Behind "Dramatic Pixels"

I released a minimalistic demo called "Dramatic Pixels" at Breakpoint 2010. It is an experiment in narrative using very minimal visual output: three colored character blocks ("big pixels") moving on an entirely black background, synchronized to musical accompaniment. (CSDB, Pouet.net)

I was expecting the demo to cause very mixed reactions in the audience, but to my surprise, it actually won the competition it was in (4-kilobyte Commodore 64 demo) and the reception has been almost entirely positive. This -- along with the fact that a somewhat similar production was released by Skrju and Triebkraft for the ZX Spectrum just two months earlier -- inspired me to write this short essay about the philosophy behind this production. And besides, visy/trilobit has also blogged about "Dramatic Pixels" recently, so I think I am obliged to do the same.

Background

For quite some time already, I have been on a philosophical excursion to the nature of "hard-core" digital creativity, especially the deep essences of the demoscene and the "8-bit" culture. The so far biggest visible result of this excursion has been my recent essay about Computationally Minimal Art, which, among all, separates the ideas of "optimalism" and "reductivism". I have noticed that the audiovisual digital culture (including the demoscene) has traditionally been very optimalist in nature, aiming at fitting as much complexity as possible within given boundaries. The opposite approach, reductivism, which embraces minimal complexity itself as an esthetic goal, is very seldom used by the demoscene, however.

In December 2009, I was pondering about how to express "complex real-world phenomena" such as human emotions via "extreme reductivism". I was planning to design a low-pixel "video game character" that shows a wide range of emotions with facial and bodily expressions, and I particularly wanted to find out the minimum number of facial pixels required to express all the nine emotional responses (rasas) of the Indian theatre. When minimizing the number of pixels, however, I realized that facial expressions might not in fact be necessary at all; movement patterns and rhythms alone seemed to be enough for differentiating fear from bravery, or certainty from uncertainty. If the character only needs to move around for full expressive power, its pixel pattern can very well be reduced to a single pixel.

I quickly did a couple of experiments with this idea of "pixel drama". As the results were convincing enough, I started to plan a minimalistic movie using only single-pixel characters. As the movie was quite probably to be implemented as a demoscene production, I thought it would be important to have a somewhat "operatic" approach, synchronizing the visual action with a strong musical accompaniment.

After some initial sketches, I didn't really think about the idea for a couple of months. But less than a week before the Breakpoint party, I decided to implement it on the C-64. The choice of platform could have been just about anything, however, from VCS to Win32. C-64 just seemed like the best and easiest choice considering the competition categories available at Breakpoint. The size of the demo ended up to be about 1.5K bytes, and I later also released a 1K version where the introductionary text was removed.

The demo itself

Technically, everything in "Dramatic Pixels" is centered around the music player routine, which is also responsible for the choreography: the bytes that encode the notes of the lead channel also contain bits that control the movement of the pixels. To be exact, every time a new note is played by the lead instrument, exactly one of the three pixels takes a single step towards one of the four cardinal directions. This is an intentional technical decision that ties the pixel movement seamlessly to the music. Internally, the whole show is a series of looping sequences that are both musical and visual at the same time.

All the actual musical notes, by the way, are encoded by only two bits each. These two bits form an index to a four-note set, which is defined by two variables (indicating base pitch and harmonic structure). These variables are manipulated on the fly by a higher-level control routine that is also responsible for the other macro-level changes in the demo. I prefer to encode melodies in this way rather than as absolute pitches, as a more "indirect" approach makes it more compact and closer to the essence of the musical structure. And, in the case of this demo, I wanted some minimalism (or maybe serialism) in the musical score as well, and the possibility to repeat the same patterns in different modes helps in this goal.

The 6502 assembly source code of the 1K version is available for those who are interested. It should be relatively easy to port to any 6502-based platform (with the music player probably requiring most work), so I've been planning on releasing separate versions for VIC-20 and Atari 2600 as well.

So, what about the story, then? Most of the interpretations I've heard have been somewhat similar and close to my own intentions, so I think my decisions about the audiovisual language have been relatively succesful: Red and Blue meet, fall in love, become estranged, cheat on each other with Green, and in the end everyone gets killed. However, there are some portions that are apparently more difficult.

When I created the characters, I had no intentions of assigning genders to the pixels. Still, some people have interpreted Red as male and Blue as female. This probably stems from the differences in the base pitches (when Blue moves, the pitch is an octave higher than when Red moves), but the personalities of the pixels may also matter. Red is more stereotypically masculine, making more initiatives, while Blue mostly responds to these initiatives. I don't know whether the interpretations would have been different if I had chosen Blue to be the initiator.

