December 31st, 2002
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
by Richard Thomson
This was our biggest and most succesful outreach event ever! It was particularly satisfying since this was an event for the general public and not one just for computer geeks. For those of you who don't know, First Night is a community celebration of the New Year through the arts.
From the First Night International web site:
First Night seeks to foster the public's appreciation of visual and performing arts through an innovative, diverse and high quality New Year's Eve program which provides a shared cultural experience, accessible and affordable to all. First Night International promotes, licenses and supports the development of First Night Festivals in communities around the world.
We were involved in a projection art performance arranged by Derek Dyer, a local projection artist. Derek did the projection art at the SIGGRAPH Local Chapter Social where I did my first outreach for the demoscene. Initially it looked like we were going to share projectors, 1/2 hour of demoscene material every hour. This was due to the lack of projectors available to the performance space. However, as the event got closer it became clear that we were not going to need to share projectors because we were able to obtain a good number of projectors in the final few days before the performance.
There were a total of five large screen projectors running simultaneously through the night from around 7pm until Midnight. In addition to the projectors, another artist was projecting slides onto a wall with six slide projectors. The sound system was quite beefy, although we didn't want it so loud that you couldn't talk about the demos and the scene, although we could easily have pushed it to rock concert levels if we wanted. The performance space itself was quite large, probably around 1500 square feet, and consisted of an empty retail store on Main Street in downtown Salt Lake City, right in the middle of the First Night festivities. The Salt Lake City Downtown Alliance graciously provided us with seating for the spectators and door greeters who handed out our demoscene pamphlets to those entering the exhibit.
We had planned on having three screens of demoscene material going at all times: one screen showing the "oldskool" side of the demo DVD, while a second screen showed the "transcendental vistas" side of the DVD. A third screen was running from my computer showing live demos and was connected to the sound system. (Its easier to visually ignore something than it is to block out the sound, so we decided that only one screen would have the sound at any one time.) However, one of the DVD players that we brought wouldn't get past the initial demo DVD menu without the remote control (don't lose that remote!), so we could only project on two screens simultaneously. We would let the DVD play until it reached the menu and then start it again. The remaining screens had images projected by Derek Dyer and the other artists participating in the performance.
I'm proud to say that the demo scene dominated the exhibit! We had chairs placed around the performance space so that people could sit down and take a load off their feet while they watched the screens. The 'live' demo screen was the most popular and even though we placed chairs around the space so that people could watch any screen, they ended up sitting in front of the demo screens or turning the chairs from the other screens in the direction of the demo screens!
Our main goal was to get the word out to the general populace and local artists about our upcoming demoparty, Pilgrimage. I created a small, one sheet pamphlet (PostScript or PDF) that introduces the demo scene and describes our demo party. My fellow Pilgrimage organizer Adam Helps did a tremendous job of handing these out and talking to people all night long! He deserves a big thanks for that! He talked to so many people all night that his voice was almost hoarse by the end of the evening.
I made 500 of these pamphlets through Kinko's copy center. It cost about US$90 to have the pamphlets copied and folded (they have a folding machine), but next time I will print the pamphlets myself on my laser printer -- US$75 of that cost was just for the copying! I used the Windows MiKTeX distribution of LaTeX and the leaflet document class to create the pamphlet and it worked out quite nicely.
We made a number of great contacts that evening, which I hope will enrich our party even more. I talked with several artists who were very excited about the whole thing -- one artist wanted to know how he could get involved even though he wasn't very savvy with the computer! I told him that the best way to get involved is to collaborate with someone who is savvy with the computer but doesn't have the artistic skills. Collaboration creates a whole that is more than the sum of its parts! Another woman was so excited about what she saw that she offered to cater our demoparty for free!
We also made some contact with a programmer who liked coding in assembly, so naturally we showed him some 256 byte and 4K demos! Our best contact of the evening was a guy who walked in, looked around at our screens and said "Hey, this looks like the stuff from the European demo scene!". We spent quite a bit of time talking with him and he was very excited to hear that we were planning a demo party in Salt Lake City for the following August. He was alone no more!
We are hoping that these newfound contacts will help us to broaden the awareness both of the scene and of our party. It may result in some free food (yum!) and connections into the rave scene which is alive and well in Salt Lake. The ravers would be a good group with which to network to help support for our music compo.
The following demos were shown during the evening. For each, the group name is given first and then the name of the demo. Each demo is linked to its corresponding pouet.net product page. The demos were selected from monostep.org and the demo show v2.00 CDs.
Unlike previous outreach efforts, this time I wanted to automate the showing of the demos so that I didn't have to babysit my machine every 5 minutes and so that the screen would never be static. I did this by creating a directory of shortcuts for all the demos that didn't require additional user input in order to start (no screen resolution dialogs, etc.). I then made a simple script that ran the demos in sequence. To automate demos that require resolution settings and so-on, you can use AutoIt! which does a great job. We did use this to drive the demos we were showing, but I didn't have time to make AutoIt scripts for each of the demos needing input so we just used it to sequence the shortcuts I had created. Once we got the initial bugs worked out of my script, we had about enough time to run through the whole list once.