Another awful year has passed for planet earth, and I’m still around doing my multplexed shenanigans.
Text
I’ve published two texts this year. I spent far too many weeks looking for teletext in all the wrong places, which resulted in a spreadsheet for videotex & teletext services around the world, and the post A Global Look at Teletext on text-mode.org. Although a “somewhat obscure” topic, it did receive some attention when it was picked up by Hackaday. I also published a text called REJECT PIXELS <> EMBRACE TEXT in a sort of academic zine about “evil media”. Yeah, pixels are evil!
Oh, and it was nice to be mentioned in Lori Emerson’s book Other Networks, where she wrote about DATAGÅRDEN, a teletext piece that Raquel Meyers, Possan and I exhibited a long time ago.
Art
Entter’s One minute of WOW Computer with my music was shown at RGB Montreal. That was cool, since me and Entter haven’t done things together since 1899. Ailadi, on the other hand, is someone I’ve worked a lot with the past years. Ailadi’s PETSCII animations with my music were shown at the Kinomural Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. And she’s posted short PETSCII video comics with new music by me on Instagram, which I think we’ll collect to some sort of release in the future.
Jacob Remin and me have this art project, robot music, and we presented its newest shape at t3chfest in Madrid. It’s the most poppy one so far, with tightly synchronized visuals and lights. Good times!
Music
I have this album series of slow-long, very C64-based music, which I continued this year with B Y S A N. I also showed a video at Transmission64 in a similar style, featuring three C64-improvisations in one, and some very lazy visuals.
But this not really the kind of music I’ve been making this year. No, I’ve been busy with Amiga-music. That usually means either (1) all-over-the-place songs made with old crappy samples from this archive (see w93.m3u) or (2) chiptooon! I’ve released some of the (1)-songs in the Ailadi videos mentioned above, and one in a Razor keygen, but in general this is kind of homeless music. It doesn’t resonate with Amiga freaks, and doesn’t resonate with anyone else for that matter, hehe. Maybe they’ll end up on the 100% offline album that I’m planning to do, that very few people will ever know about?
I released two Amiga songs at the Gerp demoparty. The chiptune won the chip-compo, and I’m quite happy with it, but I think I prefer the weirder one that didn’t win. It’s kind of a mix of (1) and (2), with the amen break.
I also went to the Compusphere demoparty, where I won the “streaming music” compo with Trader’s Delight. It’s an homage to the traders – the masked heroes and heroines who spent (spend?) their time sending cracked software around the world so that you could easily find it when you needed it. This is a vocoder poptune to celebrate their dedication, which few of us can really understand.
I also released a (1)-style song: a melancholic almost folky song with delightlfully fresh Swedish vocals by Breakin: Bombero.
I didn’t do a lot of live performances this year, but when I did, I only did it in Gothenburg! I think that’s a first for me. I started doing my own visuals too. It’s of course mostly text graphics, and they’re not great yet, but when they are, you’ll probably see it here.
Graphics
Ok music bla bla bla, but who cares about music?? It’s all about text graphics these days, haven’t you heard? Myeah well, that’s what I’ve spent most of my time on anyway. I’ve done a few comissions this year and I released some very long ASCII/ANSI collections: Pyramidas, Best Requests, Hello and Leonas. I really like to work in this format, because it sits somewhere inbetween a time-based media and still imagery. It loves both improvisation and repetition.
Dubmood and me did lots of keygens and installers for Razor 1911 last year, and this year we started making demos too. Anamie was first conceptualized as a music video for my song with the same name, but it grew into a rather decent demo. I made tons of text animations for it, and Dubmood put things together, based on Anat’s code. Trivia: something like 99% of the filesize of the demo is the MP3…
After Anamie, I finally joined Razor 1911 after working with them quite a lot lately. We started working on a big demo for next year, but we also snuck in a small one for the Compusphere demoparty.
CMOS Cosmos was the next big collaboration from me and Dubmood, this time powered by Zabutom (music) and Flopine and Anat (code). The demo shared first place in the demo compo at Compusphere with this demo:
The Line is a small Amiga demo with my text graphics scrolling by, a song by Tempest (with some bits by me), and code by Koobo. Up Rough released another demo at Compusphere called Hypocrisy, that streams audio/video from a hard drive on Amiga 500. Bldzr and me did the video. There are still a few final tweaks to do before it goes public.
Speaking of the scene, you might have heard about The Art of Coding, an initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage? Ziphoid and me did the application for Sweden this year, and it was accepted, which feels weird and wonderful. Let’s see what that leads to, if anything.
Games
Ok, enough about the scene already. Time for games! My music was used in a few games: GlitchPick, the Mortimer Files and first and foremost in Re/Phase. This is a game I’ve been involved with for quite a while now. We still have a long way to go, but there is a playable version available now. Check out dreihander.com for more info.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it? If you’re still feeling hungry, there is more stuff to eat in the archive.