Dipswitch: Compendium or Colorful Chaos? "Demoscene: The Art of Realtime" Book Reviewed (00.12.2004)
dipswitch, Wed 30 May 2007
As a subculture that exists for over 20 years and bears a lot of potential knowledge on the cultural and technical side, the demoscene is surprisingly sparse documentated by books; the efforts on this matter can be counted with the fingers of one hand. In 1994 there was "PC Underground", the crucial German book about democoding which you can even find in most local libraries and which was the bible for generations of scene newbies - at least as long as DOS coding was up-to-date. Then we have the rather hapless approaches by Evrimsson and Merlin-M. Instead of dealing whith what the authors really knew about, namely the Amiga scene, they tried (and perhaps got pressured by the publisher) to cover general hacking issues in "Hackerland", which not only brought up the CCC against them, but also discredited the book in general as unfounded and speculative. The sequel "Hackertales" made more sense, containing mostly BBS-times stories, but still wasn't really well-recieved by the scene for the bad reputation of its antecessor. Then, of course, there is Tomcat's "Freax" project, which has been in the end stadium for the last few years, a project that appears very promising but everyone's fed up waiting for.
And then, out of the blue, a new demoscene book pops up when noone expected it. Here we have "Demoscene: The Art of Realtime", edited by Lassi Tasajärvi aka Rawer/Twilight, an old Finnish Amiga scener. It's definetely not the first book covering demoscene culture, unlike the editor claims, but it's most likely the first demoscene book in English, which is a good thing already, since the only scene books the author of these lines know of were published in German. The 72-paged full color book is an anthology built out of contributions by several people, which somewhat gives an impression of a printed out diskmag, concerning the randomness of the topics, but about that later.
On a first impression the book design appears almost luxurious. A full-color glossy cardboard cover with impregnation effects makes it look like something that might gain demoscene a large feedback in artistic circles and demoparty organizers huge sponsor attraction - as long as the sponsors aren't designers... It's sad to say that even if this book seems to be concieved mainly as a design project, I've rarely seen such a heap of visual incoherency in professional print-media with an artistic claim. The used fonts can be counted in dozens, and even if the book is not explicitely ugly by far (except for the LSDJ article where the layout borders on visual crime), its horrible incoherency gets obvious even to people who are not familiar with DTP. The design incoherency especially cristallizes itself in the "The Gathering" article, visually going from Art Nouveau and 18th-19th century graphics over somewhat sci-fi and ending in a 3d rendering of a robot, and all that without any reasonable cause.
But even if this publication can prove its claim as an artsy something only on the first view - it's the content that makes a book what it is. After a short preface we have a "Brief history of the Demoscene" written by the editor himself - probably the best part of the book, a short but detailed history of the scene like it was rarely written before. It describes all the motivation complexes, communication methods (although the BBS part had too few weigth) and paradigmatic shifts that made the demoscene what it is today, and all that in a very narrative, yet well-founded manner. An absolutely crucial article that may serve as reference for every further demoscene-related publications. The next article by the same author deals with music tracking and is rather brief, but also very well-founded and a nice reading. But after that, the topics seem to float away in randomness. The following interview with the maker of LSDJ, a music tool for the Gameboy, is most certainly out of place due to the little connectivity this project has with the demoscene and even the scene in general - the space could have been filled better with a more scene-related interview partner. Next we have a history of The Gathering, a demoparty that definitely has its historical value, but is rather questionable as a representative example of a scene party, especially considering its shift towards a gaming event in the last years. The following article about a demoscene exhibition by katastro.fi is rather irrelevant and seems like almost cronyism, since the books comes from katastro.fi surroundings. At the latest from this point on the question comes up if this book is aimed to represent the demoscene as a whole, or rather to give a forum to a certain group of people.
