| Chaos Constructions | |
|---|---|
 Richard Stallman opens Chaos Constructions 2019 | |
| Genre | demoscene |
| Location(s) | Saint Petersburg,  Russia |
| Major events | ChaosConf |
| Website | chaosconstructions |
| Demoscene |
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| Concepts |
| Alternative demo platforms |
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Chaos Constructions is the oldest demoparty in Russia, previously known as ENLiGHT. Nowadays, it is considered to be annual computer art festival and IT conference. [1]
The demoscene (Russian : русскоязычная демосцена) began to form in CIS countries in the early 1990s, when people massively began to possess home computers such as ZX Spectrum, Amiga and Atari and make tracker music, demos and other artwork on them. They were exchanging it using compact cassettes, floppy disks, FIDOnet and later the Internet, so that these artists joined the worldwide demoscene culture. By the year 1995, the first Russian demoparty occurred, located in St. Petersburg—the second-largest Russian city, situated close to Finland, the country with one of the strongest demoscene cultures.
The demoparty was entitled ENLiGHT; it gathered around 150 people. It was followed by ENLiGHT'96 and ENLiGHT'97; the latter gathered more than 1200 people.
The year 1998 was skipped, and the 1999 festival was held in a new format and under the new name Chaos Constructions.
In 2006 the event's format was shifted closer to a LAN party.
2009 event featured software crash test competition supported by IT companies. [2]
The 2017 festival featured an extra event called ChaosConf which was aimed at developers and admins of enterprise IT systems. [3]
Traditionally it is held on a weekend at the end of August at Saint Petersburg, Russia. Creative competitions for computer artists and musicians, as well as programmers, are the important part of the event. The competitions ("compos") are both for pre-released and real-time works. Many of the compos and exhibits are related to retro computing (ASCII art, pixel art, tracker music, chiptune etc), but recent festivals also tend to include conferences and meetings for people from the modern IT industry who concentrate on technologies such as augmented/virtual reality, blockchain, robotics and more.
The 2018 festival [4] was held at a co-working location called Boiling Point and also featured "enterprise" and "telecom" sections. There were several thematic areas; the party went for 2 days without breaking at night. [5] Twitch broadcast it online, and international English-speaking people also participated. The festival's crew also had arranged an "embassy" at a similar earlier gathering called Geek Picnic. [6]
The 2019 festival was held on 24–25 August [7] at Pulkovskaya hotel . The 2019 event was opened by Richard Stallman. A major government-related leak of many people's personal data was disclosed at the 2019 event. [8]
In February 2020 a smaller "winter version" was organized, some of the contests were preparatory for the forthcoming "main summer version". in 2021 a Winter and Summer Edition was held and in 2022 the event is planned to be held too
A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term hacker has become associated in popular culture with a security hacker – someone who utilizes their technical know-how of bugs or exploits to break into computer systems and access data which would otherwise be inaccessible to them – hacking can also be utilized by legitimate figures in legal situations. For example, law enforcement agencies sometimes use hacking techniques in order to collect evidence on criminals and other malicious actors. This could include using anonymity tools to mask their identities online, posing as criminals themselves. Likewise, covert world agencies can employ hacking techniques in the legal conduct of their work. On the other hand, hacking and cyber-attacks are used extra- and illegally by law enforcement and security agencies, and employed by state actors as a weapon of both legal and illegal warfare.
The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy—often in collective effort—the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware, to achieve novel and clever outcomes. The act of engaging in activities in a spirit of playfulness and exploration is termed hacking. However, the defining characteristic of a hacker is not the activities performed themselves, but how it is done and whether it is exciting and meaningful. Activities of playful cleverness can be said to have "hack value" and therefore the term "hacks" came about, with early examples including pranks at MIT done by students to demonstrate their technical aptitude and cleverness. The hacker culture originally emerged in academia in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Hacking originally involved entering restricted areas in a clever way without causing any major damage. Some famous hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were placing of a campus police cruiser on the roof of the Great Dome and converting the Great Dome into R2-D2.
Demogroups are teams of demosceners, who make computer based audio-visual works of art known as demos. Demogroups form a subculture collectively known as the demoscene.
The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual art, and musical skills. Demos and other demoscene productions are shared at festivals known as demoparties, voted on by those who attend and released online.