The second part, where Red and Blue spend time on the opposite sides of the screen, is perhaps the most difficult to follow. I intended this part to represent everyday life where both pixels have their own daytime activities and only see each other at home very briefly in evenings (and don't pay much attention to one another even then). Also, the workplaces are so far away that the pixels can't see each other cheating until Red decides to get closer to Blue's workplace. And no, Green does not represent two different pixel personalities depending on the partner -- it's the same despisable creature in all cases. The part is intentionally slightly too long and repetitive in order to emphasize the frustration that repetitive everyday routines may lead to.

Comparison to the Spectrum demo

I would now like to compare "Dramatic Pixels" to the 256-byte Spectrum demo I mentioned earlier, "A true story from the life of a lonely cell" by Sq/Skrju and Psndcj/Triebkraft. Although I'm trying to follow the Spectrum demoscene due to some very visionary groups therein, this demo was so recent that I never managed to even hear about it until I had finished "Dramatic Pixels".

In both demos, there are three characters represented by solid-colored blocks. The blocks express emotion mostly by the way how they move. In "A true story", all movement happens in one dimension, so it is basically all about back-and-forth movement in varying rhythms. "Dramatic Pixels" can be very easily seen as a refinement of this concept, adding a musical accompaniment and another dimension (although it may very well have worked in 1D as well). The stories in both demos are based on the love triangle model, although my story is a little bit more complex.

"Great minds think alike", yes, but the coincidence still baffles me. Is it really just a coincidence or a result of some external factors? Deep thoughts about the state of the demoscene, perhaps combined with some general angst about the potential of the art form in the 2010s, were part of the mental process that lead me to create "Dramatic Pixels". I haven't discussed this with Sq, but perhaps there was something similar going on in his mind as well.

To add an additional spice to the mystery: the recent video game inspired short film called "Pixels" was put on the web on the same day (2010-04-07) as I put the video of "Dramatic Pixels" on Youtube.

The bigger purpose

For some time already, I have been writing pretty words about "thinking out of the box" in the demoscene context. But pretty words are hollow unless you back them up with some practical evidence, such as an actual demo.

I considered it important to finish "Dramatic Pixels" for Breakpoint, as I had just recently released my essay about Computationally Minimal Art. I wanted to release a production that would support some of its ideas, especially the equality of reductivism as a "boundary-pushing" approach.

When working on "Dramatic Pixels", I made two observations about my mental reactions. First, extreme visual minimalism can give me the same kind of "boundary-pushing shivers" as some groundbreaking optimalist demos can, so I got the subjective evidence I desired about the power of the reductivist approach. And second, despite the existence of the narrative, I never felt any "narrative embarrasment" that is almost a given with story-based demos (even the good ones). I don't yet know what the missing embarrassing element is; narrative text, dialogue, human-like characters? I still need to think this over, I guess.

Anyway, I hope this experiment broke some new ground that would inspire some further experimentation in computational minimalism. I think traditional minimalists have already done quite a lot of "basic research" during the last hundred years or so, so I would like the inspired productions to choose a fresh route by emphasizing those areas that are unique in the computational approach.

Defining Computationally Minimal Art (or, taking the "8" out of "8-bit")

Introduction

"Low-tech" and "8-bit" are everywhere nowadays. Not only are the related underground subcultures thriving, but "retrocomputing esthetics" seems to pop up every now and then in mainstream contexts as well: obvious chip sounds can be heard in many pop music songs, and there are many examples of "old video game style" in TV commercials and music videos. And there are even "pixel-styled" physical products, such as the pictured watch sold by the Japanese company "&design". I'm not a grand follower of popular culture, but it seems to me that the trend is increasing.

The most popular and widely accepted explanation for this phenomenon is the "nostalgia theory", i.e. "People of the age group X are collectively rediscovering artifacts from the era Y". But I'm convinced that there's more to it -- something more profound that is gradually integrating "low-tech" or "8-bit" into our mainstream cultural imagery.

Many people have became involved with low-tech esthetics via nostalgia, but I think it is only the first phase. Many don't experience this phase at all and jump directly to the "second phase", where pixellated graphics or chip sounds are simply enjoyed the way they are, totally ignoring the
historical baggage. There is even an apparent freshness or novelty value for some people. This happens with audiences that are "too young" (like the users of Habbo Hotel) or otherwise more or less unaffected by the "oldskool electronic culture" (like many listeners of pop music).

