[HN Gopher] The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden
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The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden
Author : robin_reala
Score : 495 points
Date : 2025-03-31 10:39 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.goto80.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.goto80.com)
| velo_aprx wrote:
| Here is the official announcement (in Swedish):
| https://levandekulturarv.se/forteckningen/element/demoscenen
| diggan wrote:
| Hastily thrown together translation, because I thought it
| captured the hacker mindset so well:
|
| > A fundamental driver of the demo scene is to make a machine,
| such as a computer, do something it has not done before. This
| could mean, for example, creating a tailor-made program for a
| particular type of machine. Technically, it is about exploiting
| the capabilities of the machine in an efficient and novel way.
|
| It's sad to think that the computing devices our newer
| generations are growing up with are trying their best to shoot
| down this exact use case; making the device do things no one
| made it do before.
|
| Instead, everything is locked down in the name of safety, and
| people loosing out on the ability of just having fun by
| modifying devices we already own.
| Lerc wrote:
| I think the term "Use case" has done a fair bit of the
| shooting itself.
|
| So many times I have seen people hold things up with "What's
| the use case" always transforming the problem at hand into
| convincing a person who doesn't comprehend that other
| people's experiences are also valid.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I think the demoscene is what it is: a treasure, a heritage.
|
| I was/still a part of it, but essentially, every demo evolved
| into a video during the 90th.
|
| A shift came with the more powerful machines, especially on
| PC.
|
| C64, Amiga 500 - technical prowess was necessary for certain
| optical illusions; the video illusion stems from hacks. This
| reversed.
|
| I think that this is ok. Device hacking is now the new old
| low-code hacking.
|
| Today's demoscene is also totally meta. From fighting
| emulators to accepting to utilizing was quite a ride.
|
| The massively impressive demos of today on C64 or Amiga are a
| testament to the heritage they capitalize on. Here and there,
| a minor tweak or final secret was finally totally understood;
| differences between serial numbers of C64 were a thing, too -
| and that's it.
|
| I am impressed by what has been done and achieved in the
| early days by machine code on C64 during the 80th.
|
| Massive influence was also time. The Scandinavians find a
| cool thing to do during the winter months and hack for days
| and nights - hardly anyone would do this today.
|
| There was no harddisk, code revisioning. Compiling took time,
| and saving the stuff on disk was a tedious procedure during
| debugging. Printed Assembler code etc.
|
| Today, you can dump the most elaborate code and data on
| emulators within seconds, all well compiled and checked - it
| is a wonder. IDEs, etc., are standard.
|
| Even back then, some elite coders used cross-development
| platforms, such as Amiga and C64, to deal with the burden of
| memory and slow compile times on C64.
|
| But the thing is that you had to develop the tools yourself.
| An advantage of this scale was earned.
|
| Anyway, it was a fantastic time. Copy parties, puberty, trash
| talk - and, to be honest, a lot of doxxing and mobbing in
| retrospect.
|
| I am glad I was part of the scene from 1987 to 1994 and
| attended Venlo and other infamous Copy parties.
|
| Greetings from Beastie Boys/C64
| Sharlin wrote:
| I don't know, real-time graphics programming is and has
| always been about hacks. Today it's perhaps not often
| _hardware_ -level hacks, but the ethos is still "cheat as
| much as you can, and then some more for good measure".
| immibis wrote:
| Not really - graphics cards are now powerful enough to
| ray-trace every pixel every frame, if you are doing it
| with a reasonable SDF instead of a huge bag of triangles.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Meh, real-time reflectance functions are still going to
| be all sorts of approximations. To say nothing about
| stuff like real global illumination. And SDFs are really
| nifty but a function that represents a complex, detailed,
| non-stylized/cartoony scene such as those in modern games
| is not going to be fast to evaluate.
| psb217 wrote:
| Not to mention other aspects of the overall visual
| experience, eg, everything about scene dynamics, object
| interactions, etc. A bigger compute budget is always
| welcome.
| joarv0249nw wrote:
| Computers are mostly appliances, like dishwashers, now.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| But demomakers have a good track record of turning
| appliances into computers.
|
| I am not aware of a demoscene production running on a
| dishwasher, but I wouldn't be surprised if one existed.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > It's sad to think that the computing devices our newer
| generations are growing up with are trying their best to
| shoot down this exact use case; making the device do things
| no one made it do before.
|
| Buy a Steam Deck.