The following chart of "Demoscene Eras" may be the most controversial part of the book. It teems with overhasty conclusions and reveals a certain scandinavian-centristic view on things which can not be representative for the demoscene. While the brief keywords concerning the "Oldskool" (1980-1992) period mostly make sense, those on the "Middleskool" (1992-1996) are highly subjective. The question of "hardware acceleration versus software rendering" is quite an anachronism concerning the time before 1996, also it is doubtful that the FTP can be viewed upon as a significant spreading method for a time at least before 1995, where BBS was definetely the dominant method of scene communication, with every more-or-less important demogroup having a large list of BBS headquarters from Brazil to New Zealand, and with dedicated demoscene BBSs, like Starport, ACE, Scenet (the Hungarian board, not the website) and others flourishing. At least in Central Europe, the internet was a luxurious good until the second half of the 90s, not even to speak about Eastern Europe, with the Russian internet as a whole being only 10 years old. This scandinavian-centristic approach is really disturbing. Although the Scandinavians did and still do a major effort for the developement of the demoscene as we know it, other parts of Europe played a very important role as well, and the Scandinavian way of how the scene developed is not representative for the scene at all, which also gets clear in the claim of the author that in the "Middleskool" era parties generally didn't allow indoor booze anymore, which may have been a hard fact for Scandinavian demoparties, but not for demoparties in general. Also the recapitulation of the demoscene before the gamers, as described in the "Nuskool" chart in form of a stronger gamer than demoscener presence on demoparties, is a typical Scandinavian phenomenon and not representative at all. Several major Central European demoparties still manage to keep their events gamer-free and are proud of it, and the presence of gamers on major Scandinavian scene parties is considered by the majority of sceners rather as a plague than as a status quo. There are surely some true points in this whole chapter, especially some highly striking observations that made me smile, and also the way the eras are subtitled as "classic", "modern", and "postmodern" is very fitting in the context of cultural theory in general. But all in all it bears the danger to be considered as a general picture of the demoscene, while it depicts a very subjectvie view.
Well, what to say about this one? Nice effort, but very hapless on several points. It's a nice thing to give away to demoparty sponsors, and in generally something a scener should have in his bookshelf - already for the "Brief history of the Demoscene" it's worth it. But it fails as a representation of all important aspects of the demoscene, and so we'll have to wait again for a real demoscene anthology.
Tasajärvi, Lassi (ed.): Demoscene. The Art of Real-Time, Helsinki, Evenlake Studios, 2004. 72 pp. ISBN 952-91-7022-X.
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dipswitch, Wed 30 May 2007
Compendium or Colorful Chaos? "Demoscene: The Art of Realtime" Book Reviewed - by Dipswitch / Black Maiden
Publication: Pain 12/04 (2004)
Publication: Pain 12/04 (2004)
As a subculture that exists for over 20 years and bears a lot of potential knowledge on the cultural and technical side, the demoscene is surprisingly sparse documentated by books; the efforts on this matter can be counted with the fingers of one hand. In 1994 there was "PC Underground", the crucial German book about democoding which you can even find in most local libraries and which was the bible for generations of scene newbies - at least as long as DOS coding was up-to-date. Then we have the rather hapless approaches by Evrimsson and Merlin-M. Instead of dealing whith what the authors really knew about, namely the Amiga scene, they tried (and perhaps got pressured by the publisher) to cover general hacking issues in "Hackerland", which not only brought up the CCC against them, but also discredited the book in general as unfounded and speculative. The sequel "Hackertales" made more sense, containing mostly BBS-times stories, but still wasn't really well-recieved by the scene for the bad reputation of its antecessor. Then, of course, there is Tomcat's "Freax" project, which has been in the end stadium for the last few years, a project that appears very promising but everyone's fed up waiting for.
And then, out of the blue, a new demoscene book pops up when noone expected it. Here we have "Demoscene: The Art of Realtime", edited by Lassi Tasajärvi aka Rawer/Twilight, an old Finnish Amiga scener. It's definetely not the first book covering demoscene culture, unlike the editor claims, but it's most likely the first demoscene book in English, which is a good thing already, since the only scene books the author of these lines know of were published in German. The 72-paged full color book is an anthology built out of contributions by several people, which somewhat gives an impression of a printed out diskmag, concerning the randomness of the topics, but about that later.
