State of the Art
Encyclopedia
State of the Art is an Amiga
Amiga
The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...

 demo
Demoscene
The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer...

 by Spaceballs
Spaceballs (demogroup)
Spaceballs is an Amiga demo group from Norway, originally based around the city of Halden. It was formed in 1987, but did not make its first release until 1989.The group has released many demos, including State of the Art and Nine Fingers...

, and winner of The Party
The Party (demo party)
The Party was an annual demoscene event held from 1991 to 2002 in Denmark. It was one of the first events of its kind and set the trend for many other demoscene parties in Europe.-The early years:...

 1992 demo competition. It features vector
Vector graphics
Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon, which are all based on mathematical expressions, to represent images in computer graphics...

 silhouette
Silhouette
A silhouette is the image of a person, an object or scene consisting of the outline and a basically featureless interior, with the silhouetted object usually being black. Although the art form has been popular since the mid-18th century, the term “silhouette” was seldom used until the early decades...

s of dancers, occasionally morphing
Morphing
Morphing is a special effect in motion pictures and animations that changes one image into another through a seamless transition. Most often it is used to depict one person turning into another through technological means or as part of a fantasy or surreal sequence. Traditionally such a depiction...

 into geometric shapes, synchronised to a rave music
Rave music
Rave music may either refer the late 1980s genre or any genre of electronic dance music that may be played at an electronic dance party such as a rave. Very rarely, the term is used to refer to less electronic related genres glam, powerpop, psychedelic rock and dub music parties...

 soundtrack. The sequel to State of the Art was 9 Fingers.

The production of the demo was described in an interview in Amiga disc magazine R.A.W #5. It was created by videotaping footage of a dancer and converting it to vector data using a tool created by Lone Starr. The dancer was 17 year old Jannicke Selmer-Olsen who was dating Lone Starr at the time.

Despite winning The Party, opinion was split on State of the Art. Unlike other demos of the time which focused on outperforming other demos technically, State of the Art focused on being artistically pleasing.

State of the Art was also notorious for being fairly hardware specific, requiring an Amiga 500 with 1MB memory - the 512KB additional memory had to be from the expansion port underneath the computer, as the demo was coded to use memory in this memory space, rather than request memory from the OS.

Jannicke Selmer-Olsen now works for the "Norwegian design council".

External links

  • Demo entry on Pouët
  • Captured version on Google Video
    Google Video
    Google Videos is a video search engine, and formerly a free video sharing website, from Google Inc. Before removing user-uploaded content, the service allowed selected videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provided the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube...

  • R.A.W #5 on Ambime.net
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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