11. Disappeared Chinese demoscene

This is the eleventh lesson of the Introduction to demoscene. In the previous lessons we talked a lot about European topics, this lesson is the time to discuss the situation in China. "Did demoscene ever exist in China?" This question has been brought up before, both overseas and in China, but perhaps the only one who has seriously answered it is myself.

Even today, most Chinese outside of this classroom have a vague impression of the demoscene; many have heard Keygen music, but few have a clear idea of the means by which demos are made, let alone the community organization and motivation for their creation.

In 2017, Zijie, who was an editor of VICE China asked me for an article about demoscene. I completed two articles in response, namely "Demoscene and media stories" and "Gifts from 8-bit kids: keygen, demo community, chiptune, and vintage hardware".

One question after another

One question that has been bothering me however is whether the Chinese Internet community has ever been connected to the overseas demoscene community, and furthermore, whether a demoscene community ever existed in China itself. I am obviously not the only one who is curious about this question. On Zhihu, a Chinese Q&A website like Quora EvilRyu posted a question: "Why did Sycini disappear? Is there still a demoscene group in China?" His question answered my question to some extent, but the new question he posed was equally challenging.

EvilRyu's question was not answered in full for several years after it was raised in 2014, and my article "A Brief History of (disappeared) Demoscene in China" was the result. I was able to get in touch with many of the participants at the time, and to review in some detail the involvement of Chinese enthusiasts in demo making around the time when Sycini active.

Yet are the Max/MSP, Processing, and other "creative programming" courses mentioned at the end of the article "A Brief History of (disappeared) Demoscene in China" really a continuation of the practice of the demoscene enthusiasts? What is the connection between their communities? For me, there are still many gaps left.

An early record of creative programming-related events that is publicly searchable online is a series of events organized by the Chinese media production traning company "OF COURSE" starting in 2015.

Based on some of the recorded speakers' topics and their biographies, I can roughly deduce that around 2012-14, the Chinese IT industry seemed to have gone through a period of data visualization popularity, and some engineers transformed during this period and then became active as new media artists, many of whom are still active in related fields, and there should be no obvious gap among them.

I therefore focus my research on the period between 2008, when Sycini disappeared, and 2015, when the "OF COURSE" record began, and I want to understand several things: where did the participants go after Sycini disappeared? When and where did the creative programming community in China start to emerge? What were the main communication channels? Who are the community leaders? Did they overlap with the previous demo authors? I tried to consult some organizers and participants of early creative programming communities in China to get some preliminary answers.

The Beginning of Creative Programming in China: The Dream of Demo

As I mentioned in "A Brief History of (disappeared) Demoscene in China", the 2005 article "The dream of demo" by Ye Liao (eapass), who lives in Chongqing, was one of the first Chinese articles that introduced the demoscene in some detail, mentioning topics such as the demos, disk magazines, demo parties, Tracker music, and so on. In the comment section of this article we can find the interaction between Sunnm (Sun Mo), the organizer of Sycini, and Ye Liao. In the message, Ye Liao politely declined Sun Mo's invitation to join demo group.

However, Ye Liao's influence on the Chinese Internet community is not limited to one article; his personal website "Compute Arts" shares the first demos that Chinese enthusiasts were exposed to: Heaven Seven by Exceed, Some Bookprint And A Broken Heart by Replay, Please The Cookie Thing by Aardbei, fr-08: .the .product by Farbrausch, and many more. This batch of demos is probably the only batch of demos that have been widely distributed in China so far, and it is also the only batch that Chinese netizens who did not know the demoscene beforehand have access to. Some of them received localized names when spread in China, "爱之记忆"（ài zhī jì yì, Memories of Love）for Some Bookprint And A Broken Heart, "火域幻境" (huǒ yù huàn jìng, Fireland Fantasy) for Please The Cookie Thing, and "幽灵古堡" (yōu líng gǔ bǎo, Ghost Castle) for fr-08: .the .product.

It can be said that except for the early contactors such as Ye Liao and Sun Mo, a large number of domestic enthusiasts are in the state of "knowing the demos but not the scene", and some demos are spread under the names of "64k animation", "hacker's programming contest", etc., but the disseminators had no background knowledge of the demoscene. In the popular Chinese video site Bilibili, fr-08: .the .product was uploaded several times under the name of "programming contest", and two of the uploaders' videos were played more than one million times.

