"THE HACKER DEMO SCENE AND IT'S CULTURAL ARTEFACTS" George Borzyskowski School of Design Curtin University of Technology Perth, Western Australia
[email protected] ABSTRACT The paper reports on a study undertaken into vernacular forms of multimedia production referred to as "demos" or "intros" and variants of these terms among adherents of a computer oriented subculture identifying itself as "the scene". The cultural and technological factors which are thought to have influenced the evolution of the genre since the early 1980's are discussed as are observations which distinguish a specific, almost exclusively male gender, internationally dispersed anarchistic youth subculture which holds this form of cultural production as a principal objective. An analysis of a number of examples of the genre provides tentative information on the dynamics of the subculture which survives on the basis of liberty and cooperation in the absence of coercive or cohesive structural influence, and presents an overview of the "demo" genre form in terms of function and audio visual syntax. INTRODUCTION The study was undertaken from 1992 to 1994 and resulted in an account of a cyberculture which evolved before the current widespread availability of access to the world wide web via graphical browsers such as Mosaic, Netscape or Internet Explorer. It was and is a subculture whose transactions are created and delivered through the computer screen, though in it’s formative years the transmission and exchange of the data was by means of floppy disk passed on by hand or through the international postal service. Files were also maintained and distributed on private scene bulletin board systems.