PROW:ESSE – Gender Diversity in Digital Arts and Craft

Picture of PROW:ESSE Exhibition by Echtzeit – Digitale Kultur – Mario Spuler, 2024 – CC BY-SA 4.0

In The Beginning

In February, after our talk at Digitale Gesellschaft’s Winterkongress in Winterthur, we were approached by the organisers of the HackThePromise Festival in Basel. Would we be interested to present the Demoscene at their festival, perhaps come up with a way to illustrate societal challenges through the lens of demoscene releases?

Amongst others, the idea of PROW:ESSE was born: An exhibition exploring how gender expectations impact the access to digital crafts, trades and communities.

Would you like to give a platform to our PROW:ESSE artisans?

The demoscene is one of the oldest digital cultures, and recognised by the UNESCO chapters in Finland, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland as Intangible Cultural Heritage. With its roots in the early 1980s, its heyday in the early 90s and recent uptick since the late 2010s, its history is ripe with experiences and reflections about computers and digital creativity entering the average households’ living rooms, and revolutionising our work, social and creative lives in the past 40 years.

So it also isn’t immune to systemic discrimination and exclusion: Just as the vast majority of tech communities, the demoscene is a heavily male-dominated affair. Estimates on gender distribution within the scene speak about a 10% to 20% non-male presenting audience, with a notable increase amongst demosceners below the age of 35.

So what happened? Was it the attitudes that were originally set by male teenagers in the 80s and 90s? Or the TV spots only ever showing boys and men in front of computers or playing video games? Parents and teachers discouraging girls to explore MINT subjects for decades? Was it the sexism in academia and the industries, which buried the stories of influential programmers and mathematicians from minority groups, which are only slowly getting recovered as for example in the movie “Hidden Figures”?

Picture displaying digital art pieces “King of Coins” by Sylvia Ritter and “There” by Still. Copyrights on artwork apply.CC BY-SA 4.0: Mario Spuler, Sylvia Ritter, Thomas Mann, Lena Kilkka – 2024

The demoscene is one of the very few hobbyist communities that can easily provide the stories of multiple generations of gender minorities in tech, highly capable in their respective fields, who have embarked on the journey to make a living from their creativity.

The Exhibition

And so we sat out to explore those stories amongst our cis- and trans* sisters and non-binary siblings: in interviews, long texts and discussions with six highly talented demosceners, we collected their thoughts, experiences, but also recommendations and messages to people just starting out in the arts.

All of this of course portrayed next to a showcase of their work on beautiful, sleek digital totems provided by our partner Screencom. They all shared intimate details of their life stories, but also took the opportunity to pass on their experiences:

Faith aka Sylvia Ritter, professional illustrator, outstandingly gifted in drawing unique animals, playing with light, colour and details, shared how she took a long time to find her way and preferred medium, the financial struggles and resulting insecurities of illustrators and her recommendations around open source creative tools as well as funding.

Aldroid aka Alex Shaw, programmer at the intersection of art and high tech, as well as skilled firestarter for creative communities, talks about their restless mind always staying superficially interested, until they found their place in the demoscene, where their sensation-seeking finally found satisfaction in watching their own and others’ skills grow in long-term collaboration.

Picture displaying digital art piece “They Call Me the Blade Runner” by Luisa/PB^RA. Copyrights on artwork apply.CC BY-SA 4.0: Mario Spuler, Luisa/PB^RA – 2024

Luisa of Poo-Brain and Rabenauge, a jane-of-all-trades in graphics design from ANSI-Art and Pixel Graphics to 3D-Modelling and Animation, is reflecting on over 20 years of experience overcoming misogyny and rusty structures by excelling at whatever she puts her exceptionally strong mind on, as a craftswoman as much as in her academic education.

Violet aka Violet Suchomski, whose versatility certainly teaches the audience that you can create art (and racoons!) on any hardware under the sun, speaks truth to academia’s false promises about job security for people with a digital arts degree, and how government funding needs to step up to enable small businesses to grow, so we can build a world that is inclusive and safe for everyone.

