6. Wild demo

Today is the sixth lesson of the Introduction to demoscene, where we will talk about the Wild demo. What is it and what is its history? The purpose of the wild demo is summarized in a quote from the Finnish Assembly Party's Wild demo primer from 2002.

The original purpose of the wild compo was to provide a category for entries done on platforms not accepted in the normal compos.

Wild demos are obviously distinctly different from the careful categorization and detailed rules that characterize demo competitions in general. A typical demo compo usually has a detailed classification of computer platforms, such as a category for Commodore 64, a category for PC, a category for Amiga, and so on. However, there are always many computer models that the organizers are unable to provide, some of which are niche models or have few developers, such as the TI-99 series; there are also some models that have distinct regional ties but may occasionally be used to compete in international competitions, such as Chinese educational computer "learning machines" and electronic dictionaries. These models often cannot find a suitable category to participate in because of the differences in capibilities and development tools, and the demos developed for them are difficult to compare directly with Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

Nevertheless, curiosity about the hardware platform itself is one of the core values of the demoscene, and hobbyists often expect to see some strange hardware devices, so a new category has emerged to accommodate these entries that cannot be placed in a specific competition category: the wild demos.

The scope of wild is variable

The range of entries accepted into the wild demo is intentionally vague, and usually any entry that cannot be found in the appropriate category at the party can be entered as wild. The primary criterion for determining whether an entry is wild is whether there is a more appropriate category at the party it wishes to enter. For example, some parties accept game consoles as platforms for entry, while others do not. At parties that accept consoles, demos made for consoles can be entered in the appropriate category, usually in the category of oldskool or newskool compo, but at parties that do not accept consoles, they can only be entered in the wild compo.

For example, the Assembly Party in Finland includes Playstation 2/3, Xbox, Sega Dreamcast and other consoles in the "desktop" category, and allows entries from these platforms to compete in the 64KB Intro, 4K Intro and other compos. It also allows entries written in Java. However, the Revision Party in Germany only allowed console platforms in the OldSkool competition, and PC platforms could neither include consoles nor allow entries written in Java. In this case, some of the entries that could be included in the appropriate category at Assembly Party would have to be entered in the wild category at Revision Party.

Another situation is that some devices are difficult to define as "old" or "new", for example, the Raspberry Pi is much more powerful than a typical OldSkool computer: it is a typical 32-bit system, often with 512MB of RAM or more. But it is undoubtedly weak compared to typical modern computers. However, the Raspberry Pi hardware is one of the most popular dev boards available, and currently even sells more than the Commodore 64, which holds the record for sales of a single model computer, so there is no shortage of works on the Raspberry Pi platform, at which point the Raspberry Pi or similar works on dev boards face the same problem of classification. At the Demosplash party at Carnegie Mellon University, it was specifically mentioned that the Arduino could be entered in the "Modern" category, so the Raspberry Pi could be entered under this rule by analogy, but more often than not, work created on a dev board would be classified as wild.

Starting point for the wild: video work in the scene

If we were to trace the origins of the wild demo category in the demoscene, most participants would agree that the earliest wild demos were the non-real-time rendered video and animation works created by the demoscene participants.

As we mentioned in the first lesson, the core activity of the demoscene is the production of a series of executable computer programs called "demos," this rule generally excludes non-real-time rendered video content, and is the most obvious boundary that distinguishes "demos" from digital and experimental video works in a broader sense.

This does not mean, however, that participants in the demoscene will refuse to produce work that is not generated in real time. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) has many technical similarities to executable real-time demos, so some non-real-time generated animations and videos are also distributed and presented by enthusiasts at demo parties. And some of these non-real-time running works get the opportunity to join the compos, and as the number of such works increases, the organizers of the parties start to try to add new categories to them.

Doreen Hartmann, a scholar at the University of Paderborn (Germany), published a paper in 2014, "Animation in the Demoscene. From Obfuscation to Category", which provides a more systematic introduction to animation in the demoscene, mentions that it is acceptable to include some pre-rendered effects as a performance-optimizing "deceptive trick " even in a demo program running in real time.

