pouët.net

Not a discussion for this thread. I think you know what I meant and I think we pretty much agree on everything.

My real point is, we do not make enough impactful content to truly matter in the way Banksy matters. We could do very well with having a hack like him in the community.

It is my strong believe that the scene needs to be more "Underground". I guess that after 25 years of doing a party called "Underground Conference", originally founded to protest against the scene and "The Party" becoming too "overground" that is an obvious position.

But of course there is no clear definition of "Underground". It's true that Breakpoint did attract sponsors like Intel, NVidia, AMD and even the FOX movie studios, but back then all of this had happened under our own rules. It was "OK" (even when I personally thought it sucked) that sponsor speakers got attacked. It was OK that the same time Fox advertised their movie there had been demos making crude fun about them and their movie. It was OK for the fins to undress when the Mayor of Bingen joined. We did not give a shit about GEMA, and did play music and did remixes all that we wanted. We had content on our bigscreen that today would get you banned lifetime on Twitch and YouTube within 100 Milliseconds.

~10 years later: Imagine any single one of these things happening at a major party. Unthinkable.

And yes, we had tons of TV coverage back then. Far more than what we have today.

But just because your underground subculture is interesting to be reported about or getting sponsored, it doesn't mean you HAVE to adapt your standards. You can always operate in a "take our rules or leave it" mode.

You can see this with the Cracking/Warez scene: They also had been reported about a hell lot, but still kept to their own system of rules and values, and did not accept outside pressure.

In Summary: The question on "is the scene still underground" can not be answered without a proper definition of "Underground".

According to my personal one, the core item is control and influence. Is the sub culture / community creating and evolving their own rules, or is there influence or even pressure coming from the outside world to be more "compliant"?

We clearly have this pressure to be compliant. Being more of an "Underground" person I can clearly hear scene artists constantly discuss "but can we release this at $party, or will this get us in trouble?" or "can I use this sample, or will this get the party banned from some streaming service?".

Would we still undress in front of representatives of Unesco, shouting "Scheiße!!" and "Amiga!"? I think we should find out.

Also, the comparison to the Graffiti scene is excellent. They are an example of something that is highly visible to the world outside of the community, reported much about, having found a healthy amount of outreach (non-illegal works, banksy etc), but completely working with their own set of rules and ethical framework.

I have the highest respect for the Graffiti scene.

Scene is dead. Once buried it will finally be underground again. Or maybe presented in an unesco heritage museum, crinkled and naked to the bone.

It hasnt been since the beginning. Way back in time a lot of the first demos were spread via compunet, a commercial online service. It was quite visible to the general public (the small nerdy part that actually used such a service, obviously). It got attention in all mainstream mags too.

I also dig this analogy a lot. I'd even expand it to the Hip-Hop scene in general. The Handles, the competitions, the wars and disses, even the rants about how the scene is dead and the oldschool farts complaining about the newschool kids :) It gets LOTS of exposure in mainstream media. However, the portion you see in that media is only scratching the surface, and to an outsider doesnt really show a proper image of what the scene really is and what people are involved in it at all. They also have their own set of problems regarding new people, homophobia, women, etc. And it is also changing recently, with women making kickass releases and coming-outs and certain ppl getting the shit for being shit.

Again, your criterion is strangely tight. If you look at which bands are called underground rock bands for instance, many of them had their debut albums available in ordinary record stores and reviewed in ordinary magazines.

Since the music began to being distributed in the Internet, many have asked if there is any underground anymore, since things go directly to the mainstream.

But interestingly, here mainstream seems to refer to a wider public which is interested in the music. However, there is no such wider audience for demos (or other demoscene products) which might take us to an interesting discussion.

groepaz: Yes, I have heard that there is quite dramatic positive change in this regards in the Graffiti scene. And I don't mean this disrespectful at all, but given that there appear to be quite a big chunk of "undereducated" people and/or people who come from not-that-progressive households in the Graffiti scene, that progress is even more impressive.

I disagree in regards of the Hip Hop scene. I'd been to a tiny extent been part of that in the 90ies, and from all what I saw becoming "overground" has pretty much killed it completely. In the early nineties everybody was sampling and doing mixtapes, and then more and more artists signed major record deals, and suddenly they were no longer allowed to do mixtapes or to sample, up to the point where people started suing each other.

