos and the works of certain video artists. He describes the demo-likeness of the works of a video art group called Pink Twins as "baffling", and also Kari Yli-Annala, who reviewed their recent Helsinki exhibition, describes their esthetic as very similar to that of the demoscene. However, I wouldn't regard this similarity as a mere coincidence. Given that the guys are two brothers in their thirties living in Helsinki, formed their group in the late nineties and create their art on
computers via programming, it would be quite improbable that they were not at least aware of demos.

Still, astounding outwards similarity to demos can be found in some art films that predate the demoscene by several decades. In 2007, when I found a video of Whitney's Catalog on YouTube, for example, I was baffled by its demo-likeness (which probably stems from the procedural basis of the animation). Also, some very early experimental films by Oskar Fischinger were screened at the Breakpoint demoparty in 2004 because some scener thought it would be nice to enlighten the participants about "the first demos ever". In this case, the apparent similarity probably comes from the use of abstract music-synchronized visuals.

So, common grounds between the demoscene and film/video-based art can be found in the areas of social structures and outward esthetics. The biggest differences, according to Räsänen, seem to be in the conventions of distribution: while the demoscene has grown within a culture of unrestricted digital distribution, the art world has its legacy of galleries and expensive artifacts. Even art videos presented in galleries, despite being shown from materially cheap and easily duplicable DVDs, may cost "tens of thousands of euros", which is somewhat difficult for someone grown in the "pirate generation" to understand.

Modernism and medium-specificity

The modernist movement(s) have been referred to by both Jarkko Räsänen and Kari Yli-Annala in their articles. Relating the demoscene to something that saw its golden age in the early 20th century, in very different cultural and technological conditions, may sound far-fetched, but I personally find this comparison quite intriguing.

Modernist thought, if I've interpreted my art history correctly, is characterized by a certain kind of "engineer's idealism": the artist is like an engineer who avoids the old, outdated and inefficient "traditional" way of thinking and constantly tries to innovate something better, more
efficient and more optimal. This kind of progressivism can also be found on the demoscene, where it has been important to reach new technical standards in code optimality and an ever-deeper understanding of the platform of choice.

The modernist principle of medium-specificity holds that each art form has its own unique "essence", and artists should try to find this essence in the medium they're working on. A film-maker, for example, should not try to imitate staged theatre on film but create something that is only possible on film.

According to Räsänen, the demoscene has been able to get closer to the "essence" of computer-based art than most of the "true" artists who explore the medium, and this is why these artists should look into demos for an important lesson. Video art, for example, often neglects the role of the actual technological platform: if loudspeakers or computers are present in
the gallery space, a mainstream artist may just ignore them, while a demoscener would find them essential to the experience.

To me it seems that the medium is explored on the demoscene particularly on the lowest level of abstraction, in the form of "platform-specificity": traditional demos, especially ones written for more restricted platforms, use highly platform-specific tricks in order to implement their effects. Sometimes, the features of a specific platform lead the author to use a
specific, "platform-optimal" means of representation (for instance, preferring vertical scrolling direction on the Atari 2600, or using simple and inexpensive copper tricks for transitions on the Amiga 500). In this way, each demoscene platform builds its own platform-specific audiovisual
"dialect". Similarly, size-restricted categories and software platforms also build their own "dialects".

Still, there are some areas where the demoscene has done relatively little in regards to finding the medium-specific essence. Räsänen brings up the rareness of generativity (productions that are different on each run and maybe even interactive) as well as the tendency of sticking to the basic structure of a music video. This leads me to my next topic --

The forgotten levels of content

The general unwillingness to question the traditional demo structure is, in my opinion, connected to the demoscene's overwhelming focus on the lowest levels of abstraction. The higher the level, the less important it is considered to be, and the very highest levels are simply out of the scope where variation, exploration and innovation are generally considered to be "allowed". It's a pity, since, in my opinion, the core creative ideals of the demoscene can very well be extrapolated to higher levels (for example, think about the idea of "Homo Sapiens" as a demo platform).

It has always been important for demos to be technically solid. Another important element has been the superficial esthetics (looking good, sounding good, flowing good). Esthetic experimentation has also been taking place in the form of different styles and moods. For most demos, however, there's nothing beyond technique and esthetics. No message, no story, no underlying philosophy, no point. These demos are, from a conceptual point of view,
hollow works of craft.

