prosthetic knowledge
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Jesus On E’s
Demoscene production from 1992 for the Commodore Amiga by Leeds Spreading Division (LSD). The demo captured the style of visuals that would have been played at raves of the time, and amazingly, this 30 minute demo fitted two floppy disks (the demo is approx. 1.4MB, less than two full size Tumblr gifs).
Here is a video of the complete demo - it will not be for everyone and it is very repetitive, but it certainly is a memorable production for it’s time:
A more authentic viewing would be with an emulator, and you can download the original files at Pouet here
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Litterae Finis
Textmode demoscene winner of TDMC 2012 put together by Trauma - very impressive stylistically rendering 3D objects in ASCII.
Video embedded below:
Alternatively, you can download the demo yourself at Pouet here (it is much much better than the video above, sharper and cleaner, Windows only).
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1bir (1 Block Interactive Raycaster)
A 3D engine developed by demogroup Crescent for the Commodore 64, which has a kind of minimalist beauty in itself - video embedded below:
This is a simple raycaster for our beloved C64 featuring the following:
- Size of one C64 disk block (254 bytes)
- Joystick controlled (port 2)
- Simple collision detection
- 256 step rotation in 2 PI
- Open (wrapped) and closed map areasDownload links can be found at Pouet here
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Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks - WebGL
In this submission, I take a look at a web technology that brings impressive 3D projects into the browser.
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Elevated
Beautiful in-browser demo of mountain flyover, amazingly comprised of only 28kb of code - via CreativeJS:
Elevated was originally released in 2009 at the Breakpoint demo party. Created by Rgba and TBC it took the viewer on a stunning trip around a beautiful mountain landscape, complete with music, rippling seas and lighting effects. All packed into a tiny 4k executable. A level of procedural generation that would make even Braben weep.
Fast forward to 2013 and the Japanese JavaScript gurus 301z have taken the PC original and converted it to just 28Kb worth of WebGL powered demo heaven. You’ll need Chrome or Firefox to view it with WebGL enabled, and it takes a while for it to calculate all of the textures, music and data at the beginning – but once done it’s a wonderful visual treat.
You can try out the demo for yourself here
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Catzilla
A PC Demo / PC benchmark / animation of a monstrous cat destroying a city, put together by the Plastic Demoscene Group - worth a watch:
Catzilla from Plastic Demoscene Group on Vimeo.
Catzilla is our latest project to date. It’s a realtime PC benchmark that will get all the juices from your PC.
Finally we had some time to make a proper demo. It was made with a nice collaboration with Platige Image.
We did the code, they did the art. The music was made exclusively by Bent ‘subsquare’ Stamnes.
Thanks for watching!More info and links here
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Never Seen The Sky by Steven Wittens
Seasonal WebGL demo combines 3D graphics and dubstep, impressively demonstates what in-browser graphics are capable of today - Chrome only.
Try it out here
Other seasonal coding experiments can be found here -
Spacecut by CND
Winner of Assembly 2012 PC Demo competition.
The above gifs do not do the demo any service due to the (vastly) reduced frame rate - what you see above is one of the later sections involving a polygon body dancing, whilst it’s body glitches and morphs to the dubstep soundtrack.
You can download and watch the demo via Pouet here, or you can watch the video embedded below:
Full list of entries and results, with videos and links to downloads, can be found at 3D Geeks here
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Aetherwaves
C64 demo that is a continuous glitch performance written in 32 bytes, entered in the Flashback 2012 demo party.
Above is a video capture using an emulator, lasting a minute or two, but theoretically could run as long as the machine was on.
You can download and try the demo from Pouet here
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Dramatic Pixels
An experiment in dramatic storytelling using only three big pixels, built as a demo on the Commodore 64 in 2010 as a 4K demo.
It was developed by VIznut, and he posted some thoughts and background on the piece:
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.
You can read the whole piece here
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TI Calculator Demoscene
Programming experiments from the last decade creating graphical demos on TI calculators.
The demoscene has always experimented with computational hardware, but it is hard to find examples outside of the personal computer. Just by chance, I discovered this video from 2002 showcasing some familiar demoscene graphical effects on a Texas Instruments TI-83 calculator (with very limited specs - 27k RAM, a graphics display of 96x64 monochrome pixels). It’s called “Monochromatic” by Noice and was released at Mekka Symposium 2002.
Looking at the Pouet Demoscene database, there are only 24 official productions on the platform between 1996 and 2010. Here is another example (in GIF format) called ‘Pixel Madness’ (no author attribution):
You can check out yourself the Poeut collection of TI-8x demos here (should you want to try these out on a compatible calculator).
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JS 1k Demo Winner: Autumn Evening by Philip Buchanan
The JS 1k competition was set up to see who could code together some ‘application’ in Javascript in just 1k. For perspective, 1k is one thousandths of a megabyte, and the GIF above is 968k (the original looks better and runs longer). The 2012 theme for the competition was love. Here is the programmer’s description of the piece:
In my opinion, the most romantic scene is an autumn evening, just at sunset when the sky turns red and everything looks so beautiful and warm. So I was inspired to write this scene and see how far I could push “high-quality” graphics in 1k. I’m very pleased with the result.
It runs fullscreen at 30fps in Chrome & Opera on my I7 laptop. If you’ve got a lower spec machine then running it in a smaller window will probably help things along.You can check this entry on your browser here
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Demoscene - The Art of the Algorithms (2012)
Great full-length documentary about the European Demoscene, a portrait of the creative digital subculture from 80s home computers to the current state:
In the 1980’s, something changed the world forever. Computer technology, mostly due to the appearance of affordable Commodore 64’s, entered households worldwide, providing the opportunity for everyone to create digital art. But existing art forms weren’t the only ones to be re-implemented on these computers; brand new forms of art also appeared, ones thought to be impossible up to that point. Computers provided an opportunity for the creator to produce visuals and sound effects and combine them to create the ultimate audiovisual experience, by using only the language of mathematics and writing program code, without physical interaction. As a result of such techniques, demos were born, and with them, the demoscene subculture. A demo can best be understood as a spectacular animated music video which is usually a few minutes long. And yet it’s something entirely different from a traditional video. Computer technics is the fastest developing part of our world, which produces more and more new opportunities for art. Moleman shows you now a digital subculture, where artists don’t use always the latest technology, but their aim is also to bring out the best from 30 year-old computer technics.
Recommended for anyone interested in creativity and the computer, and worth the spare hour and a half time if you have nothing to do this Easter weekend. It is recommended to turn on YouTube’s captions on to understand the European programmers who cannot speak English.
You can find out more about the documentary from the makers ‘Moleman’ here, and download your own copy from here.
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Text Mode Demo Contest
Text / Unicode Art taken to computational extreme in this demoscene contest.
Anyone familiar with the demoscene knows that it is a programming festival / activity where groups create graphical demos, programmed art pieces to demonstrate the graphical powers of computers.
Sometimes, with some competitions, it is to get as much out of the computer within certain limits (for example, a full demo in a small amount of memory space such as 64k or even 4k), and in this case, the graphics can only be displayed in the most limited mode a computer has available: Text Mode.
The video above is from the winner of the most recent contest. It is called ‘Lick Weed’ and is by the demo group Brainstorm. It has to be said, though, that the video above doesn’t really do it justice to the visual effect, and should be seen in it’s original executable form [you can get it via the Demoscene portal Pouet here, although it is PC only]. Second place was ‘Disambiguation’ by npli [Youtube link here]
More about the Text Mode Demo Contest can be found here
This post was discovered via the Tumblr Blog The Demo Scene, and is a good resource for those that may want to find out more about it.
