Introduction

In early 2022, I was invited by Professor Huang Sunquan to visit the Institute of Network Society at the China Academy of Art and offer a series of Introduction to Demoscene lecture, the first time the digital cultural phenomenon of the demoscene appeared in a Chinese classroom.

Most of my students in this class came from humanities and art backgrounds, and they had usually studied courses like art criticism, contemporary art, and art theory, and were familiar with contemporary art and new media art exhibitions and works such as Documenta and Ars Electronica. But almost all of them have never heard of demoscene.

So my course is aimed at an audience that has some foundation in the theory of new media art, but is not familiar with computer programming and has heard of demoscene for the first time. I try to relate and contrast demoscene with the popular sense of new media art and the cultural industry, helping them to understand and criticize the works in the demoscene.

The course is divided into four units, the first of which introduces the historical context and cultural elements of the demoscene, the second part is about the platforms used by the demoscene, which is the primary basis for classifying demoscene works, the third unit focuses on chip music, which is the part of the demoscene that is closely linked to popular culture, and the fourth unit introduces the community and cultural challenges of the demoscene.

As an Asian observer of the demoscene is facing huge cultural differences, in this series I use some Chinese and Japanese cultural phenomena as comparisons to help my students understand the concepts involved, but also to show how cultural differences work in the context of the Internet.

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