demoscene

014 #buenzlivsdock18

Aletsdat

Apr 30, 2016 • 5 min read

Folks creating art out of passion for machines.
Filling holes in their lives, or so it seems.
I wanted to be a part of it so bad.
Hoped to feel something I've never felt.
The Return by Bitlove [video]

On April 29 we ran #BüNZLIREBOOT 2, beaming demoscene hits and none-too-forgotten gems on the giant new screen at Dock18, part of the Rote Fabrik in Zürich. This was the second demoscene event organised by SODA and Echtzeit, following on the momentum of our show at the Lichtspiel in December. At least thirty people joined in over the course of the evening for a program of demoscene releases, presentations, live performances and Q&A discussion.

Releases

The evening was organised together with @gluggergames who ran a sublime chippy live generated music performance to the background of livecoded shaders.

Another surprise and major delight of the evening was an original C64 production dedicated to #Bünzlireboot and the Swiss demoscene called "We Miss You" released by Atlantis during our event.

Download and run this prod on your Commodore 64 (or handy emulator) today!

With standing room only at the end, we rocked until well past midight. Thanks a lot to our hosts and sponsors Dock18, especially to dragica, boosda, muhvie & unlock for your support <3

Speeches

At one point we took a lights-on break to discuss the state and future of the [Swiss] demoscene. Thank you to everyone for the great Q&A. Please share any further ideas and thoughts you have on the demoshow or the demoscene in our forum, Pouet, Twitter, Facebook or email, and we will tie all threads together. Some of my takeaways were:

People are doing wonderful things with code across the country and all around Europe - there are many ways and places to support this.
The vibrant demoscene spirit and vitally needed ideas of autodidactic/explorative multimedia/art are things we wish to see survive and thrive, especially to include the next generations.
Open devices (Arduino, Raspberry Pi), standards (OpenGL, WebGL,..) and "well known" retro hardware (Commodore64, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Vectrex,..) attract wide interest from makers and creative coders.
There is huge, blossoming public interest in game development, virtual/augmented reality and mobile/wearable devices, that must not be ignored. After all, it was the explosion of interest in personal computing that permeated the demoscene heyday of the 80-90s.
Art/music/design/code skills translate well across mediums, but many people are stil not aware of the demoscene and are surprised to hear such a thing as "real time art". Example: we had people walking in curious as to what the noise was, who were passionate about computer graphics and projection mapping, but never seen demos before.

We tried to show that it's easy to get started with generative coding, art, or music. We (briefly) showed off Demopaja by moppi, werkkzeug by farbrausch, Shadertoy, openFrameworks, OpenGL and WebGL, THREE.js and Blender. We pointed out both online seminars (e.g. Revision, Assembly) and offline (e.g. EB Zürich, HS Luzern) introductory courses.

Explaining how the different formats and techniques are used in making demos, we tried to point out how important teamwork is for a great production, and that people can bring all kinds of important skills into the mix even if they are not technical. A couple of guys downloaded a tool (Ibniz) and started making colourful procedural tunnels and noise on a laptop right there and then.

It became clear that an overwhelming number of platforms & tools to choose from, being unsure where or how to get help, and just the sheer amount of motivation needed to stick through with a production is what people were worried about. It seems the best way is to just dive in and paddle as hard as you can :)

We then killed all audio and lights and immersed ourselves in appreciating the pixels, sounds, shaders and elations of the demoscene. You can experience this yourself (even if maybe not quite at the level of the huge high-def screen and sound of Dock18) through our YouTube playlists:

The official playlist (up until midnight) follows: on each page you will find links to freely downloadable copies of the demos (ignore the browser warnings) and links to YouTube for video captures (not as good as watching the "real thing").