In "The Dream of Demos" Ye Liao mentions his feeling that "demos are the result of a team effort, a combination of programming, graphics, and music, all of which are necessary for a perfect computer work." But the concept of creating demos and organizing scenes was still a hazy "dream", both for the level of multimedia programming in China and for people's understanding of European digital culture at the time.

Computer animation as an educational tool

Although the concept of demos and demoscene is still vague and unfamiliar to Chinese netizens today, the fact that some enthusiasts in the 2000s were able to notice the existence of demos, and that they also felt the meaning of demos as a way to show off their technical skills, shows that Chinese enthusiasts at least had some understanding of animation production. In other words, they can understand the connection between the complexity of animation and the level of computer skills.

An important background of this is that computer animation was an important part of computer education for young people at that time, as well as the background of Deng Xiaoping's announcement: "The popularization of computer (knowledge) should start with children." in 1984 was the computer animation education activities organized by the Shanghai Children's Palace.

Until the mid-1990s, the only people who had access to computer animation for adults in China were probably the staff of film and television-related organizations, as evidenced by the fact that almost all computer animation papers at that time in China were published in professional journals of the film and television industry. However, teenagers have access to computer animation software through computer education channels. For example, the founder of Chinese game company miHoYo, Cai Haoyu, got the opportunity to learn computer animation related technology from his parents who were teaching computer courses in colleges. Among the first 13 "young academicians" selected by the Chinese Youth Academy of Sciences in 1999, four of them, including Cai Haoyu, were selected for their expertise in computer animation.

I also got a copy of Autodesk Animator between 1998 and 1999, and the person who copied this software to me was my classmate in elementary school, who is currently a teacher of a choreography-related university program.

So the group of "good kids" among the urban youth in the 90s China had access to animation software. If they are not satisfied with playing games on the computer and want to explore other things with the computer and seek help from their teachers at school or youth centers, their teachers will offer them two directions, one is the Informatics Olympiad, and the other direction is computer animation.

My high school alumnus, the author of KXXT, Wang Xin, is one of the more acclaimed demo makers in China who has documented his creative journey. He mentioned in "My animation dream in high school in 2005"

I was actually qualified to get a guaranteed admission (to university) through animation, and one of the major triggers was also because I was upset that an animation I made in my grade 9 only won the third prize in the city. At begining I learned flash, think some of them belong to not quite normal, not in line with the normal world of common sense, so I got a copy of 3dsMax English version in a pirated CD bought from electronic technology market in Jinan, think that one is in line with the definition of the physical rules of the real world ...... gave up flash animation in junior high school and changed to 3D animation.

His recording basically recounts the way that teenagers were exposed to computer animation from the late 90s to the early 2000s, as the education system consciously guided teenagers to computer animation by setting up various competitions, awards and guaranteed admission opportunities. However, it can be seen from Wang Xin's defense script that these animation competitions mainly look at the technical specifications of the works and are consistent with mainstream values; they do not require the contestants to have knowledge related to new media art.

Localizers were probably the first group to be exposed to demos in China

So what was the path that allowed Ye Liao to access demos in 2001? I believe both the warez community and the Chineseization group may have played a role in this.

In the 1990s, due to low income and inconvenient cross-border transfers, there were almost no channels to buy genuine overseas software in China, and cracking became a mandatory course of action for domestic computer users. "Paul" Gao Chunhui set up paulgao.com.cn, one of the earliest personal websites in China, whose initial content was based on cracking software. Earlier, Gao Chunhui was also the moderator of software cracking forum of Northland Happy World BBS (bbs.ndc.neu.edu.cn). In 1998, he sold a series of software CDs through the Internet, including a special collection of PCSoft CD'1998 tHREE - WAREZ, which clearly shows that even if the Chinese Internet community and the Warez community are not closely connected, they are at least aware of their existence.

