Hacking as art: Demoscene
Steven Levy’s book Hackers (summary, e-text) from 1984 is a great history of hacker culture until 1984. For what happens after 1984, you must read Stallman or Raymond. But they only cover the Unix/university world. From the early 80s on, really interesting things started happening on the home computer front.
According to Levy, one of the imperatives of the MIT hacker community was: You can create art and beauty on a computer. An early hack on the TX-0 computer at the MIT AI lab was a program that played music. I don’t know what happened during 60s and 70s, but since the late 70s, lots of games were written. Games have always been part of the hacker culture (some games at least, not any games).
A recent book edited by Lassi Tasaj�rvi, called Demoscene: The Art of Real-time tells a story about the birth of the demoscene in the beginning of 80s.
The book has a couple of articles, of which the first one, “A Brief History of the Demoscene” by Tasaj�rvi is the interesting one. According to Tasaj�rvi, demoscene has its roots in the cracking/swapping scene. Cracker groups distributed pirated games, usually adding their own signature to the game in a form of a computer animation, an intro. This eventually gave a birth to new art, the demo art. It is not art in the traditional sense, just like programming is not art in the same sense as painting is (although there are similarities). According to Tasaj�rvi, demos are based on “game aesthetics”, i.e. the aesthetic conceptions and valuations that players have developed with regard to games. This includes interactivity (also “interpassivity” in the case of demos, where the user can’t intervene with the demo) and ways of showing and doing things. To understand beauty and non-beauty of demos, one needs to understand the aesthetic, because it’s not inherent beauty that we are talking about (though I doubt if such thing exists at all).
This also applies to hacking. Somebody may consider a hack beautiful, but somebody else won’t because they don’t understand hacking. There are coding conventions, guidelines and the correct way of doing things that define when a piece of code is beautiful.
I’m not sure if the demoscene is part of the hacker culture. There are similarities but I get the feeling that something is missing. Such as, what is the relation between demoscene and the free software movement? I get the feeling that there is more secrecy in the demoscene than in the free software movement, although nowadays some demos are GPL-licensed.
Nevertheless, this an interesting book that shows we are able to create beauty on the computer. I suggest reading it.
