Discover Top Posts Tagged with #revision 2016

And now, Ladies & Gentlemen, This year’s Competition entries from the Revision Demo-party.

#demos #demoscene #demo compo #revision 2016

True Colors - Still | 60fps | Revision 2016

#Still #Demoscene #Revision 2016

Darkness Lay Your Eyes Upon Me (by Conspiracy)

64k is not a lot of space for information. Granted, the demoscene has been doing a lot with a little for a long time. But the curious thing about information is that there are mathematical and physical limits to the degree to which information can be compressed.

The demo above, which took 2nd place at Revision 2016, is made up of 65,536 bytes. Within that limit, the team (who go by the collective name of Conspiracy) managed to convey a cinematic experience with a narrative bent by using just a few thousand numbers.

Narrative and cinematography are themselves a kind of information compression, a way of packing more meaning into symbols and images than their pixel values would suggest. The formal study of art and art history is largely a process of learning to decode the conversations that the artists were speaking to with their work, and understanding the abstract systems that drove those conversations in turn.

Both narrative and cinematography are forms of order. Technological sophistication on its own is seldom enough to create the kinds of order that hold our attention for long, and the best tech solutions often operate by emergently invoking that narrative sense. That’s one reason why I think it’s a mistake to view story or visuals as something separate from gameplay or systems: they’re all part of the same thing, multiplied together to create the meaning from the machine.

Generating something that has a story attached, or that conveys meaning through composition or montage, can often create a better generator without needing more sophisticated technology. While I enthusiastically embrace the creation of new algorithms, I am even more interested by the designers who take existing technology and repurpose it to create new meanings and new stories.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_izwOdGFlk)