The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden

https://www.goto80.com/the-demoscene-as-a-unesco-heritage-in-sweden

by robin_reala • 1 year ago

640 87 1 year ago

goto80.com

velo_aprx2• 1 year ago

Here is the official announcement (in Swedish): https://levandekulturarv.se/forteckningen/element/demoscenen

diggan• 1 year ago

Hastily thrown together translation, because I thought it captured the hacker mindset so well:

A fundamental driver of the demo scene is to make a machine, such as a computer, do something it has not done before. This could mean, for example, creating a tailor-made program for a particular type of machine. Technically, it is about exploiting the capabilities of the machine in an efficient and novel way.

It's sad to think that the computing devices our newer generations are growing up with are trying their best to shoot down this exact use case; making the device do things no one made it do before.

Instead, everything is locked down in the name of safety, and people loosing out on the ability of just having fun by modifying devices we already own.

Lerc• 1 year ago

I think the term "Use case" has done a fair bit of the shooting itself.

So many times I have seen people hold things up with "What's the use case" always transforming the problem at hand into convincing a person who doesn't comprehend that other people's experiences are also valid.

_the_inflator• 1 year ago

I think the demoscene is what it is: a treasure, a heritage.

I was/still a part of it, but essentially, every demo evolved into a video during the 90th.

A shift came with the more powerful machines, especially on PC.

C64, Amiga 500 - technical prowess was necessary for certain optical illusions; the video illusion stems from hacks. This reversed.

I think that this is ok. Device hacking is now the new old low-code hacking.

Today's demoscene is also totally meta. From fighting emulators to accepting to utilizing was quite a ride.

The massively impressive demos of today on C64 or Amiga are a testament to the heritage they capitalize on. Here and there, a minor tweak or final secret was finally totally understood; differences between serial numbers of C64 were a thing, too - and that's it.

I am impressed by what has been done and achieved in the early days by machine code on C64 during the 80th.

Massive influence was also time. The Scandinavians find a cool thing to do during the winter months and hack for days and nights - hardly anyone would do this today.

There was no harddisk, code revisioning. Compiling took time, and saving the stuff on disk was a tedious procedure during debugging. Printed Assembler code etc.

Today, you can dump the most elaborate code and data on emulators within seconds, all well compiled and checked - it is a wonder. IDEs, etc., are standard.

Even back then, some elite coders used cross-development platforms, such as Amiga and C64, to deal with the burden of memory and slow compile times on C64.

But the thing is that you had to develop the tools yourself. An advantage of this scale was earned.

Anyway, it was a fantastic time. Copy parties, puberty, trash talk - and, to be honest, a lot of doxxing and mobbing in retrospect.

I am glad I was part of the scene from 1987 to 1994 and attended Venlo and other infamous Copy parties.

Greetings from Beastie Boys/C64

joarv0249nw• 1 year ago

Computers are mostly appliances, like dishwashers, now.

randmeerkat• 1 year ago

It's sad to think that the computing devices our newer generations are growing up with are trying their best to shoot down this exact use case; making the device do things no one made it do before.

Buy a Steam Deck.

dahart3• 1 year ago

everything is locked down in the name of safety, and people loosing out on the ability of just having fun by modifying devices we already own.

Do you have any specific examples? I’m not convinced this problem exists for demoscene.

For other kinds of hacking, maybe yes, but demoscene was always about pushing graphics and sound limits of the device, and that is absolutely still possible and not being traded for security. If anything, the actual problem to lament is that GPUs are so damn good that no crazy hacking is required anymore, at least not to work around the hardware, though just using the hardware as designed these days can sometimes be categorized as crazy hacking. The hardware now does far more than everything we wished it could do thirty or forty years ago. We got what we wanted in the first place: programmable graphics hardware. Nonetheless, people are still pushing GPUs to do things it wasn’t quite designed for.

I’m not sure anyone’s fun is being hampered, demoscene graphics hacking is alive and well:

https://demozoo.org/parties/4813/

https://www.shadertoy.com/playlist/featured

femto• 1 year ago

Instead, everything is locked down...

There's an argument that that just raises the bar.

skrebbel2• 1 year ago

As a demoscener, I think this cool (though maybe also a bit useless).

