Generative design materials in DIY digital art creation

Nicolai Brodersen Hansen1, Kim Halskov1,

1 PIT & CAVI, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University,

{nbhansen, halskov,@cavi.au.dk}

Abstract. In this workshop paper we outline how we intend to study DIY digital art creation among hobbyists. We investigate how a group of hobbyists, the “demosceners” collaborate by different design materials to create digital art. We focus on how they sustain their community as makers well as develop and collaborate, through the use of these design materials, and in that process utilize their different skill-sets to create small audiovisual presentations, called “demos”. Keywords: Design Materials, Collaborative Art creation, case study, the demo-scene.

1 Introduction

This workshop paper contributes with a research agenda research plan for a case study of end-user developers belonging to a specific subculture, “the demoscene”. The demoscene participants, the “demosceners”, collaborate using different software tools and software artifacts, that they themselves produce utilizing different skillsets. We will study their work using contextual interview, video documentation of their work, and a subsequent microanalysis of the video material.

The demoscene has a long history dating back to the introduction of personal home computers, like the C64, Atari and Amiga, meaning at least the early 80’. The demosceners are hobbyists, creating software and modifying it for their own use and enjoyment, and can in that regard be considered “makers”, although of digital art. If understood as a community of makers, it is interesting that the demoscene has stood the test of time – after so many years they are still here, still creating demos. With that in mind, we will ask two questions at the workshop: 1) how do the demosceners develop and collaborate as makers? And 2) what are the reason for the endurance of this particular subculture? The underlying assumptions here are, that other maker communities can learn from the demoscene, both with regards to the challenges faced when building community for longevity as well as what productive traits the demoscene has, that allows it to stand the test of time.

We conceptualize the software tools and artifacts produced by the demosceners in

their creative process as design materials drawing on a Schönian notion design as a conversation with the materials of a situation [15]. We furthermore narrow our focus

to the use of these design materials in a generative role [16], that is, how they support the creation of new ideas. One of us has a long-standing engagement with the demoscene providing us access to the community as well as background knowledge about the community. We consider our work be of importance for the EUD-community in that our work will highlight how different kinds of users utilize hardware and software and use it to creatively express themselves, drawing on each others’ skills. We wish to draw attention to how creativity unfolds as interplay between individuals and the materials they use for collaboration. Drawing on our case study we will unfold this analysis at more detail at the workshop.

2 The demo-scene

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that emerged from hacker and cracker cultures as early as the advent of personal home computer itself. In the 70’ies and 80’ies when software was pirated, the people releasing the pirated software created small introductory programs and appended them to the pirated software, thus creating recognition for themselves. A good introduction to demoscene history can be found in [10] and [4] – for the purposes of our study it is sufficient to remark, that the demo-scene now exists separately from its murky outsets. The audiovisual presentations, ‘demos’, are now created separately for the purpose of enjoyment and competition among the people participating in the subculture of the demoscene.

Figure 1 – a screenshot from the PC demo ‘Lifeforce’ by the demogroup ASD, 2006

We will study how this small group of highly specialized and competent hobby artists, “demosceners”, create audio-visual presentations running in real-time on a computer. The main motivation for their creations is to show off their skills and compete with each other, something they do at various festivals, called “demo parties”. These festivals take place all over the world with a primary focus on Western

Europe – however there are festivals as far away as Tokyo as well as in USA. A demo typically runs for 3-4 minutes at most and is non-interactive – it is meant to be enjoyed like a fancy video, with the difference that everything is running in realtime, something that gives rise to specific challenges and opportunities.

First, it requires some of the creators to be familiar with programming in order to

produce procedurally generated content (like for instance algorithms creating audio, drawing lines on the screen and so on). Second, there is the opportunity to employ specific algorithmic tricks to impress the audience – one of the simplest being timing the movement of a graphical piece to the music used in the demo.

Figure 2 - A shot of the biggest demoscene festival, 'Revision' (from 2012)

It is a vital trait of most demoscene productions that they are multidisciplinary efforts – not many demosceners master diverse disciplines of programming, graphics and music, so work is typically divided among the individuals in the group. Each individual possess one or more of these skills to a certain extent, although of course things are often more subtle than that – one programmer might possess knowledge about a certain hardware platform, while another in the same group has specific knowledge about graphics programming. At the same time demos are creative efforts – a demo requires the creators to come up with ways of impressing their audience using whatever tools they have available. In example, a graphics designer might have created a beautiful texture for a generated 3-dimensional object created by the programmer, who then in turn synchronizes the movement of the object to the music provided by a musician. Through this process of continuous production and refinement does the creation of an audiovisual presentation, a ‘demo’ proceed.

3 Software as a material

We consider the development process of demos a creative effort that uses software as the working material. Software can be considered a material in several ways. Within the fields of design and HCI, this is a growing area of interest.

