Can you offer a separate work-safe stream? I have a monitor with this fullscreen in my open office and I had to shut the screen off temporarily when one demo had a very pornographic image for a scene. Whichever one was on before 'Magic Show' that's running right now. I think it was 'Revenge'
What was missing for us "old skoolers" so as to get back in touch with all those great demos in the demoscene.
<nostalgia>
I remember when I was downloading the Hornet archive (now at https://hornet.org/) or demos from The Scene (http://scene.org) using the university connection back in the 56K modem days.
I still remember my first time, Second Reality by Future Crew :-)
Unfortunately due to lack of time my last contact with the demoscene was with Iconoclast by Andromeda Software Development (http://www.asd.gr)
You might even remember when the hornet archive was hosted out of a random ftp server at the University of Florida.
I access it for a couple years via a gopher client installed on the 20-minute free dial-up internet account I tricked my local school district into giving to me.
If you're new to the scene take heed of the warning, the video's cannot do the best of these justice, codecs just cannot convey the fluid high resolution impact of the real deal. If you get the chance install and run a few :)
To this point, here's a recent production that's been nick named "the Codec Destroyer" due to the way its visuals seem to exploit weaknesses in a great many video codecs
The demoscene is (in my opinion at least) one of the first true global digital art movements and what I believe is the 3rd great software movement of the computer revolution (after commercial, and open source). As an art movement it's now nearing half-a-century old, has multiple sub-movements, produces visual, audio and in some cases physical art. It started in the piracy scene, computing's version of graffiti, but a bit like how some graffiti is turning into a serious art form, the demoscene broke away from piracy and is slowly moving towards high art legitimacy.
It's virtually unknown due to it being almost impossible to monetize in the way traditional art movements have been (where a single instance is made by an artist and you can purchase and own that one "true" instance, all other versions are just copies). It doesn't seem to have strong political or philosophical aims like many art movements do. Most "demos" are produced by small teams operating almost entirely under pseudonyms so single authorship and artist identification is also very hard to pin down.
The art is usually highly abstract, or plays with familiar forms in abstract ways. If there's a statement to be made it's usually in terms of create productions that push what we think computing can do, and to do it in a way that's not of any particular use to purely commercial or utilitarian interests.
Demoscene music has a variety of identifiable subgenres, often based in non-scene genres, but with several identifiable themes that don't generally exist in non-demoscene music.
It has some loose "rules" for what is and isn't a demoscene production, but it's kind of like pornography, you know it when you see it (or hear it). There are literally hundreds of thousands of productions.
