Demos as an Art :: Art Arts Artistic Technology Essays

Demos as an Art A little more than two years ago I came across a very small computer program that amazed me. It was very small as computer programs go, but it did something I have never seen before - it used a mathematical formula to create a stunning moving display, and played music in the background. After a while of looking around I found more of the same type of programs, most created by different people, all of which had a common purpose of presenting the user with computer-generated art - some by mathematical formulae, some by conventional means, but most a combination of the two. Each one had music composed especially for that program. They were all works of art, a new form of art. I found out that to make 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 fast enough to do many complex calculations on an average user’s machine. The latter part turned out to be a lot harder than it sounded. As fast as computers are today, they are not fast enough, for there is always 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 â€Å"earlyâ⠂¬  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 reach 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 amazingly high. I, myself, spent two days once writing a program that consisted of about 200 â€Å"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 name: â€Å"demos† , short for â€Å"demonstrations†, but they do so much more than that implies. Most of them push computers to the â€Å"limit†, doing what was earlier thought of as impossible or at least required a super-computer, but most importantly 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 programming skills, but most important - teamwork.