Of course, there are also demos with a stronger focus on content, but even they are usually defined by their technical and esthetical choices rather than the content itself; bottom-to-top instead of top-to-bottom. The concept in a "high-concept demo" or the story in a "storydemo" is far too often just an additional spice, just another element that pleases the crowd, increases
the entertainment value and adds to the perceived coherence.

It is a regrettably common view that the low-level craftwork is what the demoscene has always been and should always be all about, and all attempts to extend the experimentation to higher levels are futile. I always hate hearing closed-minded opinions like this, as I see so much untapped potential within the immediate reach of most demoscene artists.

Interactivity is an example of a dimension that has always been within an easy reach for demoscene artists but has still remained nearly untouched. While demos experiment very deeply on the audiovisual nature of various technological platforms, they have barely managed to scratch the surface of what I consider part of the very essence of the real-time computer art
medium itself.

When sticking to static non-interactive works, a demo artist is not really doing anything that couldn't be achieved by non-realtime means. However, when experimenting with interactivity, the artist steps into a territory where the concept of real-time calculation gains actual meaning. This territory is totally unreachable by traditional non-realtime mediums such as
motion picture.

I've understood that interactivity is an idea where both the demoscene and the traditional art world have encountered "compatibility problems". Video games, however, have always been interactive to their very core, so I think they are the form of art where everyone willing to create interactive art should take a look at. "The Realtime Art Manifesto", coming from a group of artistic video game developers, is, in my opinion, worth reading by anyone interested in interactive art, despite having been written from the point of view of a specific kind of narrative games, and despite having
some silly misconceptions (like its references to "modern art").

Of course, there are also video games released in the demoscene context, but they rarely commit deep excursions into the essence of interactivity. Instead, they tend to focus on the technical issues where the existing strengths of existing demoscene methods can be applied.

The role of humor

It is difficult for the demoscene to explore the higher levels of abstraction, as the community primarily observes the lower levels. One always needs to consider the technical and esthetical standards of excellence in order to receive the praise and encouragement from the
community, and this burden often leaves "groundbreaking conceptual ideas" in a secondary position.

"Non-serious" productions, however, are a totally different issue. Even though they are often regarded as mere "comic relief" productions, they have, in my opinion, a vast amount of experimental potential that is often overlooked. When working on a "joke" production, especially under a "fake" pseudonym, a demoscener is much freer to experiment on some higher-level
aspects than with a "serious" approach.

Well-established "jokegroups" often have very distinctive styles and attitudes. I would particularly like to praise a well-established Finnish group, ISO, for being an example of a true "avant-garde" approach by turning nearly every traditional demoscene value upside down. For me, ISO is the punk and dadaism
of the Finnish demoscene, especially as it often goes quite deep into consciousness-streamed absurdism.

I would also like to mention my own group, PWP, which originated as a pseudo-jokegroup with a focus on humorous character-driven stories. I still carry something from the original PWP style and mindset even in my "serious" demos, so I think the "silly jokes" definitely served a greater purpose than being short-lived crowd-pleasers at various events.

The role of humor in some experimental demoscene-originating games, such as Sumotori Dreams and Porrasturvat, shouldn't be neglected either, especially regarding that they are interactive works that have gained praise far beyond the demoscene, e.g. in the indie gaming community.

Do they have any critical potential?

When looking at the Mustekala articles which analyze the demoscene, it is possible to notice the abstraction-level problem I discussed earlier: there's a lot of text on the technical and esthetical aspects of demos, but the only article that considers the conceptual aspects is the one written by the non-demoscener (new media artist and researcher Kari Yli-Annala).

I find this article, titled "Demoscene as immanent critique of computer culture", quite interesting for various reasons. First, the use of demos as commentary is a rather "new" thing and not very popular at that. Second, in spite of this "newness", my own work on the demoscene has had a critical aspect from the very beginning. And third, Yli-Annala uses yours truly as
an example of the critical dimension of the demoscene.

Personally, I see that there are basically two separate approaches of making critical statements in demos: technical and conceptual. The technical approach stems from the choice of technology and restrictions (something that is at the very core of the artform), while the conceptual approach is based on the things which are actually seen and heard.

