ZX Spectrum

For the month of August, the Media Archaeology Lab has been honored indeed to host Professor Piotr Marecki (from the the Institute of Culture at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and lecturer at the Film School in Łódź, Poland) and Yerzmyey, a lo-fi artist, demoscener, musician, graphic artist, photographer, and writer also from Krakow, Poland.

To celebrate their visit, they will present a 90-minute demoshow of their work in the MAL on original ZX Spectrum Machines as well as local clones such as Timex, Speccy 2010, Zx-Uno, and the ZX Vega console.

More information below – again, please come and/or spread the word!

When: 4:30pm Thursday August 18thWhere: Media Archaeology Lab, 1320 Grandview Avenue, lower levelWhat: ZX Spectrum Scene Poetry Collection

This project is demoscene and ZX Spectrum oriented. What is the demoscene? This phenomenon is apparent to those with advanced understanding of digital media. In the book Freax. The Brief History of Computer Demoscene it is stated that “almost all modern art genres have an underground stream that can not be found anywhere, or bought in shops, and only insiders know of its existence.” Adjectives such as illegal, grassroots, independent and DIY aesthetics are often related with this field and practice. The term itself is derived from the word “demonstration” and refers to the demonstration of the capabilities of a platform and the skills of a programmer. A basic understanding of the demoscene will treat it as “a subculture in the computer underground culture universe, dealing with the creative and constructive side of technology” (Demoscene FAQ). The demoscene, as a phenomenon developed from the 80s mainly in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe, was created as a response to the lack of legal access to hardware and software. The demoscene is composed of demosceners, that is – as they define themselves ironically – “a bunch of boozing computer nerds, programming weird, useless multimedia stuff” (Demoscene FAQ). This phenomenon comes directly from the “cracker” community, namely traders and distributors of illegal software, who by copying games and other programs left behind their signature on them (in effect, a satisfied customer had to go back for more merchandise). In the field of digital media demosceners have unique knowledge of the platform, as well as the languages of the program. During organized parties by sceners, demosceners (by using nicknames) are always affiliated with a platform, for example ZX Spectrum, C-64, Commodore Amiga and PC (just as some academics are affiliated with various institutions in which they work and with which they identify). In the world of digital media this is the only such community in which the platform fills such an important role in terms of identification. The demoscene is in other words art generated in real time. The genres created by demosceners are demos and intros, or pieces of music and graphics that have no purpose other than to amaze the audience (usually also well versed in a given platform or programing language). It is worth to emphisazie that demoscene gathers programmes involed wit programming for fun. Our project focuses on one particular demoscene platform, the ZX Spectrum, which was popular mainly in Europe (despite attempts, the platform was never popularized in the United States). The aim of the research project is to put in context the phenomenon of ZX Spectrum scene poetry. Demosceners themself don’t call themself artists, they mostly treat their creative activity as a hobby. Many demos are treated as a kind of video clip, hence the demoscene was usually contextualized as a phenomenon from the field of digital media and audiovisual art. There exist several demos of which an integral part is constituted by text and poetry, and we want to distinguish those demos which we can call scene poetry. During our reasearch project such a collection of ZX Spectrum demos will be built. This project takes into account and affirms the local perspective, different from the dominant one (ZX Spectrum as platform and demoscene as form of activity are very local). So our collection consists of creative works not only in English, but also in Russian, Polish and Czech. This is also a project built at the intersection between a few fields in creative computing (eg. electronic literature, electronic music, demoscene).

Piotr Marecki, Ph.D., from Jagiellonian University and the UBU Lab in Kraków, Poland, will speak on the popular 8-bit computer released in 1982 in the UK, the ZX Spectrum. The title of his talk,  “The ZX Spectrum Demoscene as Organized Anarchy,” argues that the ZX Spectrum platform is unique as compared to other 8-bit machines and can be seen as organized anarchy. The event is scheduled on Friday, September 1, from 12-1 p.m. in VMMC 211A on the campus of WSUV.

Its uniqueness lies, Marecki claims, in the reception of the platform by users on a scale which is incomparable to that of any other platform. The traditional way of using platforms (not only the 8-bit) is based on their consumption, or the use of the official equipment, as well as programing, delivered by the manufacturer. And although the stories about platforms such as the C-64 or Atari are no strangers to creative and bottom-up approaches, these are based on the creation of independent programs. Besides the ZX Spectrum, none of these platforms generated, on such scale and creative level, the same hardware systems or clones. This is related to the simplicity of the computer’s construction and the cheap cost of the accessories as well as the geopolitical conditions in the world in the period of the platform’s popularity, the 80s and 90s.