Knowing about these technological and historical circumstances, one could assume that the demoscene’s real-time principle excludes animation. But this is not the case: Animation is part of the demoscene almost since its beginning and it has appeared in different kind of forms, as previous demoscene research has already pointed out. For instance, early demosceners already cheated their audience with animated graphics that were pre-calculated in the background while other effects were shown (cf. Reunanen 2010, 47 and Leonard 2006) or with effects that were calculated only once and then played back as animations. Especially on the Amiga 500/OCS in the late 1980s and early 1990s this cyclic structure was commonly used without being disapproved by the scene (cf. Botz 2011, 293).

One work that is credited with really putting the wild demo on the map was Global Trash 2, presented by The Silents group at The Party in Denmark in 1991. Although it was not a program that ran in real time on a computer, it demonstrated many of the leading CGI animation effects of the time, and thus received high praise from enthusiasts in the demoscene and prompted the demoscene to create a new wild category to accept such work. From the introduction to the work:

Global Trash II has been shown at computer conferences all over Europe and has been shown on MTV Europe several times. It helped give birth to a new scene called WILD Demos in ’91, and today the WILD Demo Scene includes many demo groups. Global Trash II was the first video demo to hit the demoscene, setting a new standard in demo’s and videos.

At the time of Global Trash II's appearance in 1991, there was no digital home video distribution path like Video CD or DVD, so it was distributed at parties as a VHS tape.

Features of Demoscene video works

If we examine each shot in Global Trash II carefully, we will see that it has many effects that are common in demos of the same period, such as rotating 3D models, continuously generated light bars, smoke effects, etc. The article "From Confusion to Classification" actually summarizes some of the characteristics of the video-imaging type of work that appears in the Demoscene.

Highlighting visual effects rather than narrative

It mentions that one of the common creative techniques in Demoscene animations is the use of physical, yet digital ways to mimic the effects of the demo program, and notes that the video work in the demoscene does not emphasize the narrative nature of the video.

Experimenting with geometric, abstract forms or typography and the physical (mis-)behaviour of these elements seem to be an essential ingredient in a lot of demoscene animations. Many demoscene animations make use of classic demo effects in order to ‘win the hearts’ of their audience, as e.g. the stop-motion works of Gaspode can illustrate. In his productions, he uses demo effects as a topic by analogously re-building them (see Noodles (2010) or Sugar Shock (2013)). These productions are very popular within the scene, certainly for reasons of self-perception. On the contrary, non-demoscenish computer-generated works and digital film productions put focus upon storytelling.

In the 2010 work Noodles, for example, we can see that the author of the video uses a variety of noodles to create a stop-motion animation in which he imitates a large number of effects that are common in real-time generated demos: spinning cubes, bouncing balls, and loading progress bar.

Audio-visual synaesthesia

However, the text goes on to argue that it is not only works mimicking the effects of real-time image generation that are accepted by the demoscene, but that the core criterion for the evaluation of video by the demoscene is the synchronization of audio and visual effects, i.e. synaesthesia.

Rather, another aspect of successful demoscene animations seems to be operative in this case: synchronisation between audio and visual effects. This is perhaps the most central criterion for appraisal, which is hardly surprising since it is a main aspect of real-time demos as well. JCO’s animation work Visual Approach to the Aesthetics of Sampling (2013) may serve as an example here.

The Visual Approach to the Aesthetics of Sampling, cited in the text, is a relatively recent work, and the creative approach in it can be traced directly back to the 2002 Visual Approach To The Aesthetics Of Techno Aesthetics Of Techno.

Following a non-commercial hacking ethic

One of the features of the demoscene animations also mentioned in "From Obfuscation to Category" is non-commercial.

Another characteristic trait is non-commerciality and that animations have to be done for the scene only – thereby animations follow the overall demoscene ‘ethic’. This, too, marks a main difference to other CGI festivals (such as the Ars Electronica Animation Festival), where commercial pieces are voted side-by-side to amateur works.

Real time wild

After the emergence of the wild category in the demoscene, the video category had been the most important and most numerous segment of the wild work, but in the early 2000s, some party organizers found that the popularity of video work led the computer-centric nature of the demoscene has been undermined. In Wild demo primer, it said:

Lately the wild compo has unfortunately turned more and more into a home video compo with productions not related to computers in any way. While many of these productions have, no doubt, been quite humorous and even quite well done, the large amount of home videos have dropped computer-generated entries from the finals.