The use of very restricted or "obsolete" platforms or doing something with a very limited file size is often considered to require a certain attitude, and the statements inherent to such technological choices are related to this attitude. Personally, I like my 8-bit demos seen as having an inherent statement directed against the "wasteful" aspects of mainstream computing -- not only the wasteful use of computing resources but also to the ecological wastefulness of consumerism and high-tech snobbery.

The conceptual approach, on the other hand, can be used to deliver nearly any message (just like motion pictures). Since the early days, there have been demos containing political statements (such as Fairlight's anti-communist sentiments) as well as productions that comment aspects of the scene itself. My own work has had both of these among the multitude of
topics it has covered.

What Yli-Annala talks about the most is immanent critique. That is, critique coming from the within. In my opinion, this is not something that works very well within the usual demoscene context, especially these days, when demos are seldom actively watched by people outside the scene itself. However, whenever a demoscener dares to take effort of bringing something
into "other scenes", there may be a lot of critical potential.

The video game .kkrieger is a prime example of such an "inter-subcultural" intervention: instead of creating just another size-limited demo, the demoscene group .theprodukkt decided to make a size-limited video game instead. By simply choosing another format that is
more accessible to video gaming audience, .theprodukkt managed to critique aspects of the video game culture from inside the video game culture itself. The mere use of demoscene techniques and a tight size limitation served as a statement.

There are many possible ways for a demoscener to do interventions like this, however some of them don't have anything to do with the demoscene or even with skills relevant to demomaking. I, for example, have been doing on-line interventions (using things such as fake textfiles, trolling, fake websites, parodies, etc.) since the early 1990s, that is, longer than I have even been involved with demos. I've never regarded it as anything artistic, so, I found it quite amusing that Kari Yli-Annala, when discussing the critical potential of the demoscene, draws examples from some of my web projects.

What about avant-garde?

In his article, Yli-Annala has noticed that demos have a lot of recognizable cultural imagery that is used and combined in unusual ways. Similarly, "cultural technologies" (such as hardware platforms) are often used in novel means. This kind of recognition and recombination of cultural elements is considered typical of postmodernism.

While I find most points of the discussion relevant, there are some parts I disagree with. To begin with, here follows my translation of the final summary of the article: "The demoscene is underground and avant-garde of new media art, as it is based on cultural technologies and imagery by refining raw material and concretely biting into the code level. Its traditions of representation and making are, in the manner of artists' radical avant-garde movements, based on an introvert potential of renewal and on a collectivity created from this hermeneutics."

It is true that there is a lot of cultural imagery used even in mainstream demos. Even the most unimaginative mid-1990s demos tend to have graphical elements such as dragons, swords and half-naked warrior girls, which quite clearly stem from a pop-cultural background (i.e. film posters, graphic novels, book covers, musical record illustrations, etc.) However, in the traditional demo design, this material merely serves the technical and esthetical levels of abstraction. It does not really matter what the pictures depict or where they come from, as long as they look good (technically and esthetically) and cause the desired reaction in the
viewer.

It is also true that hardware platforms (such as 8-bit computers) are cultural artifacts, and thus, using them for novel purposes (such as new demo effects) could be regarded as "postmodern" reuse of pre-existing elements. In my opinion, however, this idea sounds quite far-fetched. To
me, technological devices, when used as demo platforms, get rid of their cultural and historical value altogether, and the only thing that matters is the plain technological structure and what possibilities and challenges it offers to the artist. I assume this is quite close to how most musicians relate to their instruments, for example.

What about the conclusion, then? I don't think there's much doubt that demoscene is "underground", but is it an avant-garde movement?

Avant-garde, in short, is about "pushing the boundaries", which is also an important principle on the demoscene. Although the mainstream demoscene only applies this idea to certain key areas, there are "rebel" movements, such as "joke" or "fake" groups, that supplement the mainstream by questioning the traditions and expanding the range where the boundary-pushing attitude can
be applied.

Quite often, a single demoscene artist has two "faces" -- one for "traditional" productions and another for ones that may clash against the tradition. The different faces usually manifest themselves via separate group labels; most of the members of HiRMU and Jumalauta, for example, are also members of "serious" groups and use different pseudonyms there.

Based on my personal experiences, I would say that there is an avant-garde branch within the demoscene, but when combining all the aspects of the demoscene and asking whether it is "avant-garde" as a whole, I'm not so sure anymore. I would perhaps rather see it as a bipolar system in this matter.