In addition, Chinese localizers play an important role in the path of software distribution in China. The localizers of multimedia software such as 3DS Max, Photoshop, Authorware, and Flash were probably also among the first domestic developers in digital media-related fields. There was a website called "Filter Chineseization Room" linked in Ye Liao's Compute Arts website, and its name showed that it focused on filters for various multimedia software, and almost all the Chinese patches for software provided corresponding registration codes or keygens.

Given the consumption level in China at that time, hardly any enthusiasts could afford to buy professional software that started at hundreds of dollars, and cracking and Chineseization were almost necessary for a software to be popular in China, so the Chineseization group played a role similar to oversea warez community in China. The occasional demos that appear in the keygen's zip package are likely to have attracted their interest in the process of copying and localization and to have spread in China, a point that can be corroborated by the fact that Warez groups like CORE and Razor1911 are much better known in China than other demo teams that are not involved in cracking. CORE is the cracker of Adobe Suite, Corel Painter and many other content creation software, while Razor1911 cracked popular games such as Half-Life and StarCraft.

Introduction of Demo tools

Farb-rausch Chinese synchronous mirror is the earliest Chinese website to introduce the demotool, probably established in 2003. Its founder Ren Wei "three volts" is then working for computer department of Chengdu Medical College. In the "About" page of the website, he also recorded his feelings while watching the demo program.

When we saw the animations, we were amazed that a small 64K could contain such beautiful animations and distortion-free music. Out of our passion and hobby, we created this farb-rausch Chinese synchronous mirror, hoping to bring these beautiful animations from Germany to more 3D animation lovers in the fastest time.

According to the information of the website, there were three members involved in the maintenance of the site, except for Frank, who is probably Ren Wei himself, and the remaining two participants, zxz and henry, whose identities cannot be determined yet.

The deputy webmaster mentioned in Frank's homepage "Frank's Studio", Zhou Qirui (Qray, A-X) from Southwest Jiaotong University, may be the zxz mentioned in the farb-rausch Chinese synchronous mirror. There is a big intersection between Chinese demo fans and Flash fans. Zhou Qirui's personal homepage "Qray Studio" shows a lot of pixelated images made by Flash, and he mentions in the homepage that "I made all these pixelated drawings pixel by pixel with mouse". But he is also a multimedia software developer, and in the "My Designs" section, he provides his own WBMP editor and "Qray ASCII Art master".

As we can see, many of the groups that were able to study in depth the process of making demos in the early 2000s, and to actively translate and disseminate them, were formed by university students and teachers, with a distinctly collegiate character.

Sycini: an "Adventure" for Art Students

In early 2003, Studio 12 was established at the Xu Beihong School of Art at Renmin University of China, with a focus on multimedia technology and art. In early 2005, some of the Studio 12 students formed Sycini, the first known team in China to consciously operate as a demo group.

Sycini describes their website as "the first resource site for demoscene in China". However, if we take into account the creation of the farb-rausch Chinese synchronization mirror site, and the spread of these works shared on Ye Liao's "Compute Arts" website, Sycini may not be considered the "first" in terms of time. However, in terms of their philosophy and creative goals for the demo making, they were certainly among the first practitioners to have a more accurate understanding of the cultural connotations of the demoscene. Their goal is not only technical, but also cultural, i.e. "to accelerate the localization of demo and intro concepts".

One of the most important characteristics of Sycini is that they do not see the production of demos as a purely technical practice, but they are fully aware of the artistic and cultural properties of demos, and they actively cooperate with the traditional, academic new media art field and seek exposure opportunities. For example, in May 2005, Sycini, founded only two months ago, participated in the first New Vision New Media Art Festival (新视像·新媒体艺术节) at the Beijing Film Academy, where it would connect itself to the contemporary art field by exhibiting on the same stage as video art. It also later included video content generated by the demo program in Beijing Theatre SanTuoQi's new media drama "6:3 II".

As participants from arts background, Sycini, while consciously disseminating their work through art exhibitions in a collegiate context, also attempted to gain theoretical legitimacy from the literature of new media art, as when they introduced the genetic art of artist Eduardo Kac, and the artificial art of Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau's Artificial Life Art, among others. They themselves have created scholarly essays to explain their understanding of new media art.

