the problem with "demoscene art" is that the final product is often only impressive if you know how it was done. really you want to display it in a way that shows off the mechanism. i guess quines don't have this problem.

I'd argue a good chunk of "Art art" is quite similar: the thing you see is quite unimpressive and really only considered important because of context.

A nice demoscene example is "Piledriver", which contains all of the last 2 decades worth of demoscene tropes, no exceptions. Hexagonal cones, walking robots, purple explosions, drum'n'bass with rap vocals, television walls with earlier scenes, it's all there. And it's extremely well executed, which hides that it's a parody. So I guess it only works as a work of art if you saw the demos it mocks.

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=82882

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4zkSd3-6I2A

A lot of art derives value from craft, but when craft is systematized, it becomes product design and targeted towards consumers instead. Demoscene folks have often crossed over to the industrial side of computer graphics and gaming.

A good proportion of the art-as-art world either finds new and original ways to push craft, or focuses on medium facilitating message(which in turn falls neatly into the product-marketing framework).

agreed that it is true for a lot of "high art" too. but much of it can still be appreciated at face value.

I think you could physically implement demos (especially very very small ones) in such a way as to demonstrate just how compact their implementation is. E.g. use ancient computer hardware, load from 5.25" floppy when you press a button to start it, etc.

The best example (counter-example?) of this that I can think of is one of the realtime raytracing demos that came out circa 2000 when it was all the rage. I can't remember the name but basically after doing well in a compo the authors revealed that it was just a rasterizer running at low rez with some hacked reflections, which everyone had believed was super impressive because they thought it was raytracing and the deliberately low resolution made it look the part.

Iirc that was Transgression 2 by MFX: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=672

For better or worse, there's no scarcity in software. And thus, “we hackers do for love what others wouldn't do for money.”

I'm thinking the democoders could create scarcity. I'm imagining e.g. Future Crew making a Third reality. Or Triton making Crystal Dream III. Release at like a 300p video for the world and like AM audio mono sound quality and sell the binary to the highest bidder. Or perhaps smarter, release it at 1:1 quality for the first minute, but only for the first minute.

;)

Edit: of course this would be a horrible future. Also, there's no way these now old guys could recreate the magic they experienced together in the early 90s.

Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIIBRr31DIU

(make sure to enable the thirdparty english subtitles)

You can create scarcity by marrying the software with a physical object.

William Gibsons poem Agrippa [1] is easily accessible, though it was distributed as part of a program that'd overwrite the floppy it was distributed on.

But it was sold in various ridiculously expensive collectors editions.

While the point of Agrippa is ostensibly the poem, the mechanism of delivery was very important to the appeal of it as well as the media attention (of course the fact that Gibson was well known by then was important), and you could imagine something similar for a demo. Add a hardware element, and packaging that forms part of the whole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)

Pushwagner printouts are sold for a ludicrous amount of money here in Oslo. No reason demo scene guys shouldn't be able to do that also.