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Yesterday the demoscene was accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage. That's a great success for the recognition of digital art and digital culture in general! But what is the demoscene? A thread:
The demoscene is a computer art subculture that creates digital art in the form of so-called "demos". A demo is an executable program that generates real-time graphics and music. Everything is calculated on screen the moment you see it.
Demos often combine coding, art and music
Demos often combine coding, art and music
If you are curious to see how a demo can look like, here is an example of a 64k intro by the group Conspiracy:
Please keep in mind that even though you can watch video recordings of demos, a demo is a program that generates computer graphics in real-time!
Please keep in mind that even though you can watch video recordings of demos, a demo is a program that generates computer graphics in real-time!
The video games industry was strongly influenced by the demoscene. For example, EA DICE (Battlefront, Battlefield) was founded by former demosceners in the 90s. Up until today, both scenes are intertwined.
The demoscene has an interesting history. It evolved out of crack-intro programming in the 80s. A crack intro is a mini demo added to cracked software as a signature from the cracker. It's not rare that the cracktros looked better than the game or software that was cracked.
Today the demoscene is a subculture on its own and not related to the cracking scene. 
Demosceners meet at demoparties where groups compete against each other in different categories. It is common to have size-restricted categories, for example, 64k and 4k intros.
That means the challenge is to create impressive real-time graphics and music with a program file size smaller than 65536 or 4096 bytes. That's super small! An empty OpenOffice text file can already be larger than a 4k intro.
There are also competitions that have no size limit, are about making games, ASCII art, or require the demo to run on retro computers. (just a few examples! there are many categories)
I bought my first graphics tablet after attending a demoparty in Cologne, 7-8 years ago.
Thanks to the girls that sat next to me who worked on entries for the freestyle graphics competition.
Thanks to the girls that sat next to me who worked on entries for the freestyle graphics competition.
A game that was developed by the German demo group Farbrausch is called .kkrieger, a first-person shooter in 96kb! Most of the assets are procedurally generated.
Another example of a demo with absolutely beautiful visual art is Vessel by Conspiracy
Another tip: 1995 by Kewlers & mfx. Awesome music! Keep in mind that this demo is 15 years old.
You can find a large collection of demos on the website http://www.pouet.net/
