The new media art site rhizome.org will feature a collection of demoscene articles this week. Some of them by us, some by other demo researchers. The first article, an introduction to demos, is already up and more will follow later this week.
We now have some more material in the bibliography again, thanks to Doreen Hartmann. Among the additions are Heikkilä 2009, Cox 2009, Moschitto & Sen 2006, and an interesting collection of demo-related articles published in the Finnish online art magazine Mustekala.info.
As technical news, I have installed a mobile switcher to this site. You can now point the browsers of your PDA’s, phones and music players etc. to this address and get a custom site. Moreover the web page theme was selected so that the bibliography can be viewed in one page on a mobile browser. Maybe useful for having a glance at the bibliography for example at a seminar.
Markku will present his licentiate thesis (a Nordic intermediate degree between MSc and PhD) called “Computer Demos–What Makes Them Tick?” on the 12th of May at the Aalto University School of Science and Technology, IT house, classroom A142, at 10 AM. If the thesis is accepted it will appear online soon thereafter. Everybody’s welcome to attend the event!
This is only partly related to demoscene research, but I feel we should still link this extensive online bibliography. It is a collection of Finnish histories of technology written in languages other than Finnish or Swedish. Included are a lot of works on the history of computing.
As a technical news, we have been getting a lot of comment spam lately. I installed WP-SpamFree which hopefully helps.
Added an article by Saarikoski & Suominen: Computer Hobbyists and the Gaming Industry in Finland, which was published in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing in 2009. Fixed some journal volume/issue glitches here and there, too.
I finished Jan Svensson’s (1999) Swedish book on the hacker group SHA. Recommendable for those interested in the topic matter, given the book’s rich detail and focus on the ordinary and human sides of hacking. There is an updated description at the bibliography.
Markku is on a work trip in Sao Paulo and was offered the opportunity to tell about demos in a design seminar. A bit of a surprise, but it’s worth a try. The lecture will take place at the University of Sao Paulo.
Added an article by Michaela Pfadenhauer (2005), called Ethnography of Scenes. Towards a Sociological Life-world Analysis of (Post-traditional) Community-building. Probably there is lots of research being done on these kinds of scenes, and I think it is good for us to know that it exists. More description at the bibliography.