Sycini is also the only demo group in China to have been featured in the mainstream media, reported in Computer Arts magazine in July 2005. They were also written about in domestic academic journals. The article "Look at digital video art from real time video demo & intro" by Chen Peng and Fan Rong from Xi'an University of Technology was published in 2007 03 issue of Zhuangshi magazine, which introduced some understanding of demoscene in Chinese academic circles at that time. The article regarded demos as a practice similar to comprehensive video works, and made an analogy with works in mainstream art exhibitions like the Venice Biennale. The only reference for this article is the Sycini team's website.

Some of the information in the article "Look at digital video art from real time video demo & intro" seems inaccurate. For example, it mentions that Sycini is "the first team in China that has participated in various demoscene events". However, as far as we can see, Sycini has published its work through Pouet.net, but has not participated in any demo parties. Even so, this article is still one of more demoscene-affine in China. Later, some domestic scholars described demoscene as "some computer experts who also cracked and used the game's code to recreate a short trailer introducing the game content" (see "Video games study in visual culture"), which is obviously the opposite.

Freedom from the limitations of Flash

Participants from art backgrounds, represented by the Sycini team, chose the demo tool as their creation tool largely just to get rid of the limitations of Flash's expressiveness. If we go to examine some of Sycini's works before 2005, we will find that works like Liu Chao's (Lauur) "Beijing Utopia" were made in Flash. But from its creation concept, it is already seen to be experimenting with procedural generation and other contents.

This is an experiment of interactive music through free distribution, or free web download. (Figure e,f) The experiment's pure purpose is: how many results can be obtained in the hands of the author and in the hands of the viewer for a piece of music with a specified loop length and individual tones but without a specified bar order? Is it possible to obtain a formula such that (just hypothetically) the number of loops (A) times the number of tones (B) times the number of bars (C) exponentiation equals a value (X)? This is the result if one of the values A, B, and C is an unknown or variable.

Starting from sy03.production in 2005, Sun Mo (sunnm0) and Ye Xiaohan (yxh) released a series of 64K demos using farb-rausch naming scheme, which can be said to be the first batch of works in China that are on par with foreign demoscene in terms of creation concepts and methods. And this attempt did make their works present a completely different audio-visual experience from the popular Flash animation at that time.

Since I have not been able to get in touch with Sun Mo and Ye Xiaohan of Sycini, I can't describe the process of this transformation with any particular accuracy. But in a Zhihu answer (How did those 64k 3D animations achieve such a large compression rate?) Wang Xin mentioned that what drove him to try making demos was his chance exposure to demos and demo tools, and his dissatisfaction with the quality of 3D animation in China at that time.

I was in my first year of senior high school (2005), and after I was qualified to be admitted to the university by using the animation "Boldly Go" made in 3dmax, I was a bit bored with the complicated production process and the lossy compression quality, and happened to find a folder "Animation made by the world's top masters" (similar to this name) in the pirated CD "3dmax 5 English Edition" back then. There are GhostCastle.exe (that is, the most famous fr-08), FireFantasy.exe, LoveMemories.exe, etc.. One day, I found out that the production team was farbrausch in the easter egg in the end fr-08, and later found the production tool: werkzeug (Germany, abbreviation wz), and then used wz to create this animation (Seal of the Heart, kxxt).

......

Also because of this, a senior student of mine decided to revitalize Chinese 3D animation, because Chinese 3D animation in 2005 was really unbearable. (I can point out that one of the animation effects in the 2013 Spring Festival Gala was a unmodified particalillustion effect.) So I chose Tsinghua University School of Software. I hope I can make powerful animation software and stunning effects. I do think that the Shenzhou 6 launch animation in the cafeteria in high school is still rather frustrating.

Wang Xin's only public work, KXXT, is slightly larger (75.5KB) and not strictly a 64K demo, but again, it was made using farbrausch's demotool. Compared to pre-rendered animations, Wang Xin also points out that the benefit of demo works similar to Flash is the ability to achieve lossless high-definition animations on smaller file sizes and limited hardware resources. In 2005, high-definition videos above 720p still required almost the highest configuration of computers to handle, but many demo works can run smoothly at 1024x768 in ordinary configurations.

