> Trying to turn what is a learning and skills compo and celebration into some sort of market is not really in the spirit of the scene.

for the disclaimer - not trying to turn anything into another thing. myself is not part of the nft market of generative art, but it is difficult to not note it, right?

> Further, the only use of the NFT I have seen that is not also trying to create some artificial value others are forced to recognize, is as tickets.

...or club cards, or other benefit somethings. okay.

Had the absolutely same argument about it for very long, so I dare to continue this conversation.

First of all, let's agree that fame related to pushing the boundaries of CPUs and other PUs is for very long not going to the demoscene. Why? Perhaps because people stopped writing their own renders, and modplayers. Because THIS was what needed pushing to the limits. In my opinion, though, the drive for demoing is not purely a coder drive, it is an aesthetic, and also art&animation drive.

Demoscene was a show-off for badass coders, but also for badass tracker music producers, and pixelcore artists, of course. The coolness of it is that it allowed impossible things with CREATIVE expression.

Similar to that is this Lithuanian producer's achievement with the cat movie, who snatched Oscar with a draft render. Is this a top-optimization showcase ?! Not on the CPU level, this brother was GPU poor, so he went for the aeshtetic excellence with whatever he had.

Now speaking of art or preservation - the fact the demoscene is heritage of something means nothing in a world where even the archive.org needs regular funding and massive volunteer effort in order to exist. Besides most of the demos, not sure what %, surely had their source code lost already, because opensource was not something badass coders embraced back in the day.

In 2025 if you want to see coding excellence, perhaps llama.cpp and tinygrad can be an object of admiration, the work of jart on the cosmopolitan c if you want... But I can think of very few demoscene (visual) productions done in the last 5 years, that are really feat of technology, given what GPUs can do with compute units nowadays. On the contrary - a lot of generative art content is implemented in processing, or even processing.js, or unity.

Of course you can never underestimate the achievements of Farbrauch, ASD (from Greece!), CNCD, all the legendary groups who produced these productions. But, come on, where is the massive demoscene output that should be there given the massive, huge gaming branch which is all about animation, sound and visuals, and pushing boundaries?

Demoscene parties have not multiplied and many tech events which should have demoscene room - do not. Neither the commercial ones, nor the hacker-run gatherings.

You know, I can definitely argue that pieces of effects may actually get better preserved as blockchain token payload, than obscure URLs at scene.org or pouet.net. So this is one reason to not bark against it, and besides for a s.o. 14years old, who just switched from scratch to processing.js - it may come as reasonable incentive, given what his peers are probably doing, to have this released as some NFT which moves and does gen-art. why not? why would he be obliged to go to the demoscene to do genart? because who said it?

My observation is that the whole generative art, or the art part of the demoscene drive, went towards the social scene, and not NFT necessarily, but say - on viral and also anon accounts on X or Mastodon, where it releases. And perhaps also blends already with the VJ and special effects crowd which perhaps have their own conferences, because you know FC went to start Remedy, and these other guys went to start Notch and it's a very commercial platform, and guys who started it - also won Assembly several times with this engine.