Demoscene culture continues to produce more with less, producing elaborate audiovisual worlds from tiny amounts of code. Revision is a hub for these kinds of creations, and in 2024, it delivers as always – including, incredibly, an animation made just from HTML scrollbar code. (Seriously.)
Germany celebrates Easter … differently. In Saarbrücken, it means an annual gathering of computation nerds, seeing how much art they can squeeze out of a few K of code on different platforms and in different media – animations, images, sounds, everything. Welcome to the Revision party.
How’s this for minimalism? Via our friend HACKMANS, blinry and winniehell managed to create an animation using nothing but HTML scroll bars and JavaScript – 32 of them, in an array. It also generates magical Raster-Noton album covers, if you want. You can download and run that demo on your computer; it literally just opens up in your browser as index.html. But if you’re too lazy, here’s what you’ll get:
It’s all part of the “wild” category. In that grab bag, you get music for the Amiga, animation on a Z80-powered phone, some dancing eggs, a school play with a wolf, and demos for the PlayStation and PlayStation Portable. Since it was trans visibility day, someone manages to talk about trans visibility and end the platform wars! Also, there’s a duck telling you about Piet, a programming language that uses pixels of color as the code. Mind blown.
Speaking of Amiga, the platform that helped the whole genre explode remains a beloved target for the scene, and it’s alive and well:
But if all that 1985 computing power just feels wasteful, how about working on the Apple II?
Silky-smooth, liquid creations dominate the 64K PC category – these are just beautiful; I’m won over by those rivers of space glitter. Obviously, epilepsy warning on this:
My heart also warms at this text art:
I really hope the demoscene is something that expands and diversifies as for all its gems, it remains a monoculture in many ways and you don’t see a lot of representation. But maybe talking about it on CDM will spur someone in that direction. I don’t mean to just present this as a novelty: with AI threatening to automate out a lot of human ingenuity, now is the time. And we should make permacomputing a real conversation as we face the growing risks of climate change, toxic computer waste, and horrific violence around the extraction of minerals for computing.
More on those topics soon, as they matter. In the meantime, I do love watching these creations. See the whole selection from Revision:
https://www.youtube.com/@revisionparty