The Gift of Constraint

The landing pages of oerum.org are a growing archive of online experiments and prototypes that don’t belong anywhere else, work that sits between the artist practice and the research, not quite either. The Gift of Constraint is its current landing page: work in progress, offered as such. The demoscene was a subculture that grew out of the software cracking communities of the early 1980s. Once you had stripped the copy protection from a game, you left a calling card, a cracktro: a few kilobytes of rotating vectors, scrolling text, and synthesised sound, executed before the game loaded. Over time the calling card became the point. Groups competed to push the hardware further than it was designed to go: more colours, smoother movement, sounds the chip wasn’t supposed to make. I was part of that scene in the 1980s, writing code on an Amiga in a bedroom, trading disks by post. Later I ran a BBS, one of the dial-up nodes that stitched the scene together before the internet arrived. Being sysop meant owning a small piece of infrastructure, learning by doing, learning by breaking. There was a hope in it. That technology might be decentralised and generative, full of local variation. What replaced what we had was not inevitable. It was a choice, and not ours. That is not something I carry as a clear lesson. It is more like a residue: knowing that things were once organised differently, that they could have gone another way. The cracktro had an ethics tangled up in its aesthetics. It had to be beautiful in a way that was at least consistent with what it was doing: small, fast, honest about its constraints, doing more than it had any right to do with almost nothing. The sine scroller at the bottom of this page comes from that tradition. Whether it manages anything similar is an open question. Something like that is what the work here is reaching towards. To stay close enough to the technology to understand it from the inside rather than from a distance. To ask what a different relationship to infrastructure might feel like in practice, and remain uncertain about what that produces. To make things that are hands-on and local and dependent on as little as possible. go to oerum.org