Conclusion

After all this discussion, it seems that doing generalizations about the demoscene and putting it in a single context is very difficult. There are all kinds of approaches and disciplines within the subculture: traditionalist and avantgarde, fame-seeking and underground, technical and
conceptual, crafty and artistic, competitive and self-expressive. Each artist is different, and choosing a single-minded definition doesn't really do justice to all the variety.

Why can't we just ignore the variety to make things easier, then? Because it is exactly this variety that has managed to keep the scene alive for so many years. On one hand, groups that embrace their own vision instead of looking for maximum appeal within the community have been able to extend the horizon every now and then, sometimes even recruiting some new blood in the
process. And on the other hand, without all the stubborn and conservative attitudes, the scene would have lost its distinctiveness -- the shell that protects it from being blended into the mainstream of digital subcultures.

Something about Alternative Party 2008

It has now been a week since this year's Alternative Party, so I'm using it as an excuse for writing another journal entry.



For me, the party started with a participation in the demoscene seminar, an external event held at the premises of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.

The seminar was not exactly a crowd-gatherer. Most of the audience consisted of fellow sceners, a considerable percentage of which also had presentations of their own. So, instead of delivering our presentations to "art people" and having a healthy little clash of cultures, we mostly ended up giving speeches to our friends.

I held my presentation with Visy (of Trilobit, Wamma, PWP etc.), with whom I happen to share quite some similar ideas and visions about demomaking as well as some common history in working on some productions.

In this 90-minute presentation, titled "Retro is a swearword" (yes, the same title as in one of my older blog entries), we mostly talked about 8-bit demomaking from the viewpoints of esthetics, technical challenges, motivation, ways of self-expression, etc. and of course we also showed quite many 8-bit demos -- both ours and others'.

The presentations were videotaped by Kari Yli-Annala, a video artist and researcher who has shown some interest in the demoscene in recent years. I'm not sure if I really want people to see the video of our presentation as I somewhat struggled with picking up the right words and expressing myself coherently, but I guess it was still a very good idea to document it. And besides, I may want to participate in a similar presentation at some later opportunity as well, so consider youselves prepared.

As for the party itself, I have somewhat mixed feelings. It seems that the organizing team tried too hard to add all kinds of fancy features to the event so that it was eventually too difficult for them to keep all the strings in their hands. This eventually lead to some major blunders in some of the most important issues, i.e. the demo competitions, voting and results. As for today, a week after the prize-giving ceremony, the final results are still "coming soon".

Also, as the partyplace was so full of different booths and special areas as well as people I wasn't personally familiar with, the whole event started to feel like a "mini-assembly" of sorts. However, I don't necessarily consider this a bad thing, as I did enjoy things like the art gallery quite a lot. Besides, in my opinion, cross-subcultural events and bold outreach efforts are something we all need, and it is always a thousand times better idea to market a demoparty to a bunch of creative people and other "freaks" than to masses of consumer whores and generic mainstream teenager nerds.



I had personally participated in two demo competition entries. One of them was "Doctor", an Atari VCS/2600 demo by Trilobit. I think this demo is really worth watching especially because of some never-seen-before effects it presents.

I personally contributed a cube effect I had actually already "finished" a year ago. One of the Trilobit guys, Ilmarque, even managed to improve the cube by fixing some rendering glitches and adding a simple checkerboard-like texture.

As far as I know, "Doctor" got the highest votecount in the "alternative demo competition", but, for some reason, the organizers had completely forgotten it during the prizegiving ceremony. The Atari STe demo by DHS (which was also technically very good) was awarded in the ceremony despite having lower points. Despite some good entries, I was also somewhat disappointed by the low level of the competition.



The PWP contribution I had been working on was a VIC-20 demo called "Future 1999". I couldn't finish it in time, but I still wanted to show the unfinished version at this very event. The content in this demo was a little bit hurried and I actually had needed to cut my original design plans to some extent, as I had only five days for creating the actual graphics and other content. The only piece of new code was the audio streamer, and all the rest was pure Brickshop32 animation played back with the routines familiar from "The Next Level".

An unfortunate fact was that the fully-linked version had too tight loading schedules for real disk drives, so it really couldn't be run with the real thing; some debugging and improvement is still needed on the linker side. For this reason, the demo had to be shown with an emulator. However, the compo machine didn't have a version of VICE containing my recent sound patch, so I had to deny the presentation altogether.