Since the role of specific historical eras and computer/gaming artifacts is diminishing, I think it is important to provide a neutral conceptual basis for "low-tech esthetics"; an independent and universal definition that does not refer to the historical timeline or some specific cultural technology. My primary goal in this article is to provide this definition
and label it as "Computationally Minimal Art". We will also be looking for support for the universality of Computationally Minimal Art and finding ur-examples that are even older than electricity.

A definition: Computationally Minimal Art

Once we strip "low-tech esthetics" from its historical and cultural connections, we will be left with "pixellated shapes and bleepy sounds" that share an essential defining element. This element stems from what is common to the old computing/gaming hardware in general, and it is perfectly possible to describe it in generic terms, without mentioning specific platforms or historical eras.

The defining element is LOW COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY, as expressed in all aspects of the audiovisual system: the complexity of the platform (i.e. the number of transistors or logic gates in the hardware), the complexity of the software (i.e. the length in bits of the program code and static data), as well as the time complexity (i.e. how many state changes the computational
tasks require). A more theoretical approach would eliminate the differentiation of software and hardware and talk about description/program length, memory complexity and time complexity.

There's little more that needs to be defined; all the important visible and audible features of "low-tech" emerge from the various kinds of low complexity. Let me elaborate with a couple of examples:

• A low computing speed leads to a low number of processed and output bits per time frame. In video output, this means low resolutions and limited color schemes. In audio output, this means simple waveforms on a low number of discrete channels.


• A short program+data length, combined with a low processing speed, makes it preferrable to have a small set of small predefined patterns (characters, tiles, sprites) that are extensively reused.


• A limited amount of temporary storage (emerging from the low hardware complexity) also supports the former two examples via the small amount of available video memory.


• In general, the various types of low complexity make it possible for a human being (with some expertise) to "see the individual bits with a naked eye and even count them".

In order to complete the definition, we will still have to know what "low" means. It may not be wise to go for an arbitrary threshold here ("less than X transistors in logic, less than Y bits of storage and less than Z cycles per second"), so I would like to define it as "the lower the better". Of course, this does not mean that a piece of low-tech artwork would ideally
constitute of one flashing pixel and static square-wave noise, but that the most essential elements of this artistic branch are those that persist the longest when the complexity of the system approaches zero.

Let me therefore dub the idealized definition of "low-tech art" as Computationally Minimal Art (CMA).

To summarize: "Computationally Minimal Art is a form of discrete art governed by a low computational complexity in the domains of time, description length and temporary storage. The most essential features of Computationally Minimal Art are those that persist the longest when the
various levels of complexity approach zero."

How to deal with the low complexity?

Traditionally, of course, low complexity was the only way to go. The technological and economical conditions of the 1970s and 1980s made the microelectronic artist bump into certain "strict boundaries" very soon, so the art needed to be built around these boundaries regardless of the artist's actual esthetic ideals. Today, on the other hand, immense and virtually non-limiting amounts of computing capacity are available for practically everyone who desires it, so computational minimalism is nearly always a conscious choice. There are, therefore, clear differences in how the low complexity has been dealt with in different eras and
disciplines.

I'm now going to define two opposite approaches to low complexity in computational art: optimalism (or "oldschool" attitude), which aims at pushing the boundaries in order to fit in "as much beauty as possible", and reductivism (or "newschool" attitude), which idealizes the low complexity itself as a source of beauty.

Disclaimer: All the exaggeration and generalization is intentional! I'm intending to point out differences between various extremities, not to portray any existing "philosophies" accurately.

Optimalism

Optimalism is a battle of maximal goals against a minimal environment. There are absolute predefined boundaries that provide hard upper limits for the computational complexity, and these boundaries are then pushed by fitting as much expressive power as possible between them. This approach is the one traditionally applied to mature and static hardware platforms by the
video game industry and the demoscene, and it is characterized by the appreciation of optimization in order to reach a high content density regardless of the limitations.

A piece of traditional European-style pixel graphics ("Frog, Landscape and a lot of Clouds" by oys) exemplifies many aspects of optimalism. The resolution and color constraints of a video mode (in this case, non-tweaked C-64
multicolor) provide the hard limits, and it is the responsibility of the artist to fill up the space as wisely and densely as possible. Large single-colored areas would look "unfinished", so they are avoided, and if it is possible to fit in more detail or dithering somewhere, it should be done. It is also avoidable to leave an available color unused -- an idea which leads to the infamous "Dutch color scheme" when applied to high/truecolor video modes.

