Programmed by Clint Enns.. Presented by Vector Festival in Toronto, Ontario at Artscape Youngplace on July 14, 2017.
Vector co-founder Clint Enns curates an extraordinary screening that pays homage to the extravagant, edgy, and plain crazy history of the demoscene, a loose international community of programmers, hackers, musicians, and designers (originally involved in cracking video game copy protection) who create self-contained, audio-visual code-based works that range from minuscule visual abstractions to over-the-top epics. The majority of the work will be screened from executable files, rather than video, reframing the demo as a micro-cinema format.
Program:
State of the Art | Spaceballs | 1992 | 4 min. | Amiga
A classic Amiga Demo! Released at The Party in 1992 (1st in the Amiga Demo Competition). A trackmo on one disk.
[Code: Lone Starr, Major Asshole | Music: Travolta | Graphics: Tmb Design | Dancer: Jannicke Selmer-Olsen]
Home Movies from The Gathering in 1993 | 1993 | 5 min. | DV
Home video recordings from The Gathering in 1993, held in Skedsmohallen, Lillestrøm during April 7-10, 1993.
Ameisen | Jan “Řrřola” Kadlec | 2007 | 5 min. | MS DOS
An MS-DOS demo coded in 32 bytes.
Super Mario Movie | Cory Arcangel & Paper Rad | 2005 | 15 min. | NES
Nausea (1938) for a generation raised on Nintendo.
Mothership FTW & Cell II | Strobe & TiTAN | 2007/2010 | 3 min. | MilkyTracker Animation
Code that is both score and animation.
Jed’s Other Poem | Stewart Smith | 2005 | 3 min. | DV
Music video for the Grandaddy song of the same name.
Fist of Trade | Hack ‘n’ Trade | 2014 | 4 min. | C64
An excellent example of KYBDslöjd (drawing by typing).
[Code: Mathman | Music: Goto80 | Graphics: AcidT*]
The Shores of Reflection | SHAPE | 2017 | 10 min. | C64
A contemporary demo in a classic style. Released Datastorm 2017.
[Code: 6R6, Bjørn Røstøen, Glenn Davanger, Knut M. Clausen, Wisdom | Music: 6R6, Kristian Røstøen, Linus | Graphics: Archmage, Carrion | Linking: 6R6, Knut M. Clausen | Concept: Archmage | Loader: Bitbreaker]
DESCENT | Peter Burr, Mark Fingerhut & Forma | 2017 | 6 min. | EXE
A world descending into darkness in the form of a desktop application.
Critical Discourse
Jed’s Other Festival
Dan Dickinson, “Jed’s Other Festival,” Skirl (July 15, 2017).
We spent our Thursday and Friday evenings attending parts of the Vector Festival here in Toronto:
Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing digital games and creative media practices. Presenting works across a dynamic range of exhibitions, screenings, performances, lectures, and workshops, Vector acts as a critical bridge between emergent digital platforms and new media art practice.
Thursday night was the opening was the launch party at Inter/Access, and while a bunch of what we saw was interesting, I was blown away by some of what we saw Friday night at Execute! From Scene To Screen. From the site:
Vector co-founder Clint Enns curates an extraordinary screening that pays homage to the extravagant, edgy, and plain crazy history of the demoscene, a loose international community of programmers, hackers, musicians, and designers (originally involved in cracking video game copy protection) who create self-contained, audio-visual code-based works that range from minuscule visual abstractions to over-the-top epics. The majority of the work will be screened from executable files, rather than video, reframing the demo as a micro-cinema format.
He played the files using various emulators which got a little glitchy…which is part of the point. There were Amiga demos. Nintendo movies about Super Mario’s dementia. DOS animations. An unofficial video for a Grandaddy song (from The Sophtware Slump, which reminded me that I really need to re-listen to that album). Some kind of mutant hybrid where the file was both audio and animation.
There were Commodore C64 files, for fuck’s sake. And some of them made in this year. What a fascinating look into a scene that exists — somehow — out of sheer creativity and, I guess, patience. I remember C64 coding.