| dahart wrote:
| > everything is locked down in the name of safety, and people
| loosing out on the ability of just having fun by modifying
| devices we already own.
|
| Do you have any specific examples? I'm not convinced this
| problem exists for demoscene.
|
| For other kinds of hacking, maybe yes, but demoscene was
| always about pushing graphics and sound limits of the device,
| and that is absolutely still possible and not being traded
| for security. If anything, the actual problem to lament is
| that GPUs are so damn good that no crazy hacking is required
| anymore, at least not to work around the hardware, though
| just using the hardware as designed these days can sometimes
| be categorized as crazy hacking. The hardware now does far
| more than everything we wished it could do thirty or forty
| years ago. We got what we wanted in the first place:
| programmable graphics hardware. Nonetheless, people are still
| pushing GPUs to do things it wasn't quite designed for.
|
| I'm not sure anyone's fun is being hampered, demoscene
| graphics hacking is alive and well:
|
| https://demozoo.org/parties/4813/
|
| https://www.shadertoy.com/playlist/featured
| femto wrote:
| > Instead, everything is locked down...
|
| There's an argument that that just raises the bar.
| skrebbel wrote:
| As a demoscener, I think this cool (though maybe also a bit
| useless).
|
| But the thing this highlights to me now is how weird it is that
| UNESCO heritage lists are per country. The design seems wholly
| unsuited to any sort of culture that has emerged after the
| invention of global communication networks such as the internet.
| IIRC demoscene is already recognized as UNESCO heritage in
| Finland and Germany, what are we going to do, go down the list of
| every country that ever produced more than a few demos?
|
| I mean of course none of this matters, because there's not really
| any tangible benefit to one's hobby being on a list like this,
| but it's still kinda funky. As if culture stops at country
| borders.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Would it help if you tried to have a demo class at a community
| center and could point at the UNESCO decision to get proper
| handling and shut down the "kids these days" arguments ?
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| The biggest benefit is in bringing legitimacy to preservation
| efforts and curation of historic records (photos, videos, data,
| binaries, sources) on the history of the Demoscene.
|
| There is a large chunk of software history prior to pre-cloud
| services that has died in someone's hard drive, floppy, CD.
|
| Maybe because it was tied to IP or maybe just because they
| didn't think much about its historic value or didn't see it as
| ground breaking or note worthy.
| skrebbel wrote:
| > There is a large chunk of software history prior to pre-
| cloud services that has died in someone's hard drive, floppy,
| CD.
|
| Sure but I don't see how being on a UN list helps fix that.
| Seems to me like efforts from people behind eg scene.org,
| archive.org (hat tip to jscott) etc are substantially more
| valuable to preservation efforts than convincing some folk
| dance geeks who work at the UN that rotating nipple balls are
| also cool (which of course they are)
|
| EDIT: To be clear, I don't mean to dismiss the effort. The
| entire point of the demoscene is "because we can!", so
| obviously this also holds for getting our hobby listed by the
| UN.
| robin_reala wrote:
| UNESCO has funding available to use on heritage projects,
| which could support the existing archive efforts.
| amszmidt wrote:
| The IA is closing in on 30 years, has UNESCO done
| anything to help the IA during that time?
| robin_reala wrote:
| Have they ever applied?
| deater wrote:
| the IA is great for hosting demos too, including running
| in in-browser emulation. For example see:
| https://archive.org/details/@deater78
| some_random wrote:
| What has UNESCO done to assist with that?
| squigz wrote:
| GP answered why the UNESCO lists help, in their first
| sentence:
|
| > The biggest benefit is in bringing legitimacy to
| preservation efforts and curation of historic records
| (photos, videos, data, binaries, sources) on the history of
| the Demoscene.
|
| It's not necessarily about "effort" but perhaps more about
| "appearances" - it's easier to say "This history is
| important enough to be recognized by UNESCO: give us money
| to preserve it!"
| pjmlp wrote:
| It helps when talking to politicians.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Officially proclaiming it part of the Cultural Heritage of
| your country means you can write letters like this:
|
| Hello, person who controls government funding for the arts!
| The demoscene is now a UNESCO cultural heritage property in
| three different countries, including ours. We are a group
| dedicated to (preserving/documenting/continuing) this
| wonderful and unique expression of the artistic urge. You
| should give us a lot of money to keep doing this.
|
| ...in much more polite language, and with descriptions of
| exactly what you'll be doing with that money, of course.