When applied to chip music, the optimalist dogma tells, among all, to fill in all the silent parts and avoid "simple beeps". Altering the values of as many sound chip registers per frame as possible is thought to be efficient use of the chip. This adds to the richness of the sound, which is though to correlate with the quality of the music.

On platforms such as the Commodore 64, the demoscene and video game industry seem to have been having relatively similar ideals. Once an increased computing capacity becomes available, however, an important difference between these cultures is revealed. Whenever the video game
industry gets more disk space or other computational resources, it will try to use it up as aggressively as possible, without starting any optimization efforts until the new boundaries have been reached. The demoscene, on the other hand, values optimality and content density so much that it often prefers to stick to old hardware or artificial boundaries in order to keep the "art of optimality" alive. The screenshot is from the 4K demo "Artefacts" by Plush (C-64).

Despite the cultural differences, however, the core esthetic ideal of optimalism is always "bigger is better"; that an increased perceived content complexity is a requirement for increased beauty. Depending on the circumstances, more or less pushing of boundaries is required.

Reductivism

Reductivism is the diagonal opposite of optimalism. It is the appreciation of minimalism within a maximal set of possibilities, embracing the low complexity itself as an esthetic goal. The approach can be equated with the artistic discipline of minimal art, but it should be remembered that the idea is much older than that. Pythagoras, who lived around 2500 years ago, already appreciated the role of low complexity -- in the form of mathematical beauty such as simple numerical ratios -- in music and art.

The reductivist approach does not lead to a similar pushing of boundaries as optimalism, and in many cases, strict boundaries aren't even introduced. Regardless, a kind of pushing is possible -- by exploring ever simpler structures and their expressive power -- but most reductivists don't seem to be interested in this aspect. It is usually enough that the output comes out as "minimal enough" instead of being "as minimal as possible".

The visuals of the recent acclaimed Flash-based platformer game, VVVVVV, are a good example of computational minimalism with a reductivist approach. The author, Terry Cavanagh, has not only chosen a set of voluntary "restrictions" (reminiscent of mature computer platforms) to guide the
visual style, but keeps to a reductivist attitude in many other aspects as well. Just look at the "head-over-heels"-type main sprite -- it is something that a child would be able to draw in a minute, and yet it is perfect in the same iconic way as the Pac-Man character is. The style totally serves its purpose: while it is charming in its simplicity and downright naivism, it
shouts out loud at the same time: "Stop looking at the graphics, have fun with the actual game instead!"

Although reductivism may be regarded as a "newschool" approach, it is possible to find some slightly earlier examples of it as well. The graphics of the 1986 computer game Thrust, for example, has been drawn with simple geometrical lines and arcs. The style is reminiscent of older vector-based arcade games such as Asteroids and Gravitar, and it definitely serves a technical purpose on such hardware. But on home computers with bitmapped screens and sprites, the approach can only be an esthetical one.

Optimalism versus Reductivism

Optimalism and reductivism sometimes clash, and an example of this can be found in the chip music community. After a long tradition of optimalism thru the efforts of the video game industry and the demoscene, a new kind of cultural branch was born. This branch, sometimes mockingly called
"cheaptoon", seems to get most of its kicks from the unrefined roughness of the pure squarewave rather than the pushing of technological and musical boundaries that has been characteristic of the "oldschool way". To an optimalist, a reductivist work may feel lazy or unskilled, while an
optimalist work may feel like "too full" or "too refined" to a reductivist mindset.

Still, when working within constraints, there is room for both approaches. Quite often, an idea is good for both sides; a simple and short algorithm, for example, may be appreciated by an optimalist because the saved bytes leave room for something more,, while a reductivist may regard
the technical concept as beautiful on its own right.

Comparison to Low-Complexity Art

Now I would like to compare my definition of Computationally Minimal Art to another concept with a somewhat similar basis: Jürgen Schmidhuber's Low-Complexity Art.

While CMA is an attempt to formalize "low-tech computer art", Schmidhuber's LCA comes from another direction, being connected to an ages-old tradition that attempts to define beauty by mathematical simplicity. The specific mathematical basis used in Schmidhuber's theory is Kolmogorov complexity, which defines the complexity of a given string of information (such as a picture) as the length of the shortest computer program that outputs it. Kolmogorov's theory works on a high level of generalization, so the choice of language does not matter as long as you
stick to it.