But the thing this highlights to me now is how weird it is that UNESCO heritage lists are per country. The design seems wholly unsuited to any sort of culture that has emerged after the invention of global communication networks such as the internet. IIRC demoscene is already recognized as UNESCO heritage in Finland and Germany, what are we going to do, go down the list of every country that ever produced more than a few demos?

I mean of course none of this matters, because there's not really any tangible benefit to one's hobby being on a list like this, but it's still kinda funky. As if culture stops at country borders.

makeitdouble• 1 year ago

Would it help if you tried to have a demo class at a community center and could point at the UNESCO decision to get proper handling and shut down the "kids these days" arguments ?

DoingIsLearning2• 1 year ago

The biggest benefit is in bringing legitimacy to preservation efforts and curation of historic records (photos, videos, data, binaries, sources) on the history of the Demoscene.

There is a large chunk of software history prior to pre-cloud services that has died in someone's hard drive, floppy, CD.

Maybe because it was tied to IP or maybe just because they didn't think much about its historic value or didn't see it as ground breaking or note worthy.

skrebbel2• 1 year ago

There is a large chunk of software history prior to pre-cloud services that has died in someone's hard drive, floppy, CD.

Sure but I don't see how being on a UN list helps fix that. Seems to me like efforts from people behind eg scene.org, archive.org (hat tip to jscott) etc are substantially more valuable to preservation efforts than convincing some folk dance geeks who work at the UN that rotating nipple balls are also cool (which of course they are)

EDIT: To be clear, I don't mean to dismiss the effort. The entire point of the demoscene is "because we can!", so obviously this also holds for getting our hobby listed by the UN.

cinntaile• 1 year ago

I think it's fine that some things just disappear with the sands of time. Not everything needs to be preserved.

dmbche• 1 year ago

If I'm trying to see how it's useful, attaching your country's identity to a cultural practice is a good first step to then fund and prop up/support said practice - while the list itself doesn't change much, you can refer to it to show the demoscene is worthwile and argue for funding/support.

kilpikaarna3• 1 year ago

fund and prop up/support said practice

I wonder how this would look in practice in the case of the demoscene.

I feel like there was a moment in the earöy 2010s-ish when there was an interest in the demoscene as one aspect of "digital art", along with games, animation etc. Seems to have faded a bit, maybe because the focus of the demoscene shifted towards size limits where the aesthetic accomplishments can be less immidiately obvious to the uninitiated.

eCa• 1 year ago

how weird it is that UNESCO heritage lists are per country.

Most things on the list are geographic (in some sense) so for those it kind of makes sense that they are country based. There are some that spans multiple countries, the largest of which that I’m aware of is Struve Geodetic Arc stretching from the Arctic to the Black Sea.

But I agree that some cultural evolutions are quite far removed from the physical space in which they happened.

ForHackernews• 1 year ago

It's also unsuited to cultural heritage that predates the nation state or spans modern semi-arbitrary borders.

amyjess• 1 year ago

IIRC demoscene is already recognized as UNESCO heritage in Finland and Germany, what are we going to do, go down the list of every country that ever produced more than a few demos?

Potentially, yes. Take a look at the following list and you'll see, for example, that 24 countries are listed for falconry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_Her...

w_TF• 1 year ago

also not very punk rock to crave validation from unesco

kilpikaarna3• 1 year ago

Idag används ofta särskilda programvaror för att skapa demos, men det är inget måste, man kan använda vilket program som helst.

Wat?

INTPenis• 1 year ago

"Today there are specialized software to create demos but you can do it without these." It's a bit poorly formulated because back in the day people had nothing but a text editor.

kilpikaarna3• 1 year ago

There's been specialized tools in use since the very beginning though. I'd count assemblers and such among them. :)

Doctor_Fegg• 1 year ago

1987: https://cpcrulez.fr/applications_graphic-NWC-demomaker.htm

bux93• 1 year ago

I was going to mention Scream Tracker, but the Swedish language link names Fasttracker (apparently Swedish made, while Scream Tracker is by the Future Crew who hail from Finland).

jansan• 1 year ago

Welcome to the club! The demoscene is already UNESCO heritage in Finland, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands.

