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I've been wondering about this for a while. Who of you guys would welcome initiatives that would get demos more exposure in other media such as tv programming etc, and who wouldn't? Pros/cons of staying niche and arty vs. getting more attention in other media. Experiences? etc...

just wondering what your opinions are.

What I usually find is that it's really hard to explain how a demo is not a "video" to an outsider. You begin with "yeah, kind of a video, just calculated in realtime" and you get an "eh? huh? ok... so it's a video" stare back :)

related to the topic, i recently heard that AADN got a media opening (tv) for the demoscene in the lyon area (france), 14 minuts every 2 weeks, and 28 minuts once a month.. dunno which channel it is though.

what do you people think such media opening should contain? pig images? goatse? or.. seriously.. which demos? interviews? documentary like style?

Does it really matter if the audience knows that it's realtime or not? I don't know the intricacies of oil painting or metallurgy but that doesn't stop me from appreciating oil paintings or sculptures.

My opinion of this is given here:
http://www.students.meduniwien.ac.at/~n0102122/articles/present.htm

Wasn't there a weekly TV program in Sweden(?) some 10+ years ago that showed demos?

Also, AssemblyTV can be viewed in about 400,000 households in Finland thru the cable network, but AFAIK not many people actually watch it :)

all demo that do not runs on every pc should be on tv

I don't think the "realtime" point is very important. What is more important is the nature of skills required in making a demo, and especially the role of code and "computer-generated stuff".

And I neither think it is very important to get television visibility for "documentaries that explain demoscene". It might be more useful to just get a demo viewed every now and then, and this would hopefully wake up some potentially interested people who can look for more information on their own.

years ago a finnish teen program 'summeri' showed demos from assembly. 1 per day or so. i was a bit puzzled first that my girlfriend back then knew what demos were, but she just saw them from tv.

more demos to tv, please.

There's indeed a clear problem with showing off demos on mass media. On one side, appreciating demos requires quite a lot of technical knowledge ( well, when it comes to show those to people who can barelly be able to do a copy/paste ). On the other side, if you tell all the technical details, you can frighten an audience that will be looking still forward to other things, such as design and music. There are a lot of other aspects in the demoscene that are also interresting, such as the community spirit, the competition, and the fact it's a form of art which arose from chaos (not the one from sanity). We can also talk about all the other categories such as digital painting compos, music compos, wilds..

when i was a kid there was that cool sunday morning videogame show on a french tv channel called microkids... it always ended with cool amiga demos :)

i still think the worlds of demos and games are naturally born to be married ;D


btw every modern dude can be amazed by what can be produced by a 64k intro, knowing how fat office and movie files are :]

I think it's most important to show some demos that really look and sound good. Then one could mention by passing that these demos occupy only xxx kbytes on your harddisk because they're "hard-coded". What will impress most people, however, isn't the kbyte count but the audiovisual experience.

unfortunatly those adiovisual experience is pretty dissapointing if demos get compared with todays games or prerendered short movies.

dont you ever think - "if it's good enough, people will find it"..?

and yea - people are surely sometimes amazed by 4 or 64k intros when they can actually run them. but not when they're on tv. if something is going to be shown on tv it shouldnt need to be explained where it came from or how it's done, it should look good enough anyway.
(and most demos don't live up to that.)

Not true if you treat demos as pieces of art instead of pieces of techical things. Some of my friends know jack shit about computers, but still love and download demos by themselves.

The sad part is that a lot of demos are just boring and very general, unimaginative chaff. Not that many demos have any real content or ideas at all, and to non-technical people, that's where it's at.

just use the 'we make our own kickass software to run this crap just like *most recent famous game*' :p

Perhaps you are right.

I guess demo makers get satisfaction mostly from making demos, and from showing them to equally-minded people; they aren't in need of acclaim from 100,000 laymen, are they?

It's perhaps the task of non-sceners who accidentially discover demos and fall in love with them to see to it that their passion gets shared.

Zest: avec Jean-Michel Blottière :)

They also showed Atari demos by the way.


Speaking of which, the french channel Game One once made this Atari ST retrospective in their show "Memoire vive", for those who are interested. The quality of the video is really bad but it's still fun to watch: http://hugo-production.net/demost.rm

It even features Zappy's "Keops is (not) a lamer" screen :')

I think the only demos that work on TV would be storydriven-demos or totally abstract ones... what 4k's or 64k's are really about, won't matter to the viewer on TV... but could be stated at the end of each clip ("btw, this was made in 4 kilobytes only", or something like that)....

but I wonder... would you guys WANT to reach a wider audience, or wouldn't you? I think if demos in general would be communicated as "digital art", they might indeed reach a wider audience, instead of trying to explain to everyone what a demo really is. Peopple interested will find out for themselves if they're interested in a production. Thoughts?

Perhaps it would be useful to link demos to a larger context, such as hobbyist computer animations or some postmodern video/media art rather than presenting demos as something totally unique.

I agree, demos are digital art. I also think that totally abstract stuff could reach a much higher audience than everyone could expect, and i'm leaning towards trying to make a business out of it. just projects.

also.. in order to achieve spreading the word towards media and art festivals about "demos", it would be required to have a central point of contact... like a "PR person"... and a general website that isn't too technical about demos, where media can be informed.

Dunno what the gain of this would be, but it surely might be an interesting challenge. :) something like a "sceners union", where groups can be a member of.. and if they're a member, the "union" is allowed to take its productions to media, show them, etc.. or I dunno... sorry, just thinking out loud.

In my opinion size and platform doesn't matter. A good demo is always a good demo, and a good intro is always a good intro. The major problem whould be the demo/intro length (For example: some (stupid) people don't like chiptune that much).
I've just imagined a very rich demoparty showing it's Invtros as advertising on TV. Would be funny.

axel: http://www.digitalekultur.org/en/