Compared to Sycini, who have a clearer explanation of their work from an experimental art perspective, high-school-aged Wang Xin's motivation for his work is school romance. Although not quite the same as the competitive, showy creations of overseas creators, this socially motivated need to create shows the commonality of young digital content creators at China and abroad.

The content of KXXT also reveals the influence of Chinese pop music. For the most part, the creators of demoscene tend to use original music rather than ripped versions of popular songs. However, in "KXXT" we can clearly identify the main melody of Michael Wong(Guangliang)'s song "Fairy Tale".

Developers who focus on program size

Compared to creators like the Sycini and Wang Xin, who used demo tools with a creative goal more to escape the limitations of Flash and explore richer forms of screen expression, participants from programmer backgrounds put more thought into size-coding techniques.

For example, Chen Shikai(csk), another very early demo enthusiast and subsequent entrepreneur in the robotics field, created one of the earliest demo tutorials on the Internet in China. His 2006 modular music (Mod) tutorial was probably the first Tracker music production tutorial in China.

In 2008, near the end of the Sycini, Shikai Chen compiled and summarized some tips on how to reduce the size of Visual C programs. However, as far as we can tell, Chen Shikai has not published any demos independently.

We will find that there seems to be a division among the participants of demo production activities in China: some people want to make content-rich, visually appealing demos, while others are obsessed with making the programs smaller. For example, Dwing was one of the active demo makers in China at that time, but his more important work was the executable compression software UPack/WinUPack, which was more closely connected to the Warez community. Dwing's demos focused more on size-coding, but had fewer image effects, and by today's standards can only be considered as a single effect demo.

In hindsight, Chinese demo makers at the time were actually divided into two factions according to their motives for making the demos: whether the demoscene was a more technical or artistic affair was never agreed upon.

The arrival of new trends and the lack of self-reflection

As we mentioned in the fifth lesson of this series, one of the key factors in the demoscene's ability to navigate through cycles of technological change and cultural trends to become the longest-standing digital cultural community is its self-reflective nature; even though demoscene participants are often technically savvy, they still maintain a cautious attitude toward technological trends.

Many articles use terms such as "self-awareness," "self-reflection," and "self-sufficiency" when describing the European demoscene. Although there are "community centers" like Sycini in China, they are only information plazas that gather enthusiasts with different interests and backgrounds, but do not form a community with self-awareness and self-reflection.

Soon after the emergence of Sycini, China began to intensively introduce new media creation methods and artists from overseas academic and commercial sectors. For example, in the 2006 Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and the 2007 Get It Louder Beijing, a number of artists presented content created by MAX/MSP. During the same period, domestic academic and commercial new media art-related technical communities also began to emerge. In addition to a few independent forums, the main gathering place for these enthusiasts was Douban.

In 2006, interactive-china.net was launched, in 2007, "processing learning group" and Arduino group appeared on Douban, and in 2008, groups about VVVV, Max/Msp/Jitter, OpenFrameworks & Cider, etc. appeared on Douban. Their earliest work was actually similar to the farb-rausch Chinese synchronous mirror, which translated overseas documents and teaching materials.

Compared to the demoscene, the evaluation criteria in the field of new media art are obviously less restrictive and more result-oriented. The "showy" part of the demoscene, such as size-coding, is considered to lack meaning, while the academic new media production tools have a lower barrier to entry, better documentation, and are not tied to the same anti-commercial hacker ideology as the demoscene. They are more likely to be used and understood by contemporary art practitioners and commercial clients.

During this period, most of the participants who were interested in technology themselves, such as Wang Xin, Chen Shikai, and the more recently involved cjxgm, chose to work in the IT industry, and stayed away from demo making activities that lacked practical value. Students from artistic backgrounds who had played the role of organizers in the operation of Sycini turned almost without hesitation to collegiate production tools such as Processing and did not reflect the prudence and skepticism of the demoscene in the face of the tools. Sometimes participants from technical backgrounds are "adopted" by the practices of the contemporary art scene, such as Chen Shikai's participation in the 08′Shanghai eARTS Festival, when he adopted Processing for the sake of development cycles. Although this "integration" was not entirely smooth, as Chen Shikai mentions in his exhibition experience that he had "a lot of complaints" about Processing, he also mentions the pressure of balancing daily work and creation as an amateur creator, "but since I joined a formal job in August, the time available was much less than expected.".

