Without a Traceroute

Friday was probably my favorite day as far as the lectures were concerned.

The first presentation was from Anders Carlsson of the blog Goto80 (eye-searing color scheme warning). He talked about the 8-bit demoscene and about chip music. He gave the presentation on an actual Commodore 64, and showed off some demos from the early 90s (keep in mind these are running on hardware less powerful than your phone). He talked about the demoscene as a “bounded culture”. They’ve been around since at least the late 1980s, but there’s been no real academic or journalistic interest, and very little crossover into the mainstream art or music worlds. Demos are shown at “demoparties”, not in art galleries. Occasionally, mainstream musicians will sample from the demoscene, but that’s about it.

Mr. Carlsson said that the focus in the demoscene was “craftsmanship, not art,” which I thought was an interesting distinction between the art scene and the more hacker-focused demoscene. The goal of a demo (especially in the 8-bit scene) is to push limited hardware to its absolute limit, and show off what an amazing programmer you are. To squeeze the maximum performance out of obsolete hardware means coding at a very low-level, in assembly or machine code (‘bare metal’ coding) and taking advantage of undocumented features of the hardware.
Another interesting thing about the demoscene is that authorship is protected by ostracizing offenders, not copyright lawsuits. As Mr. Carlsson explained, it would be “lame” to take somebody else’s code, or try to copy something that somebody else was doing. Recently Nelly Furtado and producer Timbaland sampled tunes from Finnish Amiga/C64 demo and have incurred the wrath of the Demoscene.

Another presentation was from a group called “Time’s Up” based in a waterfront warehouse in Linz, Austria. They seemed really cool. They’re a non-profit group with members from many different backgrounds interested in the “intersection between art, technology, science and entertainment”, and they construct “experimental situations”. They showed video of exhibits from their 2003-2004 “Sensory Circus,” which had a lot of different sort of mechanical and electronic constructions that visitors could play with. The goal of the Sensory Circus was to sort of disconnect people from their ordinary interactions with their senses and force them to approach the world in a new way. So, for instance, they’d have people walking around wearing a video-helmet with a camera facing backwards. Or a mechanical bicycle-like contraption that responds in unfamiliar ways to riders attempts to pedal forward, or steer it. The presenters explained that they were interested in creating “social hardware” and were more concerned with “the relational ‘why?’ than the technical ‘how?'” (To a true hacker, this is heresy: the how is the why)

The real crux of the presentation, however, was an uncompleted projected entitled “Twixtville”. The idea behind Twixtville was something like town-as-art. As explained in the presentation, Twixtville was to have been a “temporary, lived-in, ongoing, interactive, open, semifictional, proto-urban space, without governance.”
It would be a sort of make-believe town, inhabited by artists and fictional characters (or artists playing fictional characters?) with back stories and histories, and real and fictional conflicts. There would have been parties, workshops, and symposia (“I love symposia!”).  There also would have been some sort of online component to allow people to interact with the denizens of Twixtville.

Sadly, the project is now on hold indefinitely.  The main reason being an inability to secure a suitable location to host Twixtville. It’s too bad, because it seemed like an interesting idea. There are some examples of sort of temporary art communities, such as Burning Man in the United States, but the Time’s Up people said that they really wanted Twixtville to different, because it would be residential in that “people would really live there,” as opposed to a sort of festival.