|
| You could apply for a grant big enough for your group to
| take a year off your day jobs and spend it hacking the hell
| out of your submission for a major party. You could get a
| chunk of money to keep your site full of demos running. You
| could get the state helping to pay the expenses for the
| party you run.
|
| All of these things obviously have existing ways to pay
| their expenses or the scene would have died off long ago,
| but why not add another one?
| cinntaile wrote:
| I think it's fine that some things just disappear with the
| sands of time. Not everything needs to be preserved.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > it's fine that some things just disappear
|
| The thing about History in general is that we as present
| time people have a poor intuition of what is valuable
| historic data for people in a future (long time from now)
| time.
|
| Today we draw conclusions from graffiti on Roman walls or
| Babylonian complaint records. Arguably at the time nobody
| would consider vandalism or customer service records worth
| preserving for posterity.
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| Who gets to define what's preserve and what is lost? And
| why?
| dmbche wrote:
| If I'm trying to see how it's useful, attaching your country's
| identity to a cultural practice is a good first step to then
| fund and prop up/support said practice - while the list itself
| doesn't change much, you can refer to it to show the demoscene
| is worthwile and argue for funding/support.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| > fund and prop up/support said practice
|
| I wonder how this would look in practice in the case of the
| demoscene.
|
| I feel like there was a moment in the earoy 2010s-ish when
| there was an interest in the demoscene as one aspect of
| "digital art", along with games, animation etc. Seems to have
| faded a bit, maybe because the focus of the demoscene shifted
| towards size limits where the aesthetic accomplishments can
| be less immidiately obvious to the uninitiated.
| eCa wrote:
| > how weird it is that UNESCO heritage lists are per country.
|
| Most things on the list are geographic (in some sense) so for
| those it kind of makes sense that they are country based. There
| are some that spans multiple countries, the largest of which
| that I'm aware of is Struve Geodetic Arc stretching from the
| Arctic to the Black Sea.
|
| But I agree that some cultural evolutions are quite far removed
| from the physical space in which they happened.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| It's also unsuited to cultural heritage that predates the
| nation state or spans modern semi-arbitrary borders.
| amyjess wrote:
| > IIRC demoscene is already recognized as UNESCO heritage in
| Finland and Germany, what are we going to do, go down the list
| of every country that ever produced more than a few demos?
|
| Potentially, yes. Take a look at the following list and you'll
| see, for example, that 24 countries are listed for falconry.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_Her...
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| > Idag anvands ofta sarskilda programvaror for att skapa demos,
| men det ar inget maste, man kan anvanda vilket program som helst.
|
| Wat?
| INTPenis wrote:
| "Today there are specialized software to create demos but you
| can do it without these." It's a bit poorly formulated because
| back in the day people had nothing but a text editor.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| There's been specialized tools in use since the very
| beginning though. I'd count assemblers and such among them.
| :)
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| 1987: https://cpcrulez.fr/applications_graphic-NWC-
| demomaker.htm
| bux93 wrote:
| I was going to mention Scream Tracker, but the Swedish
| language link names Fasttracker (apparently Swedish made,
| while Scream Tracker is by the Future Crew who hail from
| Finland).
| jansan wrote:
| Welcome to the club! The demoscene is already UNESCO heritage in
| Finland, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands.
| lores wrote:
| But not in Syria? Everyone always forgets the Damascene
| demoscene.
| tobylane wrote:
| They haven't yet had their sudden change of heart on the
| subject.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| It's haram now.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some of the other national UNESCO demoscene additions incl.
| thoughts around the benefits of this kind of declaration, and of
| course plenty of fond anecdotes:
|
| _Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world
| cultural heritage_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876961
|
| _Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26522681
|
| _Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The
| Netherlands_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36597460
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| FastTracker was Swedish? That's enough to justify this list add
| IMO
| kookamamie wrote:
| Yes, FT was Swedish and Scream Tracker was Finnish, from Future
| Crew.
| danwills wrote:
| And Impulse tracker is from South Australia! Jeff Lim is
| totally one of my local heroes!
| amiga386 wrote:
| Soundtracker was German
|
| Noisetracker was Swedish
|
| Protracker was Norwegian
|
| MED/OctaMED was Finnish
| tobr wrote:
| Fun to see goto80 at the top of HN. If there's one song that got
| me hooked on the 8 bit sound as a teen, it's Blox.
| https://archive.org/details/bliptv-20131104-213301-BleepStre...