Anyway, you'll see the final version (hopefully with much more content and perhaps even some effects) at some party in the year 2009. The party calendar for the beginning of the year seems to be quite open, however, so I'll probably have quite some time for other creative activity besides that. I may even have some time for writing down some coherent thoughts in this journal, so you may look forward to that one as well.

Past tense is evil

When talking about old video games and mature technology, it is quite common to use the past tense rather than the present one. People are more likely to say, for instance, that Uridium WAS a Commodore 64 game, than to state that it IS one.

In most cases, of course, this supposed mistake can be explained by the subjectiveness of the point of view. The C-64 hardware and software have obviously disappeared from the speakers' subjective world and are now something that belong entirely to their past.

Objectively speaking, however, stating that "Uridium was a Commodore 64 game" is just as wrong as saying that "George W. Bush was an American man". The statement about Dubya will not become valid until he either dies or changes his gender or nationality, and likewise, the statement about Uridium will not become valid until it is no longer possible to reconstruct the binary sequence that constitutes the Commodore 64 version of the game.

Yes, yes, but isn't this whole topic just meaningless nitpicking? How is the choice of temporal form supposed to matter so much?

Well, it is a known fact that language shapes the world, and a different choice of words promotes a different set of ideas and values. In my personal opinion, referring to a still-existing cultural artifact in the past tense promotes some quite ugly ideas, such as cultural disposability, planned obscolescence, pre-dictated consumption patterns and a general narrow-mindedness.

So, unless you deliberately want to promote these despisable and dangerous values of the dirty imperialists, you should definitely avoid referring to Uridium in the past tense.

Finding the sinners

Now that we have declared the sin, we need to find some sinners to bash and/or evangelize.

The first place where I looked into for sinful use of the past tense was, of course, the good old Wikipedia, the supposed mecca of objective and neutral knowledge.

In Wikipedia, I expected to find a lot of inconsistent use of temporal forms as well as many articles completely written in the past tense. However, I was positively surprised that it actually seems to prefer the present tense, at least for the more popular titles. For example, the Commodore 64 and Spectrum articles discuss the actual hardware platforms nearly uniformly in the present tense. There are still some problems, however, such as the VIC-20 article which uses the temporal forms inconsistently, but the overall state of the articles isn't nearly as bad as I expected.

Much more of this "past tense sin" can be found, surprisingly, on sites operated by people who actually play the old games, sometimes even with the original hardware. These people, some of which are clueless enough to refer to disk and tape images as "ROMs", often use the past tense even when referring to their favorite platforms they still use. I call these people "retro-morons".

The retro-morons

As I have already mentioned in an earlier post, "retro" is a swearword. Reading an old book does not make me a "retrobooker", or watching an old movie doesn't make me a "retrofilmer". Still, playing an old video game is supposed to make me a "retrogamer". In my opinion, the mere existence of such a category just reflects how immature the computing culture still is compared to many other forms of culture.

By using the past tense, retro-morons not only admit that they consider themselves reliving the past, but also promote the kind of thinking where objects are bound to their respective "golden ages", that is, the periods of time when they have been commercially exploited. Whenever the commercial lifeline of a product ends (after the magical finger-snap of some dirty capitalist pig), it moves from the "present tense world" into some kind of a "past tense" or "retro" world. In this strange imaginary world, the time is frozen still. No new things are possible with the "obsolete" technology anymore, no more fresh aspects can be found in anyone's creations. There's no creativity left, only endless collection, recollection and preservation.

The optimist in me hopes to see the "retro-moron" phenomenon as a temporary intermediate stage, a step towards the maturization of computing and gaming culture. In the future, I hope, old games and hardware platforms will become an integral part of our cultural heritage without being exclusively associated to certain periods of history. Just like it is possible to read a book written in the fifties without being a "fifties freak" or something, it will be possible for ordinary people to play an "eighties game" or to use an "eighties computer" without dwelling in the eighties nostalgia at all.

There's still much work to do before this stage can be reached, however. So, fire up your Interweb browser and start the holy crusade!

The development process of a new VIC-20 demo

Greetings to everyone, once again! As you can see, Countercomplex wasn't destined to become a one-post wonder, despite the six-month gap between the first post and the second.