It's FAR less dramatic in our community, as nobody is selling demos. But we had such a phase: Remember when NVidia started running demo competitions, paying hefty amount of money. Suddenly some sceners started doing things for money, and some inside the scene complained about this being unfair and a disturbing influence. Luckily (?) this commercial interest into the scene didn't last long.

One could also look at the Goth scene, which I certainly never had been part of. But from what I have seen from the outside that scene got into pretty big trouble once they became a "public fashion trend", but did recover years later when that fashion trend was over.

All in all I think this very clearly is not a black and white thing. But it certainly is something a community like ours should be aware of, and see warning signals early.

I'll take the Unesco thing for an example: To me right now it's fully unclear if this will be "neutral" to us, or will make us benefit, or will hurt us (or both). I've been very skeptical about it from the beginning, and vocal about it, because I believed it could be a damaging outside influence, but for now I think it turns out that it's simply not of much relevance neither to the outside world, nor us.

But there also had been cases where me being skeptical has been spot-on: It's four years now that I had been warning, ranting and raging about my belief that Twitch could have a negative influence on the scene. I guess nobody would object to this notion anymore today.

- No money was ever paid.
- Free hardware was provided with no strings attached; no contracts or any sort of binding agreements were signed, especially not considering the contents of their demos. Entering the compos were done the traditional way.
- Parties were sponsored - mostly yours, so you can talk about what their "unfair and disturbing influence" was and why you didn't turn them down if there was any.
- This was done as a lead-up to events they organized (with our help) on their own dime, which gave us (not counting the invitations) at least one Pouet top10 demo, 14 scene.org nominations, and 7 Meteorik nominations (2 wins), with about 60000 Youtube views on the seminar material.

Are you saying the net result wasn't positive?

I believe the net result was positive.

You have misunderstood the "paying hefty amount of money" part. They had a comparably gigantic budget, which non-commercial parties had not. And I don't remember the details, but I vaguely remember smaller demoparties being unhappy about receiving less releases due to NScene (or was it called NVScene?).

I have never said "unfair and disturbing influence". I've mentioned influence or pressure coming from the outside world, which may or not be positive, negative, fair, unfair, welcome or disturbing. First of all it's outside influence. The risk of getting rules forced upon you that have not developed inside your own culture.

Sponsoring clearly is a hot item here. We did have lots of discussions both inside the orga team when it came to the Fox sponsoring. It turned out well, but pretty much all orgas back then agreed that this might make dangerous precedent and that we are walking a fine line.

I can give an example that probably most here would agree with:

I do not believe copying software or "IP" is theft. I believe in the right to sample and remix, citation and satire. Even holding patents myself, I think patents are a terrible idea. Developed a vaccine that can heal the world? Then it's evil to try hold a monopoly on it.

My believes here highly incompatible with the outside world, which is full of censorship issued by US moral "standards", patent laws, copyright laws, upload filters, laws against "hate speech", laws against nudity etc.

If you take your average demo party, the outside world could find about a million items where "we" could be sued. Which makes opening up to that outside world slippery slope. Might be worth it in some areas, might not in other areas.

I have another example of "outside influence can be both good and bad":

As you probably know, the middle Rhine valley has Unesco world heritage status. That's great. It's attracting tourists.

But on the other hand, since the Nazis blew up all the bridges over the Rhine and the end of 2nd world world, there is now 100km of Rhine river between Mainz and Koblenz without a single bridge. To us living on the south of the Rhine the other side is like it's behind the Berlin Wall.

There had been discussions about building a new bridge for ages now. But after asking Unesco, they said that we'd lose world heritage status if you did. So no bridge for us.
(This is a simplification on what actually had happend.)

So here we are: Outside influence by a widely respected UN body having dire effects on your local community. It's a matter of perspective if that's a good or bad thing.

The world needs more bridges and less organizations.

more bridges so we can burn them!

Historically, being "underground" was always more part of the scene's self-fashioning than an actual empirical reality. From the very beginning the scene flirted with the wider home-computing public, strategically employing its "underground" image - from the first cracker features in commercial C64 magazines (like the Section 8 feature in "64'er" in 1985 and countless other "anonymous" cracker interviews), over WDR camera teams at Radwar parties, to the "PC Underground" book in 1994. And it was largely due to this love-hate-symbiosis of the scene and the wider home computing field that new people actually flocked to the scene, lured by its "underground" image.