On a first impression the book design appears almost luxurious. A full-color glossy cardboard cover with impregnation effects makes it look like something that might gain demoscene a large feedback in artistic circles and demoparty organizers huge sponsor attraction - as long as the sponsors aren't designers... It's sad to say that even if this book seems to be concieved mainly as a design project, I've rarely seen such a heap of visual incoherency in professional print-media with an artistic claim. The used fonts can be counted in dozens, and even if the book is not explicitely ugly by far (except for the LSDJ article where the layout borders on visual crime), its horrible incoherency gets obvious even to people who are not familiar with DTP. The design incoherency especially cristallizes itself in the "The Gathering" article, visually going from Art Nouveau and 18th-19th century graphics over somewhat sci-fi and ending in a 3d rendering of a robot, and all that without any reasonable cause.
But even if this publication can prove its claim as an artsy something only on the first view - it's the content that makes a book what it is. After a short preface we have a "Brief history of the Demoscene" written by the editor himself - probably the best part of the book, a short but detailed history of the scene like it was rarely written before. It describes all the motivation complexes, communication methods (although the BBS part had too few weigth) and paradigmatic shifts that made the demoscene what it is today, and all that in a very narrative, yet well-founded manner. An absolutely crucial article that may serve as reference for every further demoscene-related publications. The next article by the same author deals with music tracking and is rather brief, but also very well-founded and a nice reading. But after that, the topics seem to float away in randomness. The following interview with the maker of LSDJ, a music tool for the Gameboy, is most certainly out of place due to the little connectivity this project has with the demoscene and even the scene in general - the space could have been filled better with a more scene-related interview partner. Next we have a history of The Gathering, a demoparty that definitely has its historical value, but is rather questionable as a representative example of a scene party, especially considering its shift towards a gaming event in the last years. The following article about a demoscene exhibition by katastro.fi is rather irrelevant and seems like almost cronyism, since the books comes from katastro.fi surroundings. At the latest from this point on the question comes up if this book is aimed to represent the demoscene as a whole, or rather to give a forum to a certain group of people.
The following chart of "Demoscene Eras" may be the most controversial part of the book. It teems with overhasty conclusions and reveals a certain scandinavian-centristic view on things which can not be representative for the demoscene. While the brief keywords concerning the "Oldskool" (1980-1992) period mostly make sense, those on the "Middleskool" (1992-1996) are highly subjective. The question of "hardware acceleration versus software rendering" is quite an anachronism concerning the time before 1996, also it is doubtful that the FTP can be viewed upon as a significant spreading method for a time at least before 1995, where BBS was definetely the dominant method of scene communication, with every more-or-less important demogroup having a large list of BBS headquarters from Brazil to New Zealand, and with dedicated demoscene BBSs, like Starport, ACE, Scenet (the Hungarian board, not the website) and others flourishing. At least in Central Europe, the internet was a luxurious good until the second half of the 90s, not even to speak about Eastern Europe, with the Russian internet as a whole being only 10 years old. This scandinavian-centristic approach is really disturbing. Although the Scandinavians did and still do a major effort for the developement of the demoscene as we know it, other parts of Europe played a very important role as well, and the Scandinavian way of how the scene developed is not representative for the scene at all, which also gets clear in the claim of the author that in the "Middleskool" era parties generally didn't allow indoor booze anymore, which may have been a hard fact for Scandinavian demoparties, but not for demoparties in general. Also the recapitulation of the demoscene before the gamers, as described in the "Nuskool" chart in form of a stronger gamer than demoscener presence on demoparties, is a typical Scandinavian phenomenon and not representative at all. Several major Central European demoparties still manage to keep their events gamer-free and are proud of it, and the presence of gamers on major Scandinavian scene parties is considered by the majority of sceners rather as a plague than as a status quo. There are
Well, what to say about this one? Nice effort, but very hapless on several points. It's a nice thing to give away to demoparty sponsors, and in generally something a scener should have in his bookshelf - already for the "Brief history of the Demoscene" it's worth it. But it fails as a representation of all important aspects of the demoscene, and so we'll have to wait again for a real demoscene anthology.
Tasajärvi, Lassi (ed.): Demoscene. The Art of Real-Time, Helsinki, Evenlake Studios, 2004. 72 pp. ISBN 952-91-7022-X.
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