Evoke 2023 Demo Party Report
From July 28th to 30th, I visited the Evoke 2023 demo party in Cologne. After years of study and admiration of the demoscene, I participated in a demo party in person for the third time. Here's what I experienced, which graphics I submitted for the competitions, and what I learned. I hope this helps newcomers to the demoscene make the most of their first demo party.
Guide to ClockworkPi's Portable Linux Console
The ClockworkPi DevTerm is a peculiar portable Linux device with numerous delightful features, albeit some frustrating ones as well. This guide will demonstrate how to configure the DevTerm to overcome its limitations, such as the small screen size and the somewhat challenging trackball. Additionally, it will provide instructions on using the DevTerm with an iPad Pro.
Award-Winning CT Scan App Concept
In May 2023, we participated in the CraftHack 2023 hackathon and created the POC for HealthHub, a doctor's AI assisted portal for scheduling CT scans. To our delight and surprise, our team was awarded the grand prize from among forty competing teams. It was an unforgettable experience. This is what happened, these were the mistakes we made, and this is what we learned.
The Portable A500 Mini and How It Ended Up in a Pub
The A500 Mini is a nifty recreated retro computer that can be made to run any classic Amiga software. Here's how to turn it into a portable device using an Android tablet as a screen to bring it to the pub for field-testing. And I shot a video doing it! Let me show you, it's fun.
The Story of the first Digitally Produced Comic Book
This is an essay about Shatter, a comic book created by Mike Saenz, Peter B. Gillis and Charles Athanas in the mid-1980s on an Apple Macintosh (though with traditional, analog coloring). This milestone of the comics industry paved the way for other digital comics like Das Robot Imperium by Michael Götze and other digital comics.
How Technical Limitations Pushed the Early Demoscene to Produce Digital Art
This is my master's thesis about the demo-group The Exceptions during the years 1987 to 1989 in the Atari ST demoscene. These were the formative years of the Atari ST demoscene, and The Exceptions were the first to produce demos on the computer system.
The Telidon Art Collection at Inter/Access
This is the story of the Canadian Telidon system from the early 1980s, the artists who worked with it, the unlikely story of how their work was rediscovered by the Toronto-based Inter/Access gallery in 2015, and how to conserve digital artwork created with Telidon.
Creating a Comic Book on 1980s Hardware
In this project I created a five page comic story using 1980s computer hardware. I refurbished a thirty year old Atari computer, upgraded it and then pixel-painted comic using the art package NEOChrome Master and only 16 colors.
Mansion of Trepidation
This is a choice-based solo fantasy adventure in the style of the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books I developed in vanilla JavaScript. The graphics and text descriptions are generated using AI tools. The descriptions are generated using ChatGPT. The player can search the 'Mansion of Trepidation' to defeat the villain and rescue their young nephew.
Archive of Demo Art and Media
ADAM, the Archive of Digital Art and Media is an art archive with an Angular frontend and an API served through Express/NodeJS. I developed it as part of my master's thesis for my MA in Media Art History.
Ice Hockey Exercise Site
This is an unsolicited proof-of-concept for NHL Edge using ChartJS, Bootstrap and JQuery. It was developed in a one day hackathon session. It features a selectable video hero element and a player stats library with a simple filter function by player name.
Sports Calendar Web App
EventRadar is a calendar of sports events, where events can be added and categorized based on sports. I have implemented a simple user registration and login, so that only signed-in users can make changes to the calendar. I developed it in PHP, Symfony, TWIG (with Bootstrap 5), and MySQL.
Pure Text Website
In the age of complex HTML and CSS, with content dynamically rendered with JavaScript and megabytes worth of images, I bring you a minimalistic page only composed of pure text. It still has large titles and a page layout.
Cleaning Company Website
In the first phase of this project, I created a static brochure website for a cleaning company in Vienna featuring their services. In the phase is in progress to create a backoffice admin interface.
A Wide Variety of Videos
Over the years, I recorded a number of Youtube videos on many different subjects like the Bitmap Brothers game "Chaos Engine" on the Atari ST, about the iPad apps that support the full resolution on external displays, on how to draw Captain America and a number of different design topics.
Using AI Tools to Make Explainer Videos
What if you could create your own explainer videos without much effort? I decided to try it myself and made three explainer videos in only one day using generally available and cheap artificial intelligence tools. The results are perfectly workable. Take a look at the three videos that came out.
Youtube Series on Fantasy and Science Fiction
In 2013 and 2014, I made a series of Youtube videos about movies, comic books, science fiction, and drawing. The series covers a drawing tutorial, an experiment to draw like comics artist Rob Liefeld, visiting fantasy, and comics conventions and reviews of Doctor Who and an issue of the Fantastic Four comics series.
A Lucid Dream Comic
This is a three-page comic based on a story from the dream diary of Lucid Fera. The dreamer watches a blind woman encountering her cats and contemplating existence. I drew the comic on paper, colored the panels using Procreate on the iPad Pro, and used Comic Life on the Mac for layouts and lettering. You can find the detailed steps of the process in the project description.
Timelapse Painting Youtube Videos
These timelapse videos show the process I use to paint pictures on the iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil 2 in ProCreate. They are quick and easy to make because ProCreate is superbly snappy and delightful for quick paintings and I can record the process automatically using the built-in feature in the application.
XEGO Comic Magazine
In 2005 and 2006, I published six issues of the comic magazine XEGO in German called "XEGO" and touted as "the trash comix egozine for the ego shooter generation". The covers were printed in color. The main feature starred Dani-E, the intergalactic go-go dancer, and ran for 16 pages which I produced in color but printed in black-and-white.
Tanim Graphic Novel
From 1998 to 2004, I wrote and drew a long-form comic book called "Tanim: Am Ende der Welt" stretching across more than 200 pages. The story marches towards what is ostensibly the end of the world ("Das Ende der Welt"). It culminates in an all-out slugfest and the sentient planet coming to Earth.