Assembly 2007

August 10, 2007

After a two-year break, myself and some friends went to Assembly 2007 (official page).

Assembly is part of the demoscene movement. I’m not even going to try to explain what this is, the wikipedia article provides enough info and further pointers. But you don’t need to be fully immersed in the full history to appreciate the party ambience. Just imagine a big hall full of about 3000 computers and people. And many of them are playing games and some are also creating this weird oldskool or modern computer art. And there are also tons of other activities around. Like this year, Microsoft was a sponsor and they had set up Xbox 360 consoles around the hall so you could just walk up to them and play. And F-Secure held a reverse engineering challenge. And Fennogrid held a grid computing event. And there was a rock concert at night.

They had a world overclocking record, utilizing liquid nitrogen. And so on. So all in all, almost four days of high-quality digital multimedia entertainment.

On one hand, we did fairly well in the compos, as three entries (our short film Star City, my fastmusic and devil’s fastgraphics) got to the finals. On the other hand, we didn’t win anything :) But we liked that we got to the final with the film, even though it got the last place. At least that’s a good start with productions. Maybe we’ll do some more and in other categories sometime.

It’s a tradition at such events that people decorate their computer places with weird discoballs and other funny gadgets, and there are a lot of blinking lights and other things. On the above photo, lights are still on as everything gets set up. But then on Thursday night, the big lights are turned off and everybody cheers. And the lights then stay off until Sunday night when the party is over.