| barcoder wrote:
| It's incredible to see what can be achieved with very few lines
| of code to produce visuals and sound. It's often pretty easy to
| know who the demoscene is made by because of the artistic style.
| Similar to more traditional art forms.
| chaosprint wrote:
| Really interesting to read about this! That's wonderful
| validation for a vital digital culture and its heritage.
|
| As the creator of Glicol (https://glicol.org/), based in Oslo and
| working in the digital arts space, I'm always fascinated by how
| different countries foster creative technology. Sweden's approach
| in recognizing the demoscene this way is particularly
| encouraging.
|
| It makes me reflect on the pathways to support here in Norway.
| While academic environments can be very supportive (as my
| previous supervisors have been), navigating the broader public
| arts funding structures for newer digital art forms sometimes
| feels more challenging, especially perhaps for those working
| outside of long-established networks.
|
| Seeing Sweden's success in formally recognizing this kind of
| digital heritage is genuinely inspiring and offers food for
| thought.
| larodi wrote:
| Would you agree the demoscene is slowly turning into generative-
| art-NFT-scene. I mean, lot of new effects get released a gif or
| genart snippets, and some are actually really good. Also #genaury
| been a think for several years now.
|
| Not sure how this relates to the heritage status of older
| productions though.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Don't see how NFTs are relevant.
|
| ML/LLM/AI/generative transformer generated art is at home in
| the demo scene. The demoscene has always embraced new ways to
| create art, and then find a way to pack it inside a 32kB
| cracktro or BBS insert in a zip file. I wonder what could be
| done wi the Fabrice Bellard's very low bitrate audio
| compression, for example...
|
| Some of the imagination is "What could have been?" What demos
| _could_ have existed in 1981 on contemporary hardware? It is a
| pathway into imagining other worlds.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| It's not. Demoscene productions are released on the demoscene.
| larodi wrote:
| hah, I sure do know where and when many of the legendary
| productions got released. besides - we (demogroup ancient
| pain) released two in 1996 and 1997. when were yours released
| to down-vote my actually very informed comment, for real?
|
| the fx scene in 2025 is full throttle with a short-form
| single-effect pieces being released daily, and some of them
| are actually quite good. some people also release the code to
| them unlike what demoscene guys did back in the day, as it
| all was closed culture, albeit free.
|
| my comment was really - if kids are incentivized to do genart
| for money, or to just share pieces of short-attention spam
| material, why do it for the classic fun of it of the
| demoscene?
| ddingus wrote:
| Trying to turn what is a learning and skills compo and
| celebration into some sort of market is not really in the
| spirit of the scene.
|
| Further, the only use of the NFT I have seen that is not
| also trying to create some artificial value others are
| forced to recognize, is as tickets. And yes, I mean proof
| of purchase to an event type tickets.
| larodi wrote:
| > Trying to turn what is a learning and skills compo and
| celebration into some sort of market is not really in the
| spirit of the scene.
|
| for the disclaimer - not trying to turn anything into
| another thing. myself is not part of the nft market of
| generative art, but it is difficult to not note it,
| right?
|
| > Further, the only use of the NFT I have seen that is
| not also trying to create some artificial value others
| are forced to recognize, is as tickets.
|
| ...or club cards, or other benefit somethings. okay.
|
| Had the absolutely same argument about it for very long,
| so I dare to continue this conversation.
|
| First of all, let's agree that fame related to pushing
| the boundaries of CPUs and other PUs is for very long not
| going to the demoscene. Why? Perhaps because people
| stopped writing their own renders, and modplayers.
| Because THIS was what needed pushing to the limits. In my
| opinion, though, the drive for demoing is not purely a
| coder drive, it is an aesthetic, and also art&animation
| drive.
|
| Demoscene was a show-off for badass coders, but also for
| badass tracker music producers, and pixelcore artists, of
| course. The coolness of it is that it allowed impossible
| things with CREATIVE expression.
|
| Similar to that is this Lithuanian producer's achievement
| with the cat movie, who snatched Oscar with a draft
| render. Is this a top-optimization showcase ?! Not on the
| CPU level, this brother was GPU poor, so he went for the
| aeshtetic excellence with whatever he had.
|
| Now speaking of art or preservation - the fact the
| demoscene is heritage of something means nothing in a
| world where even the archive.org needs regular funding
| and massive volunteer effort in order to exist. Besides
| most of the demos, not sure what %, surely had their
| source code lost already, because opensource was not
| something badass coders embraced back in the day.