And in response to this change, the contest organizers have adjusted the rules for entry to give higher weight to computer-generated entries

...For example, the wild demo from last year, done on the Nokia 9210 Communicator, is a good example on a real wild demo. ... This year, to bring the wild demo competition closer to its original purpose, computer generated entries will be given an advantage in the jurying process and the competition organizers reserve the full right to drop low quality entries from the competition.

The entry on the Nokia 9210 communicator mentioned in the text is the Pygmy Projects entry G-Force 2001. The first smartphone after the operating system formerly known as EPOC was renamed to Symbian was the Nokia Series 80 device. G-Force 2001 follows the general characteristics of other types of demos: it is released as an executable and generates visual and audio effects in real time; the biggest difference with other demos is that it runs on an alternative platform: the Nokia 9210, as a device only launched in the summer of 2001. Said platform obviously cannot be classified as an Oldskool platform, but as a mobile device, it has a large performance gap with desktop PCs, so this type of work can only be entered into the demo competition as a wild category.

In order to distinguish such programmed and real-time works from general animation and video works, these works are often called "real-time wild" or "real wild" demo.

Integration with electronic DIY culture

The encouragement of real-time wild demos in the demoscene in the 2000s brought about a passion among enthusiasts to design a variety of installations and became an important intersection between the demoscene and the electronic DIY culture. A series of these works inherited some effects of real-time demos and reproduced them using atypical computer hardware and homemade devices.

For example, the 2003 work LED megademo uses a display device that is a 20×4 LCD monitor, its code runs on PC hardware and Linux systems, and mimics some common effects on PC demos, such as scrolling text and rotating cube animations. But by utilizing a different display device, it creates a significantly different audio-visual experience than the computer monitor.

Another common alternative display device in the demoscene is the oscilloscope. The 2007 work Youscope is probably the first oscilloscope work shown in the demoscene, which utilizes the X-Y mode of the oscilloscope for drawing and uses the computer sound card as the signal source. The left and right channels of the computer sound card output the X-axis and Y-axis signals respectively to achieve the drawing animation. This demo using an oscilloscope as the display device was followed by many more appearances in the demoscene, and a list was compiled by enthusiasts specifically to collect a series of similar works.

Another type of common platform in wild demos is the microcontroller(MCU). A series of microcontroller-related works have been compiled on the website of Swedish musician Linus Åkesson (lft), who is also one of the engineers at Swedish synthesizer manufacturer Teenage Engineering.

One of them, The Hardware Chiptune Project, was published in 2007 and showed that instead of using any existing sound chip, the AVR could be programmed to achieve a sound chip-like musical effect. And in 2008 Linus published a more complex work called "Craft", using an ATmega88 microcontroller to realize not only the music effect but also the dynamic image output through a VGA interface.

There are many other wild demos using microcontrollers. For example, the ESP8266, which is commonly used in these years to make various WiFi-related IoT devices, was presented at the Demosplash party in 2017, and the espTV, which uses the ESP8266 to generate TV signals, won the "Free Video" category that year.

The use of LED lighting devices in the 2000s also appeared in wild demo competitions, and Hey ho, led's go! using a homemade LED device won second place in the wild category at the Kindergarden 2008 party in Norway. The first place was awarded to a non-real time animated entry because of the mix of real time and non-real time competitions in the wild category at that party.

In the 2010s, LED light installations are still an important part of wild demo creations, and the first place wild demo in Revision 2015 was a programmable light installation called PC-10: Panda³, with LED lights mounted in a plexiglass box and controlled by an Arduino.

Mixed media: everything can be hacked

After the 2010s, the wild demo became more experimental in its use of media, with enthusiasts using a number of particularly unexpected devices. 2010 saw the German industrial music group Haujobb's Payback use an ATM in a bank as a platform for their work.

In 2013, the famous German Revision Party started a collaboration with the Experimental Media Lab (xm:lab) of the HBKsaar to collect works for the Media Facade for demoscene enthusiasts.

Installations similar to the media facade they are using often referred to as "wave display" or "naked eye 3D display" have become particularly popular in China since 2020, this is mainly due to the huge marketing effect of the giant LED screen on the outside wall of COEX SM Town in Korea, which has triggered a new media public art boom in China, though this is already 6~7 years behind the demoscene attempts.

