Introduction
Let me begin first by laying down some very general criteria that I apply when considering various forms of expression as art. I want to keep them general and relatively inclusive for two reasons: 1) I’m considering a new media art form that many wouldn’t consider worthy of artistic consideration 2) I don’t wish to engage in technical discussions about the nature of art. With regard to the first reason, I think it’s obvious that if we’re going to be open minded enough to consider new media platforms like demos as art we have to have a fairly liberal and broadminded attitude about the nature of art. With regard to the second – I tend to find the question “what is art?” to be a terminally boring question, generally because it is so heavily laced with either relativistic or elitist attitudes such that genuine exchange on the issue become impossible.
Having said that – there needs to be some level of criteria by which we can make our judgements and so I will make these clear now.
Firstly, the work must display some level of technical merit. In the examples that follow I think you’ll agree that there is no question of the technical skill. The best demos are renown for amazing visual experiences, combined with fantastic scores (often in an electronica flavour) with great synergy between the two.
Technical skill, however, is not the be all and end all of artistic expression. This is suggested to us by the second word of the phrase just used: “expression”. The artist should be trying to engage with us in some way – some theme, value or experience should be communicated. The artist should ask something of us as viewers, cause in us some reaction that goes beyond that provided by a pretty picture.
Finally, there is the depth and profundity of that expression. Here we defer to all those devices employed by the great artists of history in whatever their chosen medium may happen to be; instruments like symbolism, narrative, irony and the like. Using such powerful techniques, the great artist bequeaths a richer understanding of our own experience.
What we’ll find when we look at the three demos I’ve chosen, is great skill in the technical aspect, but varying degrees of accomplishment in the other two. I’ll argue, however, that irrespective of these failings – the demo has a fantastic potential to supersede many of the traditional artforms because of the technical freedom allowed by the medium. But only if enough attention for the medium an be garnered to make it worth the while of a great artist.
With each demo I’ve provided a youtube video. Of course, these will not do these demos justice. The best way to view them is with a high end pc with a suitable graphics card and a nice big monitor. I’ve provided links to the scene.org where the originals can be found.
Final by Plastic
Original File
The technical skill of this demo should be obvious. It is simply beautiful. The music is great and the whole experience is extremely immersive. The 3d rendering in some parts is so skilled you almost feel like you could reach out, touch it, and receive the cool feeling of marble to the hand (one needs a high resolution for this effect).
The artistic experience is purely aesthetic. There is no narrative being offered here. It is sculpture in an animated form. The appropriate response, I think, is to consider it as sculpture, but when done it is difficult to engage. The scupltures themselves are alien in form – vaguely ugly, in some cases delicate and pained, but in others they seem abstract and emotionless. It’s difficult for one to know what the artist wants us to see.
These aren’t the kind of objects that the generations will ponder over. They don’t have the enigmatic allure of Michelangelo’s David, nor do they possess the savage realism of an Auguste Rodin. But there is no reason to think that we couldn’t find such figures waiting for us in a demo somewhere – the sorts of objects that go beyond anything a real sculptor could produce in scale and imaginative fancy, simply because of the limitations of the physical medium. These are the sorts of limitations that do not exist in the computer generated realm. Perhaps one day?
Lifeforce by Andromeda Software Development
Original File
This is perhaps the most technically accomplished demo of the three. It is quite extraordinary. It has fantastic 3d renderings juxtaposed against stunning 2d representations. For instance, the scene of the silloutted bell tower with birds flying and the bell ringing is genuinely moving – although you don’t know why and that’s part of its charm.
But also part of its failing when considered as a piece of art. Many of the images contained in this demo are rewarding and attractive in their own right and the way the demo flows from one scene to the next is extraordinarily fluid and creatively done. But the imagery at times feels random and as a whole doesn’t seem to add up to anything. In terms of expression one feels there is nothing coherent being expressed. There are genuinely evocative moments like the one expressed above but to what purpose. It feels much like a dream with better visuals – something unconscious and sad, something yearning but for what we’ll never know.
fr-041: d e b r i s by Farbrausch
Original File
This is my favourite of the demos under consideration. It is technically accomplished with a rich set of visuals. I’ll leave it to you to marvel at it.