Flopine aka Florine Fouquart, household name in the Shader Coding community, role model to many live coders as well as one of the first waves heralding an upsurge of new, fresh and more diverse coders, shares how much people’s astonishment surprised her, when she, a woman, stepped into a competitive Live Shader Showdown. And how lucky she was that she always felt empowerment by her family and the people around her.

All of their artworks and stories were accompanied by the versatile compositions and liveset recordings of Lucid aka Lena Kilkka, whose work intersects at the craft of composing digital music and using analog instruments, and whose text touches on the lack of recognition for non-traditional trajectories in creative fields, ageist cultural funding policies, and artists living with health conditions or impairments.

Picture of PROW:ESSE Exhibition, featuring artworks by Sylvia Ritter and Lena Kilkka. Copyrights on artworks apply.CC BY-SA 4.0: Mario Spuler, Sylvia Ritter, Lena Kilkka – 2024

Impressions

It has been intense to see a lot of artists stopping by, sometimes spending what amounted to hours, taking in the texts and artworks. More than once, we witnessed people returning to read the texts again, then sinking into the music and visuals, going their way, then returning. Several times we saw people touched by what they read, feel empowered, feel themselves heard and understood. We couldn’t have asked for more, and will be forever grateful to the artists for allowing us to share such intimate and unique perspectives.

While the festival was very lively with its fantastic live acts, ca. 500 visitors, the many art installations and the talks especially around netizen- and data protection subjects as well as the late-evening partying, many used the room featuring PROW:ESSE as a quieter haven for deep thought, contemplation, and to learn more about the demoscene and the tools and platforms we have to offer.

Picture of PROW:ESSE Exhibition, featuring artistic works by Violet Procyon, Mrs Beanbag, Vurpo and Aldroid CC BY-SA 4.0: Shana Marinitsch, Violet Suchomski, Vurpo, Alex Shaw – 2024

Especially in the context of the festival’s topic, fact/fake/fiction, we were happy to stand out between the many art pieces addressing or utilising derivative tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, ChatGPT and the likes, and rather present handmade digital art, and the real human beings behind it.

Picture of PROW:ESSE Exhibition by Echtzeit – Digitale KulturCC BY-SA 4.0: Mario Spuler, 2024

Learnings and New Paths

We are very grateful to the HackThePromise-team for enabling us to present this. The opportunity has also given us an opportunity to shift perspectives:

With the avalanche of fake images, the million-fold stealing and scraping of protected artworks, deceptive commercial trends like NFT’s or the current AI-hype, only a very few open and accessible cultural spaces are left that truly promote artistic participation, learning and tech literacy for everyone.

The demoscene may just be one of the best-equipped to offer this: Everyone can visit our demoparties, participate in our competitions, and be welcomed into our community.

However, we need help to make moments like this possible. This wouldn’t have been possible without the donations we receive, and the hands that offered to help:

When we approached Screencom, a digital signage company in Luzern, it was almost more of a curious dream. We were pretty sure we couldn’t afford it. However, Screencom got very intrigued about our work, and since they cared deeply about the subject matter of gender minorities in tech, they decided to partner with us. So they did not just provide us with the amazing digital totems and displays you see in our pictures, but also handled the logistics and were extremely helpful and flexible whenever questions arose or trouble needed to be shot.

After organising demoparties for the past 20 years in self-built environments, we are not shy to admit that working with their content management systems was a breeze, as they are optimised for use by non-technical staff. However, an inquisitive mind drilling further into the settings menu will still get rewarded with tons of customisation options every time. (No offense, Partymeister and Wuhu. We love you. And have a few feature requests. <3)

Screencom has become more than a partner, but colleagues – we hope to be working with you again sooner than later. Thank you so, so much!

Picture of PROW:ESSE Exhibition by Echtzeit – Digitale KulturCC BY-SA 4.0: Mario Spuler, 2024

Would you like to give a platform to our PROW:ESSE artisans?