Demos as an Art :: Art Arts Artistic Technology Essays

Demos as an ArtA little more than two years ago I came across a very sm only computer architectural plan that amazed me. It was very sm every as computer courses go, but it did several(prenominal)thing I have never seen before - it used a mathematical enactment to create a stunning moving display, and played music in the background. After a while of looking around I run aground more of the same type of programs, most created by different people, every(prenominal) of which had a common purpose of presenting the user with computer-generated cunning - some by mathematical formulae, some by conventional means, but most a combination of the two. Each one had music composed especi in ally for that program. They were all works of machination, a new form of art. I found come to the fore that to exercise such a program one had to have some ideas for something to be represented by mathematical expressions, then express them all in a computer program, that was profuse enough to do numerous complex calculations on an average users machine. The latter role turned out to be a lot harder than it sounded. As fast as computers are today, they are not fast enough, for there is of all season something which requires more and more calculations. Many tricks have to be implemented to make a program run the fastest possible, some of them being, ironically, to write it in the early computer languages which dealt more with computer instructions than with the structure of the program itself. Thus the more complex your goal, the simpler means you have to employ to filter it. Because of this it is very hard to create a fast and small program. The ammount of time and effort spent on writing it can be astonishingly high. I, myself, spent two days once writing a program that consisted of about 200 letters of computer istructions - a few lines - all generated from a few pages of the program that I wrote, and re-wrote, and re-wrote ... These programs carry an unassuming noti ce demos , short for demonstrations, but they do so much more than that implies. to the highest degree of them push computers to the limit, doing what was earlier thought of as impossible or at least required a super-computer, but most significantly they define a new art form. This special mode of art requires many new and exciting factors, such as musical composition, art merged with science (a seemingly incompatible mixture), excellent computer scheduling skills, but most important - teamwork.