lores• 1 year ago

But not in Syria? Everyone always forgets the Damascene demoscene.

tobylane• 1 year ago

They haven't yet had their sudden change of heart on the subject.

myth_drannon• 1 year ago

It's haram now.

sandos• 1 year ago

I was going to mention Finland, which I always thought was maybe slightly better even than my own Swedish demoscene! :)

ChrisArchitect2• 1 year ago

Some of the other national UNESCO demoscene additions incl. thoughts around the benefits of this kind of declaration, and of course plenty of fond anecdotes:

Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876961

Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26522681

Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36597460

ChrisArchitect2• 1 year ago

FastTracker was Swedish? That's enough to justify this list add IMO

kookamamie• 1 year ago

Yes, FT was Swedish and Scream Tracker was Finnish, from Future Crew.

danwills• 1 year ago

And Impulse tracker is from South Australia! Jeff Lim is totally one of my local heroes!

amiga386• 1 year ago

Soundtracker was German

Noisetracker was Swedish

Protracker was Norwegian

MED/OctaMED was Finnish

tobr• 1 year ago

Fun to see goto80 at the top of HN. If there’s one song that got me hooked on the 8 bit sound as a teen, it’s Blox. https://archive.org/details/bliptv-20131104-213301-BleepStre...

villeb2• 1 year ago

He is a childhood buddy of mine and I had the same reaction to seeing him here.

barcoder• 1 year ago

It’s incredible to see what can be achieved with very few lines of code to produce visuals and sound. It’s often pretty easy to know who the demoscene is made by because of the artistic style. Similar to more traditional art forms.

chaosprint• 1 year ago

Really interesting to read about this! That's wonderful validation for a vital digital culture and its heritage.

As the creator of Glicol (https://glicol.org/), based in Oslo and working in the digital arts space, I'm always fascinated by how different countries foster creative technology. Sweden's approach in recognizing the demoscene this way is particularly encouraging.

It makes me reflect on the pathways to support here in Norway. While academic environments can be very supportive (as my previous supervisors have been), navigating the broader public arts funding structures for newer digital art forms sometimes feels more challenging, especially perhaps for those working outside of long-established networks.

Seeing Sweden's success in formally recognizing this kind of digital heritage is genuinely inspiring and offers food for thought.

prisenco• 1 year ago

I use to mess around with Scream Tracker (and later Impulse Tracker) back in the day, so this is bringing back memories while showcasing a completely new approach.

Incredibly cool project.

larodi5• 1 year ago

Would you agree the demoscene is slowly turning into generative-art-NFT-scene. I mean, lot of new effects get released a gif or genart snippets, and some are actually really good. Also #genaury been a think for several years now.

Not sure how this relates to the heritage status of older productions though.

trollbridge2• 1 year ago

Don’t see how NFTs are relevant.

ML/LLM/AI/generative transformer generated art is at home in the demo scene. The demoscene has always embraced new ways to create art, and then find a way to pack it inside a 32kB cracktro or BBS insert in a zip file. I wonder what could be done wi the Fabrice Bellard’s very low bitrate audio compression, for example…

Some of the imagination is “What could have been?” What demos could have existed in 1981 on contemporary hardware? It is a pathway into imagining other worlds.

larodi5• 1 year ago

Fabrice Belliard, among other things, implements neural networks for fun and compression.

I don’t think though he ever struggled to fit 32k or to do art, so dunno how this relates.

arexxbifs• 1 year ago

It's not. Demoscene productions are released on the demoscene.

larodi5• 1 year ago

hah, I sure do know where and when many of the legendary productions got released. besides - we (demogroup ancient pain) released two in 1996 and 1997. when were yours released to down-vote my actually very informed comment, for real?

the fx scene in 2025 is full throttle with a short-form single-effect pieces being released daily, and some of them are actually quite good. some people also release the code to them unlike what demoscene guys did back in the day, as it all was closed culture, albeit free.

my comment was really - if kids are incentivized to do genart for money, or to just share pieces of short-attention spam material, why do it for the classic fun of it of the demoscene?

onename• 1 year ago

Not sure if we are following the same demoparties but I still see plenty of great demos, intros, music, etc. being released. I do see new compos being add liked Modern GFX, Animations, Photo, and Videos but I dont feel that deminish the creativity of the Demoscene.