What broke this wonderful silence was my urge to tell something about my latest creation, a Commodore VIC-20 demo called "The Next Level", released at the Assembly Summer 2008 demoparty a week ago. The demo ended up second in the oldskool demo competition, the winner of which (albeit with a relatively small margin) was Byterapers' 486 PC demo called "Renaissance". There were four demos in total in the competition, and mine was actually the only one for an 8-bit platform.

I'm not hyping "The Next Level" as the best thing the VIC-20 demoscene has seen since "Robotic Liberation", as it is just one step towards something greater. There's nothing in the final product that hasn't been witnessed before -- actually, there aren't any rasters or realtime effects at all. Instead, what makes this production important was the development of a set of development tools that will hopefully shorten the creation cycle of future VIC-20 demos.

First of all, the link to the video capture on YouTube. I'm also embedding it here in order to maximize the accessibility for the ADHD internet generation:

Of course, you can also go to the Pouet.net page of the production and download the actual VIC-20 binaries. A h264.mp4 video file (16 MB) prepared by the Assembly organizers is also available for download.

The five years in between

"The Next Level" is my first actual VIC-20 trackmo after Robotic Liberation, which won the oldskool demo competition at Assembly 2003. By "trackmo" I refer to a demo that does not consist of separate memory-resident "parts" but constantly loads new material from the disk. Just like Robotic Liberation, The Next Level uses a disk drive but runs without memory expansions. That is, we have the good old 5120 bytes and 1024 nybbles of RAM available.

After finishing Robotic Liberation five years ago, I decided that I'm never going to do certain things manually anymore. A large percentage of the development time was wasted in loader-linking, that is, making sure that all the required resources get loaded in the memory just in time. Finding small slots of free RAM, splitting chunks of code and data so that they fit in these slots, possibly reordering some previously allocated areas, etc. were clearly something where automation would be much more sensible.

I also felt that I had already reached everything I could on the VIC-20 platform. On one hand, I wanted to move on to a more extreme platform where technical exploration would still be possible (like Sinclair ZX81 or Atari VCS), and on the other hand, I wanted to move on to a slightly less
restricted environment where I could concentrate on the content instead of technical details. I released some small demos for the Commodore 64, but the platform didn't really respond to my needs at the time (as it proved to be more os less just as demanding as the VIC-20).

I was also thinking about trying some "PC" stuff for a chance ("PC" referring to all the (semi-)modern 32/64-bit platforms in general). There are some appealing aspects in "PC", like the virtually endless amount of processing resources (even with dumpster-dived hardware) and the possibility to slip away from the chosen set of restrictions if the art demands it. However, "PC" requires a larger amount of initial work, and using "PC" also always feels a little bit "lame" because of the unreachability of certain hard-core values as well as the absence of the strong statement of using an 8-bit platform.

The post-technical level

A kind of enlightenment arrived to me in 2007, as I was watching some demos from some Russian Spectrum groups I had already adored for a couple of years. Groups such as Cyberpunks Unity, Inward and Skrju have, in my perspective, evolved beyond the usual "technowanking" stage often associated with the harder-core branches of the demoscene. In the new "post-technical" level, the hardware platform is no longer primarily used for bragging but for self-expression, just like in "real art".

Perhaps the two most important realizations for me were the following ones:

• "Post-technical" demos don't need to push the technology: the platform doesn't need to look or sound any better than what it is. The Spectrum may look just like the Spectrum traditionally looks, there's no need to hide the color-block clashes in the visuals or the square waves in the music.


• Most "post-technical" demos seem to be technically based on an animation player. Inward's "Your Song is Quiet", for example, seems to be mostly doing primitive graphics operations (like pixel-plotting and line-drawing) in a pre-defined order. Of course, the platform dictates quite a lot about the graphical style and what kind of animation is feasible.

In August 2007, I released "Impossiblator 3", a ultimate "technowanking" piece revealing some previously unused hardware tricks. After this, opening the door to the post-technical level became an important goal in my VIC-20 work.

Development tools

Although I had done some initial planning already in 2007, the actual development work of "The Next Level" and the related custom tools didn't start until Summer 2008.

The most important tool that needed to be made, naturally, was the automatic linker-builder system that would liberate me from manual loader-linking.

