chipmusic and 8-bit art
I wrote an article about the C64 scene archive CSDb a few years ago together with Jörgen Rahm-Skågeby and it was recently published by New Media Society: The archive and the scene: On the cultural techniques of retrocomputing databases. CSDb is one of the most impressive documentations of a subculture that I ve ever seen. [ ]
I ve always liked the term megademo . It hasn t really been that popular since its demise in the early 1990s, but my group Hack n Trade has kept the tradition going. Why? Well, the megademo form comes with some pretty convenient advantages: It doesn t need a theme. What comes next can be a complete surprise in [ ]
If someone asks me when the chipscene began, I say around 2000 . At that time chip music was mostly a thing in the demoscene, just like it was mostly a thing in the games industry before that. To be brief. But in 1999 something else started to happen. In the timeline we can that Micromusic.net was [ ]
Here s a pretty great find of early mini computer music, released on vinyl in 1967. It was made by T.H. O Beirne on the SOLIDAC computer that was produced and used at Glasgow University. The samples are of course not sampled sounds, but generated music based on Mozart s piece. Utz, who pointed me this way, shared [ ]
Mod Sample Master is a new project to look into samples in mod-files, and how they relate to each other. This is pretty amazing because it lets us delve into 30+ years of a digital music movement, to see how samples have traveled between songs, people, time, place. 75,000 songs and a million samples. At the [ ]
The terms chipmusic and chiptune was sparsely used during the 1980 s and started to become popular on the Amiga around 1990. It seems like it referred to both synthetic Amiga music (hypertracker soft synths ) and sample-based chip-modules made in soundtrackers. I came across the Dexion Megademo from 1989 the other day, and it has some [ ]
So a few weeks ago we did another DATASTORM, a party for oldschool computing. The venue we re at has had some recent troubles with the Swedish authorities because of bla-bla, but in the end everything worked out fine. One thing that I was particularly happy with was the demotalks. We invited people who had made [ ]
It is common knowledge that Soundtracker or Soundmonitor were the first trackers. But it s not necessarily true. In the 1960 s computer scientists and Fluxus artists made things that were rather tracker-like (here, here) and there are probably precursors from hundreds of years ago. But talking computer software, we can have a look at for example Muzix81, [ ]
I heard some anarchists had some feedback my post about intended uses of technologies. They disagreed with my claim that we don t know the original intentions of Facebook. So let me expand a bit on the previous post. I have this slightly mystical idea that humans can t fully and perfectly understand what a certain media is [ ]
For the last year or so, there has been a growing mainstream critique of social media. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors are raising their concerns about what Facebook and other cyber gangs are doing to society. See for example the Center for Humane Technology. The recent concerns are often embedded in a discourse that Russia [ ]