Displayhack – what is it?

Hello there, and welcome to displayhack.org! So, what’s this site then? Well, there are two ways to describe it – one short, and one long. This is the short version:

Displayhack is a site for everyone participating in or enjoying real-time graphics, visual arts, motion graphics and the demoscene. Often adduced as the reason or motivation for expending effort toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being that the accomplished goal is a hack. As Louis Armstrong once said when asked to explain jazz: “Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.”

..and here is the long one:

Niches

Niche-sites are cool. They are good at what they do, they cater to their audience, and they specialize. They’re niches after all. There are many such sites and while all good and focused, almost all of them either focus too narrow or too wide.

We wanted to create a site where all those interested in the demoscene, web-based graphics, motion graphics, visual arts and other visual fringe technologies could meet, discuss and inspire each other.

Past, present, future

As long-time demosceners, we know very well that the history of the scene is exactly that: history. If we want to play a part in the next generation of visual artistry, we need to do two things: 1) recruit, and 2) embrace. We need more people to enter the scene, actively, and we need to look outside the traditions of packaged executables downloaded to your computer. The next generation of the demoscene is already here, and it’s on the web, in movies and all around us.

Enter Displayhack. It is a site for everyone participating in or enjoying real-time graphics, graphics programming, visual arts, motion graphics and the demoscene, and aims to be a friendly and informative meeting place for beginners, seasoned professionals and everyone in between.

The name

So, where does the name come from? Well, as all truths, it stems from Wikipedia:

A display hack is a computer program with similar purpose to a kaleidoscope: to make pretty pictures (symmetrical or otherwise).

“The hack value of a display hack is proportional to the esthetic value of the images times the cleverness of the algorithm divided by the size of the code.”

Crack intros, display hacks programmed by software crackers for the home computers of the 1980s, evolved into what was to be known as demos and demo effects. The creation of demos later became a subculture of its own, now known as the demoscene.

Contribute

We’re in the middle of adding a lot of content to the site, but what we really want to achieve is a constant flow of new content, driven by our users. If you’d like to be become a contributor, please contact us – we’d love to hear from you! To become a user, simply use your existing OpenID or SceneID — oh, and read the user FAQ too.

Welcome to Displayhack.

Hello there, and welcome to displayhack.org! So, what’s this site then? Well, there are two ways to describe it – one short, and one long. This is the short version:...