On a side note, I am looking forward to this year Revision demoparty.

dakom• 1 year ago

There's also some cool stuff brewing in the AVS space to allow nondeterminism, GPU, storage, and more.. for example, WAVS executes stuff off-chain in WASI components, and brings the result on-chain (secured by re-staking via Eigenlayer etc.)- so there's a roadmap to do things directly in wasi-gfx powered shaders and more low-level access like that

initramfs• 1 year ago

my mom's basement is not for sale!

BurningFrog• 1 year ago

The more things UNESCO declares an exceptional heritage, the less special they are.

To me the shark is already jumped, but I don't think they'll ever quit.

velo_aprx2• 1 year ago

You kind of miss what the UNESCO Intangible Heritage list is actually about. It’s not like they’re handing out gold stars to things they think are "the best" or most "exceptional.

The whole point is to recognize and help preserve living traditions.

jolmg• 1 year ago

I thought UNESCO world heritage sites were physical locations rather than aspects of a possibly physically dispersed culture. Is the site the whole country of Sweden?

echoangle• 1 year ago

It's probably not a heritage site but something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_Her...

nubb• 1 year ago

ive always thought the ethereum ecosystem would give demoscene a revival. storing the demos on chain adds a new layer of complexity where the bigger the size the more expensive to deploy.

throwaway4736• 1 year ago

Ah, Sweden. Gave us “Enigma” by Phenomena and all of the music of Radix, Lizard King, Firefox, Mantronix, and Jogeir.

As good as it gets!

bane• 1 year ago

As a scener since the early 90s, I'm thrilled with these announcements. Personally, what I'd like to see come of it is an increase in the amount of academic studies of the scene at the intersection of art, technology, and anthropology. A careful study of the scene, what makes it unique, how it bleeds into other adjacent scenes (and what those are), sub-scenes, core elements of demoscene art and tech, all those things would be really interesting.

They've all been written about by sceners in the past, but I think more outside observations would be enlightening. As a demoscener, you know what is scene and what isn't, and basically how it works. But I've found it nearly impossible to succinctly explain it to non-sceners without sounding like I'm crazy, or making it up, or giving them a very wrong understanding of core demo elements (e.g. "so it's all about doing things in small sizes?")

One leg up, the scene has done a very good job archiving information about scene groups, sceners, scene productions, and sub-scene productions, giving future researchers a lot of information to start from.

xandrius• 1 year ago

I honestly often hear about the "demo scene" being talked about but I've never even once seen anything in the real world. I might see a youtube video or two but I would have 0 clue on:

1) What is it for?

2) Where does it happen?

3) What's the goal? (not in a snarky way but in what do the sceners pursue?)

4) How does one get to know about the demo scene? How does one "join"?

I'm impressed by how something that seem so hidden, but also talked about, but also hard to catch still exists.

I guess I'm just a noob out of the loop but I'm curious :)

EDIT: Or maybe I am so out of the loop not to know it's mainly a thing of the past?

renaudg• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

https://www.demoscene.info/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU

idispatch• 1 year ago

Classic masterpiece, for those who experienced it in 1990s and wanted to know how it was done: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality

herbcso• 1 year ago

I remember being blown away by Second Reality! Thanks for the trip down memory lane! ;]

huseyinkilic• 1 year ago

We don't need no validation.

karteum• 1 year ago

It's 12 years old now, but I am still extremely impressed by this 64k intro https://geidav.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/making-of-turtles-al... and also by this 4k intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE :)

And overall this website is extremely interesting with tutorials and code and great explanations https://iquilezles.org/

code_kate08• 1 year ago

Fascinating that the Swedish demoscene is getting UNESCO heritage status. It's great to see this creative digital subculture, which has pushed the boundaries of what's possible with computer graphics and effects for decades, getting mainstream recognition. Kudos to the hard work of the communities and organizers involved.

Kolorabi• 1 year ago

Absolutely deserved.

Never been a part of the demoscene per se, but I remember going to The Party in Denmark the year that Andromeda won the Amiga compo with Nexus 7. That is one of the great memories from my youth.

The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden

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