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So, demos are now art.

category: general [glöplog]
Bragging time! :) (Well, in case some of the other sceners artists featured posted about it the first time, I managed to miss it.) Anyway, Schriftfilme was an exhibition in Karlsruhe, and the same Type Motion exhibition is now showing at FACT Liverpool and this reminded me that maybe I should tell someone else in the world that it's on and has demos in it (exhibition 18 in the list). (In 2015 they will be exhibited again at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.)

The exhibition has pages on social media like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest if they fit your bill better, and it has been featured in Wired. If that's not enough of a citation for Wikipedia, a book in German has been published and the book in English and a DVD box set of the exhibition is forthcoming. (This was on the "demoscene citations on Wikipedia" topic.)

As you can see this is a quite ambitious exhibition where the demoscene is one part out of 20, but still a good initiative I think. Credit to Daniel Botz for contacting me about this (and who btw recently wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled "Hacker-Ästhetik" on this subject).
added on the 2014-12-11 19:23:47 by Photon Photon
like that never happened before!
added on the 2014-12-11 19:40:07 by maali maali
Hopefully there will be some aliens from deep space among the visitors. You know, to fully enjoy Mental Hangover scrollers.
added on the 2014-12-11 19:42:58 by ham ham
Will speedfisters be there?
added on the 2014-12-11 20:24:25 by BiasZ BiasZ
the only demo that's art is Agenda Circling Forth.
added on the 2014-12-11 20:32:02 by farfar farfar
yeah, never happened before

not even once

anyway, who did the curating of the demos?
added on the 2014-12-11 20:45:03 by nosfe nosfe
The newest two demos are from 2006, and most are from 1987/88. :-(
added on the 2014-12-11 20:57:54 by Kylearan Kylearan
Quote:
and most are from 1987/88. :-)


Fixed it for you. :)
added on the 2014-12-11 21:00:00 by StingRay StingRay
Lmao, yep, demos are *now* art! From this moment on! Not before this, no, no.

Also what nosfe and kylearan said, the selection is weird. But still cool you are in an exposition!
added on the 2014-12-11 21:06:18 by okkie okkie
Nice, might go visit. Haven't been to liverpool for a while :)
added on the 2014-12-12 06:08:33 by psonice psonice
Given that it's an exhibition about typography, I think the curation has been done quite well. It contains oldschool stuff heavy on typical oldschool fonts, and newschool stuff that does really cool stuff with text, such as Pageturner and Die Ewigkeit Schmerzt.
added on the 2014-12-12 10:36:24 by skrebbel skrebbel
ohhh, mental hangover, sweet :D
added on the 2014-12-12 12:11:03 by elkmoose elkmoose
Yes, it's not a selection to represent demos in general or a best-of. In order to match the exhibition so entitled, the selected demos would do some interesting movement or transformation of the letters deemed suitable for the exhibition it's a part of.

And I guess there has been periods on each platform where that has been popular to code and use in demos, and periods where that has not been the focus of hardly any demo at all, f.ex. the "3D years" on Amiga+accelerator and Windows.

But we mustn't lose sight of the great thing here. Museums of modern art showing scroller effects. Well, I think that's just pwnsome :)
added on the 2014-12-12 19:47:06 by Photon Photon
The curator of the exhibition in Karlsruhe was Daniel Botz who wrote the excellent book about the demoscene "Kunst, Code & Maschine". An interview with him and a short book review can be found in German language at BitFellas .deMOSZENE pages.

News about the exhibition"Type Motion" are there, too: Here and here.

Back in 2009 a nice young lady from Munich wrote her doctoral thesis about "Type demos". Here's an interview with her as well as a link to her doctoral thesis in PDF format.
added on the 2014-12-12 20:25:04 by Bobic Bobic
@Photon: Movement of letters? Hmmm... Perhaps they should take a look to my (relatively) old Amiga intro Codex Permutatio.
added on the 2014-12-12 20:46:51 by ham ham
Demos were always arts to me!
added on the 2014-12-13 16:48:19 by AntDude AntDude
with that logic basically every scroller is (kinetic) typography!
added on the 2014-12-13 16:53:46 by maali maali
Quote:
StingRay wrote:
Quote:
...and most are from 1987/88. :-(
...and most are from 1987/88. :-)

Fixed it for you. :)

^^^
this!!!! :)))))))))
added on the 2014-12-13 16:58:09 by bonefish bonefish
Quote:
Back in 2009 a nice young lady from Munich wrote her doctoral thesis about "Type demos". Here's an interview with her as well as a link to her doctoral thesis in PDF format.

This 20 pages of not-much-really better not be a "doctoral thesis"; Looks more like a "supplement paper" to get some credit for a Bachelor degree. (and reading the interview, it's indeed "a paper")
added on the 2014-12-13 17:04:04 by tomaes tomaes
yeah and the academic quality of that paper is indeed piss poor.. where's the methodology and what is it trying to conclude? it names a few examples, so perhaps it's a case study that there are indeed demos with text in them! :P
added on the 2014-12-13 17:30:54 by maali maali
Excellent link bobic :) It should answer why, and for what, the demo (parts) were selected.

Interesting that someone else had a similar angle in 2009! They're unrelated I guess, but maybe it inspired Botz to make this part of an exhibition?
added on the 2014-12-13 18:12:02 by Photon Photon
Photon: Botz is a professor (something with computer art) at the same university in Munich where Anja Hartmann used to study. He's also a long time demoscene fanatic and main brain behind the Schriftfilme exhibition. He told me that he shows demos to his students from time to time. I used to talk to him a lot between 2010 and 2012 when he released his book "Kunst, Code & Maschine". Unfortunately we never met personally which is a shame, because we only live about 180km away from each other.

If you understand German than you should really read his book, which is the most complete and informative book I've ever read about the demoscene and even better than Freax or The Art of Realtime (and I love all of these).

About the "paper" from Anja Hartmann I can only say that I like what she did. I love to see that people are talking about demos outside the scene and look at them from a different point of view. Maybe this paper is not really a masterpiece, but at least it caught attention of a couple of people who might haven't heard of or seen demos before.
added on the 2014-12-13 23:12:55 by Bobic Bobic
The exhibition has now been shown twice in Taiwan, and the following groups were listed as authors in the book "Typemotion: Type as Image in Motion", National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2015, ISBN 978-986-04-4458-2.

The book will be published in English also, and surely German also.

Black Maiden
Bypass
Chorus
Cryptoburners
Equinox
Focus
Neuro
Northstar & Fairlight
Phenomena
Sanity
Scoopex
Super Swap Sweden
Triumph
Xakk

So, are demos art now? Well, demos from the above groups naturally, not sure about the rest. ;P

Haha, just kidding :) Obviously you had to make a text effect demo to be in the exhibition. But I'm proud of having been selected for these exhibitions and I think the other groups should be, too!
added on the 2015-06-18 19:33:24 by Photon Photon
reminds me that i should prep a list of demos for showing at gogbot festival :)
added on the 2015-06-18 21:11:15 by maali maali
Good to know Northstar and Fairlight have to work together to be considered as art!
added on the 2015-06-18 21:23:20 by Serpent Serpent

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