Intricate infinite complex layers of green crystalline fractal structures turn, swing and zoom wilfully towards and away from our gaze as the melodious music takes us on an indefinite journey, always remaining doggedly green until detail merges into bright light, of Hartverdrahtet.
This intriguing and entertaining music video by Sérgio Bernardino won the PC 4kB intro competition at Revision 2012 for the latest example of the compact-coding tradition exercised within the demoscene. Hartverdrahtet roughly translates to hard wired is a three minute audio-visual trip into a procedural fractalverse, compressed into a minuscule piece of software.
Demoscene is a computer art subculture of world wide non-commercial network of creative PC coders more so referred to as sceners involved in the making of so called 'demos'. Demos are computer generated music clips that reveal how some particular kinds of graphic and sound effects can be achieved by using high-end computer hardware to its full potential.
The pride and joy of the Demoscene's product is the ability of making something really huge and compressing it into a really small file size such as 4k or 4069 bytes – less than an empty Word document. The visual treatment of using TV lines overlay is to make something new look old offering the illusion of looking at something intensely detailed as if looking through an electron microscope.
Just like the making of a feature film requires a huge crew of workers, demo-creating is teamwork. Demos are incredibly complex and many helpers are sought and relied upon. Sceners, like graphicians and musicians provide the main components to an idea whereas the programmers fit all the parts together in an extensive amount of detail work to finally make it an executable product: the demo.
Hartverdrahtet is a computer program written by Akronyme Analogiker, and runs only on Windows XP/Vista/7 (fast CPU/GPU advised) and can be downloaded here. See the info file for detailed hardware specifications.
