Syntopia

The Demo Scene never cease to amaze me. The technical quality of these demos is amazing – complex 3D scenes rendered real-time, procedural textures, real-time sound synthesis, and incredible low foot-prints.

Recently I stumbled upon demoscene.tv which features recorded videos (flash video) of many of the best demos. Of course part of the fun is actually running these demos, to be amazed that they are indeed real-time, but sadly my laptop is not geared towards neither CPU or GPU intensive activities.

A few selected demos:

fr-041: debris by Farbrausch

Lifeforce by andromeda software development

Looks like some of my binary kites have been spotted in the wild on Gnucitizen:

They sure blend in nicely in their web page design.

The Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument was the first digital sampler ever created. This ~£20000 synthesizer revolutionized the digital music scene (at least for the few artists who could afford it at the time).

This YouTube video (from 1983) shows Herbie Hancock jamming away on his Fairlight CMI (probably a Series IIx, because of the page-R pattern sequencer). Notice the light-pen driven GUI on the monochrome monitor!

Jan Hammer was also a Fairlight devotee – this early and incredible corny music video (featuring the Miami Vice Theme, of course) actually shows several screenshots from the Fairlight GUI.

The winners of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2007 proves that fractal art actually has evolved since the eighties.

View the rest of the winners…