Chen Shikai showed us a vivid example of collegiate new media production tools stealing potential participants from demo tools or other demoscene-style practices, somewhat like the Japanese scenario we mentioned in lesson 9, the booming anime industry has developed ponderous creation rules before hobbyists are exposed to demoscene, which allows Japanese creators can more easily access the rules that are already in place whether they choose games or non-real-time animation, while demos that run in real-time but are not interactive are excluded from the ecosystem created by the anime industry.

In China, the best way to distribute real-time and non-interactive new media artworks is precisely through the academy's traditional new media art exhibitions. These exhibitions have some overlap between the expectations of the work and the presentation process; for example, they both value the presentation of visual effects, but technical elements of the demoscene that cannot be visually presented, such as the originality of the engine and the size of the program, are ignored. Such evaluation criteria actually encourage creators to abandon writing the underlying part of the program and focus on achieving more complex visual effects through the already existing engine.

Post-2010: The boom of new media art and the absence of a demoscene

The public performance of Daito Manabe in Beijing in 2009 showed the public nature of new media art, and the establishment of XinCheJian hackerspace in Shanghai in 2010 made new media art known to a community of makers influenced by "Shanzhai" culture. At this point, computer graphics rendered in real time were localized in China, but not in the demoscene as Sycini had envisioned when it was founded, and the Chinese new media art community never brought with it the anti-commercial spirit and competitive atmosphere that characterized the demoscene.

However, even though many of the new media art enthusiasts of this period have entered the industrial and commercial world, their practice is not entirely meritocratic. Yet their practice was not entirely utilitarian either. Luo Xiao "Contra" and Zhang Jing "Vinjn", who participated in the same Shanghai eARTS Festival as Chen Shikai, have run hudo.it for a long time, and organized many new media art workshops and parties. Open source magazine "OpenBook" has also published articles about new media production tools such as VVVV.

The more this kind of non-demoscene academic new media art flourishes, perhaps the less hope there is for a local demoscene in China that can communicate with the world, and even I am in a position to be "recruited".

At least a few conditions are needed for the demoscene to flourish, namely a high level of aesthetic education in society, a high computer penetration rate, a good level of social welfare, and a less prosperous investment climate. In the United States, where the academy and commercialized new media arts are thriving, there is likewise no thriving demoscene. Prosperous investment allows for great disparities in wealth among those with new media-related skills due to differences in hiring status, and in turn drives people into the industry to earn a paycheck rather than participate in an altruistic, non-meritocratic scene.

The Only Remaining Chinese Scener

Is there really no Scener left in China? I think China is at a stage where there are Sceners but not a Scene. First, some of the multinational companies' engineers who are expatriated to China may have a background in the demoscene and introduce the corresponding knowledge to domestic enthusiasts. One of the cases is EvilRyu, the only Chinese participant who continues to participate in overseas competitions. He was introduced to the demoscene by Loaderror, a member of the Norwegian Ephidrena group, while working as a GPU engineer at ARM.

In addition to EvilRyu, other Chinese faces that can be found in the demoscene in recent years include TsanChungHsu, a Taiwanese engineer working in Wuhan, who uploaded a series of mod files he made of popular Chinese songs to ModArchive.

I had pinned my hopes in my 2018 article that the growth of creative programming in college curricula would foster more exposure to the demoscene, but now, four years later, I am more pessimistic: the commercialization of new media art is further squeezing the space for non-commercial scenes to thrive, and the financialized hype around creative content for artificial intelligence and crypto currency is drawing more creators into the wave of profit-seeking.

I don't currently see an independent, self-aware and self-reflective demoscene emerging in China in the foreseeable future, but it may be possible to take some cues from demoscene, as I mentioned in my last session. Demo parties, competitions and live performances could all find their way into China as part of cultural tourism and cultural industries. At the same time, the demoscene, as intangible cultural heritage of several countries, might be recognized by the government and the academy in the process of international cultural exchange. This would be a bit like the gentrification of other cultural communities with grassroots origins, as skateboarding and graffiti have experienced.