|
| In 2025 if you want to see coding excellence, perhaps
| llama.cpp and tinygrad can be an object of admiration,
| the work of jart on the cosmopolitan c if you want... But
| I can think of very few demoscene (visual) productions
| done in the last 5 years, that are really feat of
| technology, given what GPUs can do with compute units
| nowadays. On the contrary - a lot of generative art
| content is implemented in processing, or even
| processing.js, or unity.
|
| Of course you can never underestimate the achievements of
| Farbrauch, ASD (from Greece!), CNCD, all the legendary
| groups who produced these productions. But, come on,
| where is the massive demoscene output that should be
| there given the massive, huge gaming branch which is all
| about animation, sound and visuals, and pushing
| boundaries?
|
| Demoscene parties have not multiplied and many tech
| events which should have demoscene room - do not. Neither
| the commercial ones, nor the hacker-run gatherings.
|
| You know, I can definitely argue that pieces of effects
| may actually get better preserved as blockchain token
| payload, than obscure URLs at scene.org or pouet.net. So
| this is one reason to not bark against it, and besides
| for a s.o. 14years old, who just switched from scratch to
| processing.js - it may come as reasonable incentive,
| given what his peers are probably doing, to have this
| released as some NFT which moves and does gen-art. why
| not? why would he be obliged to go to the demoscene to do
| genart? because who said it?
|
| My observation is that the whole generative art, or the
| art part of the demoscene drive, went towards the social
| scene, and not NFT necessarily, but say - on viral and
| also anon accounts on X or Mastodon, where it releases.
| And perhaps also blends already with the VJ and special
| effects crowd which perhaps have their own conferences,
| because you know FC went to start Remedy, and these other
| guys went to start Notch and it's a very commercial
| platform, and guys who started it - also won Assembly
| several times with this engine.
| joemi wrote:
| I think the genart scene and demoscene might be at best
| related, but I don't think the genart scene _is_ the modern
| demoscene, as you seem to be implying.
|
| (That said, I'm assuming by "genart" you either mean modern
| AI-based generative art, or you mean all generative art in
| general. Either way, while somewhat/tangentially related to
| the demoscene, they are not direct analogs or descendants.)
| onename wrote:
| Not sure if we are following the same demoparties but I still
| see plenty of great demos, intros, music, etc. being released.
| I do see new compos being add liked Modern GFX, Animations,
| Photo, and Videos but I dont feel that deminish the creativity
| of the Demoscene.
|
| On a side note, I am looking forward to this year Revision
| demoparty.
| initramfs wrote:
| my mom's basement is not for sale!
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The more things UNESCO declares an exceptional heritage, the less
| special they are.
|
| To me the shark is already jumped, but I don't think they'll ever
| quit.
| velo_aprx wrote:
| You kind of miss what the UNESCO Intangible Heritage list is
| actually about. It's not like they're handing out gold stars to
| things they think are "the best" or most "exceptional.
|
| The whole point is to recognize and help preserve living
| traditions.
| jolmg wrote:
| I thought UNESCO world heritage sites were physical locations
| rather than aspects of a possibly physically dispersed culture.
| Is the site the whole country of Sweden?
| echoangle wrote:
| It's probably not a heritage site but something like this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_Her...
| nubb wrote:
| ive always thought the ethereum ecosystem would give demoscene a
| revival. storing the demos on chain adds a new layer of
| complexity where the bigger the size the more expensive to
| deploy.
| bane wrote:
| As a scener since the early 90s, I'm thrilled with these
| announcements. Personally, what I'd like to see come of it is an
| increase in the amount of academic studies of the scene at the
| intersection of art, technology, and anthropology. A careful
| study of the scene, what makes it unique, how it bleeds into
| other adjacent scenes (and what those are), sub-scenes, core
| elements of demoscene art and tech, all those things would be
| really interesting.
|
| They've all been written about by sceners in the past, but I
| think more outside observations would be enlightening. As a
| demoscener, you _know_ what is scene and what isn 't, and
| basically how it works. But I've found it nearly impossible to
| succinctly explain it to non-sceners without sounding like I'm
| crazy, or making it up, or giving them a very wrong understanding
| of core demo elements (e.g. "so it's all about doing things in
| small sizes?")
|
| One leg up, the scene has done a very good job archiving
| information about scene groups, sceners, scene productions, and
| sub-scene productions, giving future researchers a lot of
| information to start from.
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