What I mean is that if the demoscene was really "underground", it would have died out already a long time ago.

Just like the modern, FTP-based warez scene has almost died out by now, after having gone really deep underground in the aftermath the mid-2000s global bust waves, by closing all public IRC group-channels (where it was able to recruit new people in the early 2000s), disbanding contact email adresses, even stopping doing proper infofiles etc.

This was really an experiment in going underground, not as a means of self-fashioning but as an actual measure. With the effect that "pirate consumers" completely forgot about it and began relying on "non-elite" pirating practices (or abandoning file downloading/owning altogether, relying on legal or semi-legal streaming services instead). Nowadays, all these concepts of "groups", "topsites" etc. are completely irrelevant beyond a circle of nostalgic pirates, and no pirate newbie in their sane mind would consider trying to join some of the last remaining "elite" groups.

These are not just the consequences of media change (from downloading to streaming), but of an actual, real move to the underground (which, in reality, resembles not the copy-party days of old, but a hermetically closed-off, claustrophobic bunker labyrinth). The demoscene can be glad that it never actually was anything like underground - because already the old, pre-internet cracking scene never really was.

What could be considered as underground today anyway? Is something underground just because it does not attract enough folks to make it mainstream?

Dipswitch continues the recurring trend of this thread to have an excessively strict understanding of underground (again: the contours of the underground could be attempted to grasp by inspecting how the concept has been used in music).

Maybe we could ask at this point, what's so scary about the underground that people have a need to use sloppy arguments in order to escape it.

I would say, that underground is, what the word says. Not being public that much and not having sponsors, big money investments or money income. But if a scene grows, it needs sponsors to be implemented and will automaticly become more mainstream because sponsors wants something back. More buyers. From then on underground ends for me. :)

Meeting your arch-enemy at next rhonafree Demoparty gonna be like....

god darn it...went gone posting wrong thread again. damnit darn to shell



TEAM ROBBO!!

@DAXX: yeah like a secret society. can't be that secret if there is a yt video about it ^^

NO! We need tunnels (remember the underground roundabout in the Faroean area?) and more organizers



And that´s a good thing. Banksy is basically a marketing and performance genius, his artistic and technical skills are just average. Clearly not the kind of expertise scene is all about.

To be honest, I don't get the Banksy hype at all. There is an immense amount of (technical, athletic and artistic) skill possible in wildstyle graffiti, while Banksy mostly shows stencils

Maybe a matter of personal taste, but I prefer for example Sofles' pieces by far ;) I kinda agree with ts on this

I don't think there is a black and white answer to this question. The beauty of the Demoscene is that there is no such thing as the Demoscene. It's a collection of individuals with overlapping interests who take it upon themselves to organize events and create art of all kinds. All of the (great) infrastructure created over the years is run by volunteers with no financial incentive, and you don't have to use any of it. You can organise a demoparty completely seperate from pouet.net or scene.org, if you so wish.

That being said, we can still have a discussion on the Demoscene as a whole.

Merriam Webster:



I would say that 3c is the most relevant when it comes to the Demoscene

- It's unofficial, but UNESCO recognition might actually change this.
- It's not unsanctioned or illegal, there was little to no resistance to the mandatory lockdowns for example.
- It's not really informal either as we have formalities and ceremonies.
- It still is 'avant-garde', the quality of releases is still very high and 'cutting edge'. But the majority of the scene functions within 'the establishment.'

Bear in mind that this is based on my perspective and experiences, I have not been around long enough to understand how the Scene began nor do I have an objective view of the Scene as a whole, as I am invested in it myself. Nevertheless, in the 10 years that I have been participating in the Scene, I have seen it move more and more away from definition 3c and I fear that it will eventually lose it's 'edge' and 'underground' aspects and with it, it's creative potential.

I don't understand the "underground -> creative/edgy" line of thought. There's lot of non-underground communities, companies etc making super edgy stuff. Music videos, VPRO, super weird Roblox games, the occasional Netflix show even.

Also lets not kid ourselves, the average demo looks more like a Eurovision performance backdrop than something super artsy / edgy. That's fine! But it doesn't seem very underground-y to me.

I get the appeal of underground-ness for scamp's reasons - basically that warm fuzzy "us vs them" feeling you get when you're in a small in-group with its totally unique set of terms, rules and social norms. Tribalism, really. But for creativity? Meh.