"Bob20" is a Python script that gets a bunch of assembly source files that are divided in "chunks" using special directives. Inter-chunk dependencies and positioning constraints can be separately defined for each chunk. The linking process is based on a special chunk type called "SC" or "StreamChunk", which are executed in a chronological order by the VIC-20-based stream interpreter routine. Bob20 attempts to find an optimal position for each chunk so that it can be loaded as early as possible. In the final loader stream produced by Bob20, the loader is synchronized with flag commands that basically say things like "wait until we have reached
frame 123".

Another important part of the demo, of course, is the animation system, consisting of a couple of "PC"-based tools written in C (namely, an SDL-based graphics editor and a rawdata-to-sourcecode converter), and of course, a VIC-20-based decompressor/player routine. The editor was named "Brickshop32" after the native VIC-20 graphics editor I had created five years ago for drawing the still graphics for Robotic Liberation.

While the original Brickshop is a combination of a character mode editor and a pixel editor, BS32 is "only a pixel editor" and thus only stores the bitmap and color data. The character allocation task is left for the post-processing tools. In addition, BS32 supports a drawing mode I've dubbed "1bpcaa" (1 bit per character, anti-aliased), which is taken advantage of in the stream format.

I already used the "1bpcaa" concept in some of my 2002-2003 work ("Impossiblator 2", "Robotic Warrior"). The basic idea is to store pictures in a 1-bit-per-character fashion and to render them context-sensitively -- that is, the shape of a "zero" depends on its upper, lower, left and right neighbor.

The BS32 converter, while converting animation frames, basically first tries to represent the frame in the "1bpcaa" format and then uses bytes and nybbles to "patch" the result. It may also ignore the 1bpcaa phase completely if it is not suitable for rendering the frame. At least a dozen
different combinations of algoritmhs are attempted on each frame, and the method producing least data is chosen.

Much of the development work went to these development tools rather than the actual creation of content and native code. But I'm sure that the percentage of the tool development is going to diminish dramatically once the tools reach a certain level of maturity.

The Next Level

I decided quite early that the basic visual style of my demo would be similar to that of Robotic Warrior: a very limited number of effects, no raster tricks at all, simple silhouette-based graphics, cartoon-like characters and a shameless use of a "traditional early 1980s video game look". This was a kind of antithesis to the boundary-pussing effect demo I
had made a year before.

The speech synthesizer and the music player are mostly derived from those in Robotic Liberation. The synth may even sound worse to some ears because I decided to only assign a single melody channel and the volume register for it (instead of the two+volume in RL). I didn't want to cut out any of the drum and bass tracks this time, but I don't know whether this was a wise
choice or not.

The process of creating the actual content was quite rapid (apart from finding the voice parameters which was as tedious as always). Most of the content was actually made during the last week, and I also finished the demo unusually early (on Monday, while the compo deadline wasn't until Thursday).

As for the concept, I didn't want to get too far from the "winning PWP style" this time, despite having a totally new set of tools. The singing speech synthesis, the audiovisual style, the story and the humor are all there. Some have even argued that "The Next Level" is actually too close to Robotic Liberation in how it looks and sounds. However, there are also some things that I hadn't tried before, such as the brief "surrealist" parts. Also, I've deliberately put in far more hidden references and alternative ways of interpretation than ever before, but I'll leave them to the audience to find out.

The most entertaining part of the development process was creating the graphics. It seems that I managed to find a graphics-making concept that works for me better than anything anything I've tried prior to this. Sketching the silhouettes with "big living pixels"; using characters for finetuning the sketches; drawing backgrounds with big color blocks, almost like legos; importing some small bitmaps from the outside world, etc. etc. Not too much pixel-level work, but still enough room for perfectionist satisfaction. Overall, quite an enjoyable experience, and I hope someone (apart from myself) likes the resulting visual style.

The future

As it would be a pity to only use the development tools for a single demo, I've already decided to use them for something more. The tools will still improve a lot, as I've been planning to support a couple of general-purpose effect routines and new compression schemes.

Despite taking a step towards the "non-technical", I still have some technical ideas I'd like to try out. Audio streaming is one of them. I don't want to reveal much about it yet, I just mention that it is probably going to replace the five-year-old speech synthesis routine altogether.

I also need some actual audio tools because I don't want to hard-code all the sound in assembly language anymore. A flexible audio tool would also provide a much more satisfying means for musical experimentation, and that's something I think my musical output really needs at this time.

I have been planning to release a totally different VIC-20 demo on the next Alternative Party held in October, so look forward for it.

There are still so many things that haven't been tried out yet.