Schmidhuber sees, in "down-to-earth coder terms", that the human mind contains a built-in "compressor" that attempts to represent sensory input in a form as compact as possible. Whenever this compression process succeeds well, the input is perceived as esthetically pleasing. It is a well-studied fact that people generally perceive symmetry and regularity as more beautiful than unsymmetry and irregularity, so this hypothesis of a "mental compressor" cannot be dismissed as just an arbitrary crazy idea.

Low-Complexity Art tests this hypothesis by deliberately producing graphical images that are as compressible as possible. One of the rules of LCA is that an "informed viewer" should be able to perceive the algorithmic simplicity quite easily (which also effectively limits the time complexity of the algorithm, I suppose). Schmidhuber himself has devised a system based
on indexed circle segments for his pictures.

The above picture is from "Superego", a tiny pc demo I made in 1998. The picture takes some tens of bytes and the renderer takes less than 100 bytes of x86 code. Unfortunately, there is only one such picture in the demo, although the 4K space could have easily contained tens of pictures. This is because the picture design process was so tedious and counter-intuitive --
something that Schmidhuber has encountered with his own system as well. Anyway, when I encountered Schmidhuber's LCA a couple of years after this experiment, I immediately realized its relevance to size-restricted demoscene productions -- even though LCA is clearly a reductivist approach as opposed to the optimalism of the mainstream demoscene.

What Low-Complexity Art has in common with Computationally Minimal Art is the concern about program+data length; a minimalized Kolmogorov complexity has its place in both concepts. The relationship with other types of complexity is different, however. While CMA is concerned about all the types of complexity of the audiovisual system, LCA leaves time and memory complexity out of the rigid mathematical theory and into the domain of a "black box" that processes sensory input in the human brain. This makes LCA much more theoretical and psychological than CMA, which is mostly concerned about "how the actual bits move". In other words, LCA makes you look at
visualizations of mathematical beauty and ignore the visualization process, while CMA assigns an utmost importance to the visualizer component as well.

Psychological considerations

Now, an important question: why would anyone want to create Computationally Minimal Art for purely esthetical reasons -- novelty and counter-esthetic values aside? After all, those "very artificial bleeping sounds and flashing pixels" are quite alien to an untrained human mind, aren't they? And even many fans admit that a prolonged exposure to those may cause headache.

It is quite healthy-minded to assume that the perception mechanisms of the human species, evolved during hundreds of millions of years, are "optimized" for perceiving the natural world, a highly complex three-dimensional environment with all kinds of complex lighting and shading conditions. The extremely brief technological period has not yet managed to alter the "built-in defaults" of the human mind anyhow. Studies show, for example, that people all over the world prefer to be surrounded by wide-open landscapes with some water and trees here and there -- a preference that was fixed to our minds during our millions of years on the African savannah.

So, the untrained mind prefers a photorealistic, high-fidelity sensory input, and that's it? No, it isn't that simple, as the natural surroundings haven't evolved independently from the sensory mechanisms of their inhabitants. Fruits and flowers prefer to be symmetric and vivid-colored because animals prefer them that way, and animals prefer them that way because it is beneficial for their survival to like those features, and so on. The natural world is full of signalling which is a result of millions of years of coevolutionary feedback loops, and this is also an important source for our own sense of esthetics. (The fish in the picture, by the way, is a Synchiropus splendidus, photographed by Luc
Viatour.)

I'm personally convinced that natural signalling has a profound preference for low complexity. Symmetries, regularities and strong contrasts are important because they are easy and effortless to detect, and the implementation requires a relatively low amount of genetic coding on both
the "transmitter" and "receiver" sides. These are completely analogous to the various types of computational complexity.

So, why does enjoying Computationally Minimal Art require "mental training" in the first place? I think it is not because of the minimality itself but because of certain pecularities that arise from the higher complexity of the natural world. We can't see individual atoms or even cells, so we haven't evolved a built-in sense for pixel patterns. Also, the sound generation
mechanisms in nature are mostly optimized to the constraints of pneumatics rather than electricity, so we don't really hear squarewave arpeggios in the woods (although some birds may come quite close).

