The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden
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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.
Incredibly cool project.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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
I am not aware of a demoscene production running on a dishwasher, but I wouldn't be surprised if one existed.
Buy a Steam Deck.
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:
There's an argument that that just raises the bar.
And overall this website is extremely interesting with tutorials and code and great explanations https://iquilezles.org/
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.
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.
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.
It is a great way of spreading the word ... many small organizations don't have the man power to do "other things" (like looking up how to apply for strange grants, let alone maybe know about them).
> 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.
It's not necessarily about "effort" but perhaps more about "appearances" - it's easier to say "This history is important enough to be recognized by UNESCO: give us money to preserve it!"
Hello, person who controls government funding for the arts! The demoscene is now a UNESCO cultural heritage property in three different countries, including ours. We are a group dedicated to (preserving/documenting/continuing) this wonderful and unique expression of the artistic urge. You should give us a lot of money to keep doing this.
...in much more polite language, and with descriptions of exactly what you'll be doing with that money, of course.
You could apply for a grant big enough for your group to take a year off your day jobs and spend it hacking the hell out of your submission for a major party. You could get a chunk of money to keep your site full of demos running. You could get the state helping to pay the expenses for the party you run.
All of these things obviously have existing ways to pay their expenses or the scene would have died off long ago, but why not add another one?
The thing about History in general is that we as present time people have a poor intuition of what is valuable historic data for people in a future (long time from now) time.
Today we draw conclusions from graffiti on Roman walls or Babylonian complaint records. Arguably at the time nobody would consider vandalism or customer service records worth preserving for posterity.
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.
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.
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...
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
Noisetracker was Swedish
Protracker was Norwegian
MED/OctaMED was Finnish
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.
Wat?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_Her...
As good as it gets!
To me the shark is already jumped, but I don't think they'll ever quit.
The whole point is to recognize and help preserve living traditions.
Not sure how this relates to the heritage status of older productions though.
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.
I don’t think though he ever struggled to fit 32k or to do art, so dunno how this relates.
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?
Further, the only use of the NFT I have seen that is not also trying to create some artificial value others are forced to recognize, is as tickets. And yes, I mean proof of purchase to an event type tickets.
for the disclaimer - not trying to turn anything into another thing. myself is not part of the nft market of generative art, but it is difficult to not note it, right?
> Further, the only use of the NFT I have seen that is not also trying to create some artificial value others are forced to recognize, is as tickets.
...or club cards, or other benefit somethings. okay.
Had the absolutely same argument about it for very long, so I dare to continue this conversation.
First of all, let's agree that fame related to pushing the boundaries of CPUs and other PUs is for very long not going to the demoscene. Why? Perhaps because people stopped writing their own renders, and modplayers. Because THIS was what needed pushing to the limits. In my opinion, though, the drive for demoing is not purely a coder drive, it is an aesthetic, and also art&animation drive.
Demoscene was a show-off for badass coders, but also for badass tracker music producers, and pixelcore artists, of course. The coolness of it is that it allowed impossible things with CREATIVE expression.
Similar to that is this Lithuanian producer's achievement with the cat movie, who snatched Oscar with a draft render. Is this a top-optimization showcase ?! Not on the CPU level, this brother was GPU poor, so he went for the aeshtetic excellence with whatever he had.
Now speaking of art or preservation - the fact the demoscene is heritage of something means nothing in a world where even the archive.org needs regular funding and massive volunteer effort in order to exist. Besides most of the demos, not sure what %, surely had their source code lost already, because opensource was not something badass coders embraced back in the day.
In 2025 if you want to see coding excellence, perhaps llama.cpp and tinygrad can be an object of admiration, the work of jart on the cosmopolitan c if you want... But I can think of very few demoscene (visual) productions done in the last 5 years, that are really feat of technology, given what GPUs can do with compute units nowadays. On the contrary - a lot of generative art content is implemented in processing, or even processing.js, or unity.
Of course you can never underestimate the achievements of Farbrauch, ASD (from Greece!), CNCD, all the legendary groups who produced these productions. But, come on, where is the massive demoscene output that should be there given the massive, huge gaming branch which is all about animation, sound and visuals, and pushing boundaries?
Demoscene parties have not multiplied and many tech events which should have demoscene room - do not. Neither the commercial ones, nor the hacker-run gatherings.
You know, I can definitely argue that pieces of effects may actually get better preserved as blockchain token payload, than obscure URLs at scene.org or pouet.net. So this is one reason to not bark against it, and besides for a s.o. 14years old, who just switched from scratch to processing.js - it may come as reasonable incentive, given what his peers are probably doing, to have this released as some NFT which moves and does gen-art. why not? why would he be obliged to go to the demoscene to do genart? because who said it?
My observation is that the whole generative art, or the art part of the demoscene drive, went towards the social scene, and not NFT necessarily, but say - on viral and also anon accounts on X or Mastodon, where it releases. And perhaps also blends already with the VJ and special effects crowd which perhaps have their own conferences, because you know FC went to start Remedy, and these other guys went to start Notch and it's a very commercial platform, and guys who started it - also won Assembly several times with this engine.
This seems to be the core element in your part of this discussion.
And like every NFT mention I have seen, associating it with either the idea of untapped value with the purchase of an NFT (if that even makes sense somehow), or it is some how a way to control use, seems dubious at best, given no one has shown how involving the NFT creates additional value or has intrinsic value of some kind beyond the "makes a nice ticket" use already mentioned.
The NFT just is not germane. And "bark" is not helpful either.
Fact is, sceners started looking at each others work using disassenblers! Many still do. I do, and have, and will do so again.
I think your preservation argument is weak sauce like the NFT is weak sauce.
They are neat uses of the block chain, and that means what again?
I am not in favor of them in this context at all.
Must we continue, "what about that and NFT?" over and over before accepting the NFT just does not seem to add value, except for the hard core few looking for ANYTHING to stick?
Probably, lol.
As for that missing, and massive output, perhaps there is confusion here too. The way I see it, generative art came to the scene, who was really more about more fully exploiting tech. This is particularly true of older hardware and productions, and the sceners who did all that to start it all.
The real driving forces behind most scene works just are not mainstream things.
(That said, I'm assuming by "genart" you either mean modern AI-based generative art, or you mean all generative art in general. Either way, while somewhat/tangentially related to the demoscene, they are not direct analogs or descendants.)
Besides - demo scene was not only about performance, never was. Even though the hacker side of it is about it, the aesthetic is not.
On a side note, I am looking forward to this year Revision demoparty.