We consider design materials to be the physical and digital resources that participants in a design process draw upon to shape new creations. Typical examples of design materials include: images from field studies; video recordings of work practices; blue prints of a future building; or the use of cards. To this we would like to add the use of micro-controllers such as Arduino boards or the Raspberry Pi, which are new potential materials that can help participants in a workshop get at what Ozenc et al. [14] have labeled “the immaterial material of software”, by allowing designers an easy way to play with sensors, LEDs and a host of other input and output peripherals. In the case of the demoscene, we would include both the hardware platforms, be they PCs or older platforms like c64 and Amiga, as well as the many software tools and the results of using them. A good example of this would be a texture created in Photoshop on one computer by a graphician on his PC, and then manipulated by the programmer working on an Amiga or another hardware platform.

We, the authors use the word “material” as the label for such things in order to highlight their role as being treated, shaped and reshaped during the design process as part of the constant transformation of ideas. However others have used the terms design artefacts [1], representations [12] and externalizations [5]. All these terms are carefully chosen to communicate specific aspects of what we have chosen to call “design materials” and one aim of our research is to simultaneously celebrate this diversity as well as try to move toward more precise definitions of how we can understand design materials in action.

Throughout the field of design and HCI there have been several discussions of specific design materials. A lot of these discussions consider physical design materials such as for instance mock-ups [7] probes [11], props [2] and card-based design games, such as Inspiration Card Workshops [8]. When discussing such materials authors have argued for their value by stressing how easy physical materials are to change [12] and how easy they are for participants in a workshop to understand as opposed to more complex pieces of software [7, 8].

Others have discussed more elaborate materials such as for instance video or audio recordings. Buur et al. [3] have discussed in detail how video recordings can be used for both illuminating existing work practices as well as how to use them to create scenarios that can act as springboards for further ideation. In such examples participants have access to higher fidelity and detail at the expense of some of the advantages inherent in physical materials.

Furthermore we would like to point to purely digital materials such as for instance software prototypes, virtual video prototypes [9] and 3d environments.

Generative use of design materials

We focus on the creative use of design materials, meaning how and why they support the collaborative re-thinking of the existing, leading to the creation of new ideas. This approach builds on the Schönian notion of the generative metaphor as a way of using seeing-as in order to generate ideas. Schön [17] describes an instance where the act of seeing an artificial paintbrush as a pump, allowed product designers to re-consider its design, creating a superior product.

In design we use this way of thinking often, as exemplified by the use of creative strategies such as extreme characters or interaction relabeling [6] or the use of provotypes as a way of provoking insights [13]. In our own work we have used Inspiration Cards [8] as a way of bringing sources of inspiration into design. Here an image of for instance the media façade Blinkenlights [18] would be used as a way of inspiring new designs. In such examples, the image of Blinkenlights acts as a way for participants in the inspiration card workshop to re-imagine what can be done with for instance the façade of a building.

Figure 3 - The Commodore 64 demo “Edge of Disgrace” by Booze Design, 2008

Thus, the material, a card with an image, acts like a Schön’ian generative metaphor, in that it spurs the imagination through different ways of seeing-as. These different cards are then gathered together in a design concept, meaning that the Inspiration Cards are used as the raw materials that ideas are shaped out of.

For our case study we pose the hypothesis that as the different members of the demoscene collaborations creates materials for the demo, these materials act as generative [16], in that they give shape to unfolding the collaborative creative potential of the group of collaborators. We furthermore hypothesize that the groups’

collaboration with the demos they work on can be understood as a conversation with the material at hand, thus making their collaboration a form of collective reflection-in-action. However how exactly this process unfolds call for further investigation.

4 A case study of collaboration

For the case study we conduct qualitative interviews at the Revision demoscene-festival, a web survey of demosceners and a more in depth qualitative study of production work on one or more demos. We have enlisted the cooperation of a Danish group, “Fnuque”, who have agreed to have one of us along as participant-observers for two separate sessions. The first session takes place over a weekend roughly two weeks before the biggest demo-scene festival “Revision”, which takes places during Easter in Saarbrücken, Germany. At this session the members of Fnuque collaborate on the production of a 64 kilobytes audiovisual presentation, featuring procedurally generated graphics, textures and music. At the second session we follow the same group in the final work at the Revision-festival, where they rush to polish and finish their work. Most likely there will be both similarities and differences in the kind of work done at the two venues. During these two events we will record the work of the members on video as they collaborate, and conduct contextual interviews. We will participate for several days in order to embed ourselves in the work-processes of the group. Meanwhile we will conduct small contextual interviews aimed at understanding why and how the members choose to do this kind of work as well as their deeper motivations for both participation in the demo-scene and in working with the specific platform they have chosen.

This results in a mass of qualitative data, which will be coded and analyzed using the above theoretical concepts of software as a material acting in a generative role. The results of this will be our main contribution for the workshop at EUD.

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