Revision Party's competition used a media wall made up of five projectors. We can see that the 2013 works are still relatively crude, with many of them taking on the form of multi-channel video works. However, the first-place entry "White water" already demonstrated the practice of using the corner of the media facade to create the illusion of three-dimensional space. And in 2016, the related works can already use the characteristics of walls more maturely to create a more spatial effect such as collision and breaking glass.

The "space art" that has been frequently mentioned in the past two years also entered the practice of demoscene enthusiasts as early as 2014, when the work 10 Orbyte put a 10KB demo code of Commodore 64 onto the built-in flash memory of a micro-cube satellite called WREN, which was launched on the UniSat-5 mission into orbit and will fly in orbit for roughly 20 years.

Another work that received attention in the demoscene in 2014 demonstrated the use of a flip-dot display, and the XAYAX team created the demo Flippin' The Dots using a Raspberry Pi and network-controlled flip-dot based display designed by the Chaos Computer Club Munich eV. This work won first place in the wild demo competition at the Nordlicht 2014 party in Bremen.

Projection mapping on physical objects also appeared in the wild demo competition, and in 2014 the Gaspode group created a piece called Light & Magic using an Amiga computer case as a display surface.

Programmable laser shows are new to wild demos in the 2010s, with some enthusiasts experimenting with incorporating oldschool hardware into laser shows. The LSR 64 produced by the KETTŐ group is a laser device controlled by Commodore 64. And another laser work reLase, presented at Tokyo Demo Fest 2017, was created by Hector Martin, author of the open source laser control framework OpenLase, to demonstrate the framework's capabilities.

Wearable devices, such as the Pebble Time smartwatch, have also become platforms for enthusiasts to create on, with the 2016 work Rocky Reality recreating the effects of the famous 1993 DOS demo Second Reality on the small screen of a smartwatch.

Experimental literature related to old computers has also appeared in competitions for wild demos, such as Robbo Solucja, an entry at Silly Venture 2017 in Poland, written by assistant professor Piotr Marecki of Jagiellonian University in Poland. The program is a "Robbo walkthrough generator" inspired by the popular Polish Atari XL/XE computer game "Robbo".

In 2018, Piotr Marecki edited the 56 game walkthroughs generated by Robbo Solucja into a book with the same title. The paper Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers also published in 2019, described the details of the Robbo Solucja software and book production.

Some of the latest display devices were also used by enthusiasts in the demoscene, with HoloGrail, a work made with the volumetric display Voxon VX-1, appearing at the 2021 Revision party.

In reviewing the various "real-time wild" works of the past 20 years, it is easy to see that the boundary between wild demo in the demoscene and new media artworks in the usual sense has become very blurred, and the creators' identification with the culture and values of the demoscene is the main reason why they choose to publish their works through demo parties rather than new media art exhibitions.

Non-Computer Wild Demos

Among the wild demos there are works that are neither video or animated video works, nor programmed or electronically produced real-time works, but which are closer to mechanical installations or performance art works.

For example, the optical properties of the overhead projector are often used by enthusiasts in demoscenes to choreograph optical performances.

At the 2008 Buenzli party in Winterthur, Switzerland, the cortex group won first place in the wild demo competition for their work entitled "Interferenz", which means "interference" in German. The interference stripes is one of the most common effects of overhead projector works. The group has since entered several competitions with their overhead projector entries, and their work has been compiled in the Pouet.net database.

At the 2012 @party in Boston, USA, the Desire and TRSI groups also presented their overhead projector work: "OHP MEGA DEMO 9000", which featured a number of effects commonly found in real-time demos, such as progress bars, bouncing balls, wave-like subtitles flying across the screen, and so on.

Demos that are completely "unplugged" are less common, but still a category that cannot be ignored. For example, the Outbreak & Darklite group's "Pixel by Pixel" is a work that uses mosaics to reproduce pixel art on bathroom walls. The Danish Underpants Brigade's "Demoscene Battle Cards" is a demonstration of the "celebrities" in the demoscene as game characters in a board game, showing the funnier and more whimsical side of the tech art community.

For the demoscene, the existence of wild demos represents the flexibility and resilience of the community, allowing the demoscene to extend outward from a purely technical computer community, connecting different communities of enthusiasts while sharing their creativity and culture with others. The boundaries are wide enough to reach a range of creations beyond computers.