As an example of organized anarchy, the ZX Spectrum demoscene, the phenomenon is apparent to those with advanced understanding of digital media. In the book Freax. The Brief History of Computer Demoscene it is stated that “almost all modern art genres have an underground stream that can not be found anywhere, or bought in shops, and only insiders know of its existence.” Adjectives such as illegal, grassroots, independent and DIY aesthetics are often related with this field and practice. The term itself is derived from the word “demonstration” and refers to the demonstration of the capabilities of a platform and the skills of a programmer. A basic understanding of the demoscene will treat it as “a subculture in the computer underground culture universe, dealing with the creative and constructive side of technology” (Demoscene FAQ). This talk takes into account and affirms the local perspective, different from the dominant one (ZX Spectrum as platform and demoscene as form of activity are very local). Talk is based on the research project on ZX Spectrum platform runs by the UBU lab at the Jagiellonian University.

Digital media, which are today dominant in social communication, serve also different types of creative expression (video games, new media art, electronic literature, demoscene). It is trivial to say that digital media are dominated by the English language. Both most recognized theoretical texts as well as canonical works are in the English language. And it is the West that is treated as dominant in this area. However, only over the past few years have we seen a new trend emerging, one which aims to discover what has happened in areas that the center has meaningfully called the “end (s)”. Particularly interesting are the perspectives and phenomena that have developed without influence or inspiration from the center in question (for example, communist countries beyond the Iron Curtain or the non-Latin languages, like Arabic or Chinese).

There is no strong scientific recognition of the distinctiveness of the approach to digital media in eastern countries. Both a lack of access to hardware and legal software under communism, as well as exclusion of the peripheries after the transformation gave rise to a number of local phenomena as cloning hardware, creating independent software, and widespread creative programming. The best proof of this is the demoscene – an underground subculture which developed in Europe (also in Central and Eastern Europe), with no comparable phenomena in other areas of the world.

The p2p exhibition brings to public different digital literary works produced by Polish and Portuguese authors in the past four decades. Polish and Portuguese literary, artistic, social, political, and even religious contexts are quite similar, even if geographically distant, and still quite divergent. It has been a fascinating surprise to find evidence of several common threads in works of experimental and generative literature, Spectrum-based animated poetry/Demoscene, and ActionScript-based digital poetry and fiction.

The exhibition will therefore be constructed around three nuclei: experimentalism, activism and animation. For this purpose, the p2p exhibition proposes to present, face-to-face, works by authors such as Pedro Barbosa, Silvestre Pestana, E. M. de Melo e Castro, Rui Torres, André Sier, Manuel Portela, Luís Lucas Pereira, Józef Żuk Piwkowski, Marek Pampuch, Michał Rudolf, Kaz, Piotr Puldzian Płucienniczak, Leszek Onak and Andrzej Głowacki.

A part of the ELO 2015 exhibition “Decentering: Global Electronic Literature” at 3,14 gallery in Bergen, Norway (August 4-23, 2015).

(Source: Álvaro Seiça and Piotr Marecki)

In the 1980s, the world saw the introduction of personal computers (PCs). While the first creative stage of electronic literature took advantage of mainframe computers, only accessible in institutional environments, the context in which Silvestre Pestana created his first computer poems was totally different – a new wave Pedro Barbosa sarcastically calls “poesia doméstica” [domestic poetry] (1996: 147). With personal computers, Silvestre Pestana programmed in BASIC, first for a Sinclair ZX81, and then, already with chromatic lighting, for a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, three poems respectively dedicated to Henri Chopin, E. M. de Melo e Castro and Julian Beck, which resulted in the Computer Poetry (1981-83) series. Pestana, a visual artist, writer and performer – who had returned from the exile in Sweden after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974 – brought diverse influences put forward with photography, video, performance, and computer media. From his creative production, it should be emphasized the iconic conceptual piece Povo Novo [New People] (1975), which was remediated by the author himself in the referred series of kinetic visual poems, “video-computer-poems” (Pestana 1985: 205) or “infopoems” (Melo e Castro 1988: 57). By operating almost like TV scripts, the series oscillates between recognizable shapes – such as the oval and the larger animated Lettrist shapes, formed by the small-sized words “ovo” (egg), “povo” (people), “novo” (new), “dor” (pain) and “cor” (color) – and the reading interpretation of the words themselves: “ovo,” the unity, but also the potential; “povo,” the collective, the indistinct, the mass; “novo” and “cor/dor.” This play of relations translates the new consciousness, although painful, of a “new people” in a new historic, social and artistic period, one of freedom and action. In an interview, Pestana (2011) claimed having researched more than thirty languages, only to find in Portuguese the possibility of traversing the singular and the plural, the individual and the collective, the past, present and future, by just dislocating a letter: ovo/(p)ovo/(n)ovo.

(Source: Author's text)