Artistically there is a lot going on here. The imagery is surreal, yet consistent. We are presented with a stark urban scene, with dull apartment blocks littering the landscape. It’s ugly and yet at the same time has a strange translucent beauty. The sound track complements this perfectly. At the beginning there is an underlying hum which is familiar to anyone who has lived in an inner city environment – but also a surreal groaning sound which serves to create a dramatic tension – which is realised later in the demo when the whole scene begins to unravel. The floating cubes act as a kind of animating force which tears through the urban environment. We are able to trace the development of this force and watch its final realisation. Hence we have the use of a coherent narrative – something which the other two demos lack.
But there is also symbolism being used – we can delve into it and ponder its meaning. While there is some scope for interpretation, we don’t feel as if the process is useless. There IS meaning here. We can suggest a theme of urban decay – the lack of creativity in the inner city environment that eats away from the inside. A rotton core is revealed – perhaps hollow. The static insides is reminiscent of the static of a television set – another modern bastion of the dull and predictable.
This demo is a fantastic achievement. It’s the sort of thing that you want to watch over and over again. Perhaps it can be argued that it doesn’t belong with the greats of high art – but we’re not pushing for that level of comparison at this stage at least. It certainly represents the potential this sort of medium has an art form. I hope we see more of its ilk in the future.
If anyone has other great demos they’d like to draw attention to – please feel free to post them in the comments.
4 Comments
You’ve found some interesting stuff… I definitely like the third the best. When I was in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, I saw a demo for “Hellgate: London” at a comics festival. It certainly wasn’t as thought-provoking, but it was technically amazing. One of the other stallholders said he’d buy the game for the cut-scenes alone. Remember how lame they were in games like Command and Conquer? They’ve since become a selling point.
For a long time I thought film was potentially the greatest art form as it can combine all the others (literature, drama, costume design, music, architecture, etc) and have such an emotional impact. Though I feel it rarely attains this potential, the line between movies and games is becoming increasingly blurred. Perhaps we need to create new genres such as “interactive cinema” for the things we have in store…
I agree that this very much seems to be the way in which things are heading. I’ll be doing a post on the latest installment of half life 2 – to show just how this is indeed becoming a reality.
Being one of the two musicians who composed the score for Lifeforce, and taking part in the creation process I can assure you that demos are indeed a form of art.. an art of its own which even though it combines electronic adaptations of popular art forms (music, drawing, sculpting), it emerges as a unique form having its own “rules” and genres, much like drawing had cubism and impressionism.
Some demos are pretty much straight forward with a clear narrative which sometimes adds some subtle hints that are thought provoking in order to guide you into buildying the mythos around the demo, while others go about presenting a concept using allegory as the “weapon” of choice. There are of course demos that don’t go about offering an underlying meaning or storyline and just present eyecandy which once again has its own unique artistical merit.
As with pretty much every art form out there, the technical merit can be judged and rated through rules and objective criteria. The artistic merit however is always open to the audience’s interpretation.
Being a musician I’ve had a lot of people going into an analysis of my music and telling me how they could understand what sort of feelings I had when I was composing it, and what messages and meanings I wanted to convey. To which I smiled.. It was an interesting interpretation of how those people percieve my music while in fact when I composed it I didn’t have something in particular in mind.. in fact it just sounded good to me at the time so I kept it =)
As for lifeforce, I suggest you take a read in the accompanying text file, as it contains an “explanation” of what the underlying meanings and concept are. Of course that is only ASD’s interpertation.. yours might be completely different.
Thanks for the comment.
Yes it must be a little bemusing to hear the interpretations come back at you. For me it’s one of the best parts of the artistic process – just to see how it affects people.
I should have mentioned the music with regard to Lifeforce. It is a fantastic score and perhaps my favourite element of the demo. It has great variety and compliments the visuals well – and yet hangs together thematically. Given the somewhat divergent imagery, I actually think that its the music which ties it all together for me.
I took a look at the text file – which I should have done before posting, and as you say there is indeed more here to explore. I’ll post it here in full (hope that’s cool) – so the reader can do so for themselves:
———————————————————-
.Code / Direction – Navis
With Lifeforce we wanted to make a demo that has a progression and a cyclic narrative.
