Demoscene Research

Added Doreen Hartmann to the list of researchers, as well as a recent paper by her to the list of publications.

A thought-provoking article on the future of the demoscene by Ville “Viznut” Heikkilä can be found here.

Doreen Hartman will lecture at the ISEARuhr2010 conference, in Dortmund, Germany, Monday 23rd August. The title of the lecture is Computer Demos and the Demoscene. Artistic Subcultural Innovation in Real-Time. It is part of the panel Coded Art. The location and time of the lecture is Volkshochschule Dortmund, room L110, at 13:40. Please follow this link for further information: http://www.isea2010ruhr.org/conference/conference-overview.

Added a working paper by Wasiak (2010). The paper describes the reception of home computers in Poland in the 1980s.

Hirvitalo, a contemporary art museum in Tampere, Finland, will host a demo-related exhibition in August. For more info, see the exhibition page (Finnish) on their site. Thanks to Manu for the tip!

Wojciech ‘ENAY’ Franke has tipped us about a book chapter on the MOD music scene (Lysloff  2003). A description has been added to the bibliography. Thank you for this! The chapter can also be read online here.

For those not familiar with the concept,  MOD, short for module, is a music format long favored by demosceners. You can read more about MOD and other demoscene related music techniques in these texts: Reunanen 2010 (chapter 4.5.2), Carlsson 2008 or Carlsson’s Micro History of Demoscene Music in Rhizome.org.

It seems that the three German hacker books, Hackerland, Hackertales and No Copy, by Sen, Moschitto and Krömer are available online as pdf files under a Creative Commons license. Check out these links: http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/hackerland.pdf, http://no-copy.org/hackertales-download.html and http://no-copy.org/no-copy-download.html.

Fixed the No Copy entry to contain the correct authors (Krömer and Sen).

Quite an extensive set of articles on the history of Commodore Amiga from a gaming perspective, published by Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/06/shadow-of-the-16-bit-beast-an-amiga-gaming-retrospective.ars/

Markku’s licentiate thesis Computer Demos — What Makes Them Tick? (Reunanen 2010) was accepted yesterday. A licentiate is a bit of an oddity, an intermediate degree between M.Sc. and PhD, that exists in that form only in Finland and Sweden. Thanks to everybody who contributed and commented (esp. Antti)! The thesis can be downloaded here: http://www.kameli.net/demoresearch2/reunanen-licthesis.pdf

Added an article by Steven Levy (Levy 2010) where he pays a new visit to some of the interviewees from the book Hackers (Levy 1994/1984).