Virtual Museum opens subsidary in germany

Digitale Kultur e.V. in cooperation with NetCologne opens German mirror
for global "scene.org" network.

"scene.org" is the main virtual museum for the worldwide demoscene. The
demoscene concerns itself with creating computer generated short movies
that show the ultimate in graphic and sound performance capable on todays
hardware. The archive contains nearly all productions released in the last 15
years.

In cooperation with NetCologne, who is suppling the connectivity, Digitale
Kultur e.V. is now able to provide a German mirror for the currently 250
gigabyte size archive.

Originally only reachable via FTP protocol, the main server located in Holland
was updated over the years to a comfortable WWW site, allowing the users to
download the productions from their nearest mirror. Available among those
mirrors now is the copy located in the NetCologne datacenter in Cologne,
Germany.

"A German mirror is insofar important for the demoscene as after very
successful demoscene events the main server suffers from the amount of
access", says Timo Eismar from Digitale Kultur e.V.
Beside productions from the demoscene "scene.org" also contains a music
archive featuring many netlabels. "Free server such as these are essential for
the digital media and artworld", underlines Marc Wallowy, labelhead of Tokyo
Dawn Records, strengthening the importance of this server to the netlabelmovement:
"Without the gracious support of organisations like Digitale Kultur
e.V. or Scene.org the rising netlabel scene would never be possible".

As some of you might have heard before (Ojuice, personal message, or some other mailinglists), we've been doing heavy outreach action yesterday evening at the University of Arts in Zurich. We (that were Paralax/Speckdrumm, Robocop/Atlantis and me) were invited by the professors of the faculty of 'New Media' to present the idea of demos and the demoscene to the students under the idea of a regular
event called "Digitaler Salon". This event is more or less regularly taking place and always features some interesting presentation and whatever you can think of (beside a good supply of beer and snacks,  of course).

What we did
As requested we prepared a full featured demostration/presentation  of demos and the demoscene. Personally, I prepared a PowerPoint  presentation with a lot of photos/images and audio/video content (yes, it took me quite a while, but it's possible to do that with PowerPoint) :) Paralax has been talking about the history of the scene and explained expressions that are wellknown to all of us, but not to people that are not involved within the scene. Paralax additionally showed how to create a demo using a demo-
tool (coding is not what the students of an Art school are most interested in) - he presented his own tool of course. I continued by explaining "news and media" in the scene as well as giving and idea of what a demoparty is (thanks to Slengpung for all the photos ;-)). Robocop closed the presentation by having an unprepared speech about the Swiss demoparty "Buenzli" and generally about his passion for demos and the scene.

The Feedback
The feedback was awesome, people invited us for beer and wanted to know more details - and some of the even plan to come to Buenzli next August. In some smaller room right beside the presentation location, we set up some kind of demo-lounge with a C64 running various demos, an old 486 running Second Reality + a new PC having a couple of Windows-demos on the harddisk.

I have also been talking a lot to the professors and it seems that there will be some more outcome in this, maybe seminaries on demos  or generally realtime-arts. As another form of feedback those "artists" gave me some hints to revolutionize demomaking (not exactly, but they gave some hints on making demos looking more like traditional oldschool movies when it comes to the design/separation
of the screen content and so on).. :)

That's it for this small report that has just been written to show you that also the Swiss scene does outreaching ;-) Actually, from our side, the thing was running through our Buenzli-society. I will certainly  write a more detailed report on all this for the next issue of PAiN.

Best regards,
[unlock/vantage/padua]