The Assembly demoparty is a demoscene and gaming event in Finland. It is the biggest demoscene party. The main organizers of the event are Pekka Aakko and Jussi Laakkonen. The Summer event takes place every year between late July and early August, and lasts three to four days, and the Winter event is held in January or February. Edition 2020 was online. The most recent Assembly was held from 1 to 3 April 2022 at Messukeskus in Helsinki.
A LAN party is a social gathering of participants with personal computers or compatible game consoles, where a local area network (LAN) connection is established between the devices using a router or switch, primarily for the purpose of playing multiplayer video games together. LAN party events differ significantly from LAN gaming centers and Internet cafes in that LAN parties generally require participants to bring your own computer (BYOC) and are not permanent installations, often taking place in general-use venues or residences.
Pixel art is a form of digital art drawn with graphical software where images are built using pixels as the only building block. It is widely associated with the low-resolution graphics from 8-bit and 16-bit era computers and arcade video game consoles, in addition to other limited systems such as LED displays and graphing calculators, which have a limited number of pixels and colors available. The art form is still employed to this day by pixel artists and game studios, even though the technological limitations have since been surpassed.
Pilgrimage was a demoparty which took place annually in Salt Lake City, Utah each summer between 2003 and 2006. The event was founded by Rich "Legalize" Thompson of the demoscene group Polygony. Pilgrimage was, at the time, the only active demoscene event of its kind in all of North America, while many demoparties take place annually throughout Europe.
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on bulletin board systems. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape sequences that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the de facto.ANS file extension.
Lisp Machines, Inc. was a company formed in 1979 by Richard Greenblatt of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to build Lisp machines. It was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hugi is one of the longest lasting, frequently released demoscene and underground disk magazines (diskmag) for IBM-PC.
Richard Matthew Stallman, also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.
The ZX Spectrum's software library was very diverse. While the majority of the software produced for the system was video games, others included programming language implementations, Sinclair BASIC extensions, databases, word processors, spread sheets, drawing and painting tools, and 3D modelling tools.
The Nullarbor demo party is a combined game development and demoscene event in Australia. The event takes place at the beginning of every year in Perth, Western Australia. It was named Nullarbor in reference to Perth's physical isolation from the rest of Australia. Like other similar demo parties worldwide, it provides a platform for game developers and graphic artists to showcase their skills.
Goto80 is a Swedish music artist and researcher. He has been described as one of the key players between glitch and chipmusic, as well as an active demoscener. At the turn of the millennium he was one of the first to bring chipmusic to a wider audience, and was also an early adopter of live Game Boy music. He has an extensive back catalogue of free music – often open source – with a wide span of musical influences. He currently focuses on research and art, and maintains a number of blogs and labels such as Chipflip and the text-mode tumblr.
Creative coding is a type of computer programming in which the goal is to create something expressive instead of something functional. It is used to create live visuals and for VJing, as well as creating visual art and design, entertainment, art installations, projections and projection mapping, sound art, advertising, product prototypes, and much more.
Gennady Korotkevich is a Belarusian competitive programmer who has won major international competitions since the age of 11, as well as numerous national competitions. His top accomplishments include six consecutive gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics as well as the world championship in the 2013 and 2015 International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals. As of September 2023, Gennady is the highest-rated programmer on CodeForces,, CodeChef, Topcoder, AtCoder and HackerRank. In January 2022, he achieved a historic rating of 3979 on Codeforces, becoming the first to break the 3900 barrier.
Codeforces is a website that hosts competitive programming contests. It is maintained by a group of competitive programmers from ITMO University led by Mikhail Mirzayanov. Since 2013, Codeforces claims to surpass Topcoder in terms of active contestants. As of 2018, it has over 600,000 registered users. Codeforces along with other similar websites are used by some sport programmers, like Gennady Korotkevich, Petr Mitrichev, Benjamin Qi and Makoto Soejima, and by other programmers interested in furthering their careers.
Juan Irming, also known as Amplitude Problem, is a Swedish-American musician and producer currently based in Los Angeles. While the former hacker has had a long career in music beginning in the underground demoscene in Europe, he is best known for his chiptune, synthwave, and nerdcore tracks.
