computation

A short demo of a playable Space Invaders game built inside Dwarf Fortress, with a downloadable map. It shows the game's mechanics used as a computing substrate.

Matthias Wandel shows his wooden machine that adds binary numbers using marbles. It demonstrates computation with purely mechanical logic.

Elevated by Rgba and TBC, the winner of the 4k intro compo at Breakpoint 2009. It is a realtime procedurally generated 3D flythrough with music, all in a 4096-byte executable.

Elevated is a 4 kilobyte PC demo by RGBA and TBC from Breakpoint 2009. It fly-throughs a realistic procedurally generated landscape with synthesized music and post-processing, all from a tiny executable.

A two-minute video of Conway's Game of Life running inside Conway's Game of Life, built from OTCA metapixels and Golly. It zooms smoothly between scales.

Tim Hutton's demonstration of SmoothLifeL, a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life using floating point values. It shows gliders traveling in any direction, rotating pairs, and elastic cord-like structures, with config details to run it yourself.

Intrinsic Gravity is a real-time demoscene production by Still, made with the Tooll tool for Under Construction 2014. It is a black-and-white op-art animation with a soundtrack by hoffman.

A 3-minute demo of a tiny IOCCC 2012 winning C program that simulates fluid dynamics in an 80x25 terminal, using any text (including its own source) as input. The video shows the simulation running to Handel's Water Music.

Jerobeam Fenderson shows how to draw a mushroom on an oscilloscope in XY mode using stereo audio, then animates it by modulating with a larger wave. Pd and Max4Live patches are provided.

Hartverdrahtet by Akronyme Analogiker, the winning PC 4k intro at Revision 2012. It is a realtime demo with music and fractal visuals in 4096 bytes.

A short demo of an open-source Krita plugin that uses Stable Diffusion to generate and edit images in place. It adds ControlNet scribble and line-art support. You select an area, push a button, and new matching content appears.

A demo of Marble Marcher, a game using a fractal physics engine and fully procedural ray-marched rendering. The player rolls a marble through shifting fractal levels.

A short ShaderToy piece by Martijn Steinrucken (The Art of Code) that renders rain on a windshield during a night drive, with blurred bokeh lights. It is set to music.

A one-minute visualization of a simulated ant colony in which ants follow pheromone trails, with the source code on GitHub. It shows emergent behavior arising from simple rules.

Planets is a track from the audiovisual album Oscilloscope Music, in which the audio signal drives an analog oscilloscope directly. The left channel sets horizontal deflection and the right sets vertical, so the sound draws vector graphics.

Paul Irish explains how pointerpointer.com works. It uses a hidden canvas of colored Voronoi regions to look up which photo matches the cursor position.

Find the Longest Path is a comedic song by Daniel J. Barrett, a Billy Joel parody that describes the NP-hard longest path problem in informal terms.

The official music video for Autechre's 'Gantz Graf', a dense, glitchy electronic track paired with abstract animated 3D visuals reportedly made by hand in 2002.

A short clip of Venetian Snares' track 'Look' from Songs About My Cats (2001), shown as a spectrogram. The audio encodes an image in its frequency content.

A short clip of a track from Emily Howell, a computer program by David Cope that composes classical-style music, performed by human players. It is a sample of algorithmic composition.

A condensed rendition of a project that re-uploaded one video to YouTube 1000 times, showing the accumulating compression artifacts. It pays homage to Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room.

An art project by Simon Weckert in which 99 smartphones pulled in a handcart create a fake traffic jam on Google Maps. A green street shows as red, which diverts cars to other routes.

Brandon Thomas demos Laser Pong, a game he built on a laser projector and projected onto buildings around Atlanta. It was a weekend project.

A SIGGRAPH demo from Yoichi Ochiai's group of aerial and volumetric graphics drawn by focused femtosecond lasers with computational holography. The plasma points can be touched.