But even though CMA requires some special adjustment from the human mind, it is definitely not alone in this area. Our cultural surroundings are full of completely unnatural signals that need similar adjustments. Our music uses instruments that sound totally different from any animal, and
practically all musical genres (apart from the simplest lullabies, I think) require an adjustment period. So, I don't think there's nothing particularly "alien" in electronic CMA apart from the fact that it still hasn't yet integrated in our mainstream culture.

CMA unplugged

The final topic we cover here is the extent where Computationally Minimal Art, using our strict definition, can be found. As the definition is independent from technology, it is possible to find ur-examples that predate computers or even electricity.

In our search, we are ignoring the patterns found in the natural world because none of them seem to be discrete enough -- that is, they fail to have "human-countable bits". So, we'll limit ourselves to the artifacts found in human culture.

Embroidery is a very old area of human culture that has its own tradition of pixel patterns. I guess everyone familiar with electronic pixel art has seen cross-stitch works that immediately bring pixel graphics in mind. The similarities have been widely noted, and there have been href="http://www.spritestitch.com/">quite many craft projects inspired by old video games. But is this just a superficial resemblance or can we count it as Computationally Minimal Art?

Cross-stitch patterns are discrete, as they use a limited set of colors and a rigid grid form which dictates the positions of each of the X-shaped, single-colored stitches. "Individual bits are perceivable" because each pixel is easily visible and the colors of the "palette" are usually easy to tell apart. The low number of pixels limits the maximum description length, and one doesn't need to keep many different things in mind while working either. Thus, cross-stitch qualifies all the parts of the definition of Computationally Minimal Art.

What about the minimization of complexity? Yes, it is also there! Many traditional patterns in textiles are actually algorithmic or at least highly repetitive rather than "fully hand-pixelled". This is somewhat natural, as the old patterns have traditionally been memorized, and the memorization is much easier if mnemonic rules can be applied.

There are also some surprising similarities with electronic CMA. Many techniques (like knitting and weaving) proceed one complete row of "pixels" at a time (analogous to the raster scan of TV-like displays), and often, the set of colors is changed between rows, which is corresponds very well to the use of raster synchronization in oldschool computer graphics. There are even peculiar technique-specific constraints in color usage, just like there are similar constraints in many old video chips.

The picture above (source) depicts a pillow knitted with the traditional Fair Isle technique. It is apparent that there are two colors per "scanline", and these colors are changed between specific lines (compare to rasterbars). The patterns are based on sequential repetition, with the sequence changing on a per-scanline basis.

Perhaps the most interesting embroidery patterns from the CMA point of view are the oldest ones that remain popular. During centuries, the traditional patterns of various cultures have reached a kind of multi-variable optimality, minimizing the algorithmical and technical complexity while maximizing the eye-pleasingness of the result. These patterns may very well
be worth studying by electronic CMA artists as well. Things like this are also an object of study for the field of ethnomathematics, so that's another word you may want to look up if you're interested.

What about the music department, then? Even though human beings have written music down in discrete notation formats for a couple of millennia already, the notes alone are not enough for us. CMA emphasizes the role of the rendering, and the performance therefore needs to be discrete as well. As it seems that every live performance has at least some non-discrete variables, we will need to limit ourselves to automatic systems.

The earliest automatic music was mechanical, and arguably the simplest conceivable automatic music system is the musical box. Although the musical box isn't exactly discrete, as the barrel rotates continuously rather than stepwise, I'm sure that the pins have been positioned in an engineer's accuracy as guided by written music notation. So, it should be discrete enough to satisfy our demands, and we may very well declare the musical box as being the mechanical counterpart of chip music.

Conclusion

I hope these ideas can provide food for thought for people interested in the various forms of "low-tech" electronic art as well as computational art or "discrete art" in general. I particularly want people to realize the universality of Computationally Minimal Art and how it works very well outside of the rigid "historical" contexts it is often confined into.

I consciously skipped all the cultural commentary in the main text on my quest for proving the universality of my idea, so perhaps it's time for that part now.

In this world of endless growth and accumulation, I see Computationally Minimal Art as standing for something more sustainable, tangible and crafty than what the growth-oriented "mainstream cultural industry" provides. CMA represents the kind of simplicity and timelessness that is totally immune to the industrial trends of fidelity maximization and planned obsolescence. It is something that can be brought to a perfection by an individual artist,
without hiring a thousand-headed army of specialists.

As we are in the middle of a growth phase, we can only guess what kind of forms Computationally Minimal Art will get in the future, and what kind of position it will eventually acquire in our cultural framework. We are living interesting times indeed.

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.