It starts where Iconoclast, our Assembly 2005 demo, ended: we enter into the mind of
the creator / avatar / muse (a small reference to Homer here) and descend into the
beginning of the journey of life. The images of nature and the laughter o f children
are the starting point. Like some other parts in this demo the happy and playful mood
is interrupted by sorrowful events (knife slicing the rainbow). The sequence that
follows (tree submerged in liquid, bubbles floating towards the surface) is the
progression to maturity and the passage of time. The character tries to climb the
mountain in vain and extends his arm to reach for the beating heart – the symbol of
youth.The images that follow (statue of men reading the scribes, bells ringing in the
distance) are a reference to religion, seemingly the last resort of some men in the
dusk of their lives. The second part of the demo begins in the bathroom sequence. The
man has died but left a message: “ZEI”, which means he/she/it is alive. A message of
hope, maybe ? The black strips and octopuses represent the fear of death and guilt.
The strips guide us through a series of surealistic images that overlap one another:
images of living things that exist in the domain of the living (city, horse,elephant,
clown). We wanted to create a feeling of anxiety before the revelation of the last
scene in which we have drawn a full circle: The desert is revisited, only now, after
innumerable years it is an ocean, deep and dark. The crescendo slowly builds to a
nuclear blast that engulfs our world and memories. We too now sink down and
contemplate our own mortal fate.
Lifeforce, like all ASD demos, is almost completely hand made; which means that apart
from some static models and textures all model animation, particle effects, post
processing, camera paths, synchronizations and everything else that makes this demo
has been hard-coded. We believe that it is impossible to deliver a demo of the
complexity of lifeforce by using an available demoscripting engine and putting in
less work than hard-coding it the way we did in the first place. The code in
Lifeforce is based on a very minimalistic 3D engine (a combination of all first 20 or
so NeHe tutorials, for example, is a superset of our 3D engine) and heavy use of
image processing and shaders.
The demo was written exclusively on an Athlon 3000XP with a geforce FX 5600 ultra.
.Music – Amusic and Leviathan
Lifeforce’s soundtrack began pretty late in the creative process. This time we wanted
to have more than just an idea of what the visuals were going to look like. When we
saw the magnitude of the scenes it was clear that we had to go in a different
direction with the music while at the same time try to maintain some of our trademark
sounds and progressions.With Memento Mori we went overboard with attention to detail.
The track utilizes more than 2000 samples and over 100 rack devices on Reason, which
eventually managed to get a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 HT CPU cry for mercy, as it could not
replay the sounds in realtime.
The end result proves to be a lot more melodic and sentimental than our previous
tracks, more coherent as a whole and with a tighter beat and emotional synch. We did
not include traditional progressive rock elements such as variating time signatures
and syncopated rhythms and riffs this time as we felt that the flow of the demo
called for a more “swimmy” (as we call it) soundtrack-ish approach. As with the
visual part, the song explores the circle of life from birth to death,even if through
dramatic circumstances reminding everyone, as per the title, that they are mortal. As
the demo (and life) closes to the end, the sound gets rougher and more agressive,
portraying the multiplying aspects in a person’s life until his lifeline is cut short
, perhaps before its time. The dance segue, seemingly detached from the whole, is a
friendly nod to those who understand that life should not be taken too seriously all
of the time.
.2D graphics – Archmage of Andromeda
The graphics zoomer in Lifeforce has some predecessors in demos from the likes of TBL
, FLT and even ASD, but from a very early stage we decided that I should take this
effect in a different direction. Instead of making a seemingly improvised progression
where a zoom-in of the first picture dictates the imagery in the next one, I started
out by painting three separate pictures. These images were intended to work as stand
alone compositions, and they would then be linked by zooming out through circular
elements such as the eyes and the monocle. There are nine zoom stages in all,
seamlessly blended for your viewing pleasure. As for the imagery itself, I was given
a lot of freedom to explore the underlying ideas of Lifeforce. By depicting
disciplined Nature rebelling against Man Defaced in the setting of a circus
microcosmos, and then by having Nature turn against itself in an unnatural way with a
tiger chasing a lionfish, I wanted to communicate the inevitable coming of the End -
and a sense of good riddance.
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