Last updated: March 2, 2008 (Camps Added!)

BLOCKPARTY is assembling a solid lineup of demoscene and artscene-related folks to give presentations throughout the event, covering a wide range of subjects. One admission gets you into both NOTACON and BLOCKPARTY access, and Notacon will be hosting many speakers as well.

The Fat Man: Art Behind Enemy Lines: A Target-Rich Environment

In the first five minutes of his talk, Fat will define Art once and for all, especially in context of high technology creation and experience. Thus having taken the mystery out of it and having reduced it to a science, he will quickly realize that he has ruined the whole damn thing. The rest of the talk will consist of his backpedalling like mad, trying in vain to put the cork back in the giant monkey's butt before the whole Blockparty is covered with icky, sticky dogma.

The Fat Man, George Alistair Sanger, has been creating music and other audio for games since 1983. He is internationally recognized for having contributed to the atmosphere of over 250 games, including such sound-barrier-breaking greats as Loom, Wing Commander I and II, The 7th Guest I and II, NASCAR Racing, Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, and ATF. He wrote the first General MIDI soundtrack for a game, the first direct-to-MIDI live recording of musicians, the first redbook soundtrack included with the game as a separate disk, the first music for a game that was considered a "work of art," and the first soundtrack that was considered a selling point for the game.

On a 380-acre ranch on the Guadalupe River, The Fat Man hosts the annual Texas Interactive Music Conference and BBQ (Project Bar-B-Q), the computer/music industry's most prestigious and influential conference.

Jake "virt" Kaufman: FM Synthesis - Beyond the Adlib

Like Silly Putty, potato chips, and penicillin, FM synthesis was a delightful accident. It was most famously used in the Yamaha DX-7 keyboard, allegedly designed by the Japanese as revenge for World War II, and seen by the knob-twisting analog crowd as "like trying to paint your hallway from outside through the letterbox." Despite this, it took pop music by storm, and inexpensive one-chip FM synthesizers flooded into in video games, home computers, and even mobile phones.

Luckily for us, an entire industry of pointy-headed sound programmers has largely tamed FM since the 80s, and figured out how to create every type of sound imaginable. In an uncanny impression of an expert synthesist, Jake will show that for all its mathematical intrigue and spy-novel thrills, FM is easy, free, and fun to use, and sounds neat!

Jake Kaufman is equally happy writing for a Game Boy or an orchestra. He recently created music and sound effects for Konami's Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS, described by critics as "awesome" and "dude, awesome". Following in the footsteps of pioneers like the Fat Man (see above), he aims to advance the state of the art even as he squeezes every drop of goodness out of older technology. He participates in the chiptune community and the demoscene, and is the founder of VGMix, a site devoted to fan arrangements of game music.

Pete Edwards and Fred Owsley: Circuit-Bending Will Get You Laid!! (Maybe)

Circuit-Bending is the art of taking things apart, putting them back together, and ending up with a brand new, completely unexpected mutation of the original parts. Think of sampling, but with hardware. Nothing's out of bounds when you circuit-bend the piles of consumer electronics available around you, and the results can be insightful, weird, or just a great way to spend a weekend. Circuit-benders Pete Edwards and Fred Owsley will walk you though an introduction to the tools and trades of circuit-bending as well as show off his own recent works involving everything from a gas mask to a "that was easy" button that is anything but easy.

Pete Edwards: Pete Edwards' extensive resume, as well as videos, sounds and articles about his years of professional circuit bending are available at his website, casperelectronics.com.

Fred Owsley: From a very young age, Fred has always liked to take things apart, from all his toys to the interior of the family van, few screws were left intact. With an interest in electronic music, a soldering iron, some electronics know-how and toys from goodwill, he started circuit bending in 2005. So far his projects have included various keyboards, keytars, a gas mask, a musini, and a recently finished x0xb0x. When not at his regular job as a computer security researcher, he can be found at his workbench abusing some electronic toy into producing amazingly horrible noise.

Jim "Trixter" Leonard: Self-Preservation Mode: Lessons Learned While Archiving Demoscene History

To stay ahead of the curve, demos have always used hardware to the fullest extent available, sometimes in unorthodox and unauthorized ways. But when that hardware becomes yesterday's news, it is those very tricks that cause such demos to become lost to history. For half a decade, Hornet has been working on the Mindcandy series, a collection of DVDs reproducing demos to the best of their ability. But what's involved in that process? Trixter of Hornet will discuss how a combination of ebay, charity, and outright fakery can be used to restore for the present what has nearly been lost to the past, and how you can apply these techniques to your own archival projects.

Jim Leonard is the founder of MobyGames, the world's largest online game database, and the MindCandy series of demoscene DVDs. Jim was involved in the PC demo scene in the 1990s as well as the archival demogroup Hornet, and the residual flashbacks of that episode prompt him to code 8088 assembler for fun in his spare time. Every few months, some part of the Internet discovers "8088 Corruption" and freaks out. Jim, meanwhile is musing about Mindcandy Part III and the next big thing to save.

Jeri Ellsworth: CPU Not Required: Making Demos with FPGAs

In the endless battle to make your demo quicker, more impressive and yet still balance the changes in CPU, a whole other way of approaching this situation exists: FPGAs. Short for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, this dedicated hardware, well-documented and fun to program, will give you speed and flexibility that a world of softcode and compilers just can't touch. After going over the basics of this hardware, a simple demo will be presented and the process explained.

Jeri Ellsworth is best known as the engineer behind the C64-DTV, a Commodore-64-in-a-Joystick that has sold over half a million units. She has founded a computer store chain, designed race cars, and is hard at work building a classic arcade in Oregon.

Tim Cowley: Automated Psychedelia : Translating sound into color and motion

If you've always wanted to know how to create programs that simulate the neurological disorder 'synesthesia', or the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, look no further! This seminar will rocket through a brief history of psychedelia and synesthesia and how it relates to computer graphics and music, define key technological elements of a generic music visualization framework, discuss important problems relating to meaning extraction and presentation, and present a simple HLSL-powered, graphics hacker oriented, visualization framework. All of the source code for the framework will be available as well.

Madman. Genius. Visionary. Psychonaut. Graphics God. Bodhisattva. These are all words that Tim Cowley would write into his own bio, if he were a little more arrogant. Tim has been shovelling triangles as fast as he could since he got his hands on an OpenGL Red book in 1999. Since 2003, he's been making demos with the Northern Dragons, on the GBA, PSP, in TextMode, and occasionally using one of them expensive 'graphics cards.' He currently works on the 3d engine inside MS Office, is preparing to start his M.Sc. at Digipen, and is about to reach 1 million downloads on the Psychedelia visualization pack.

New! Blockparty Camps!

Every year, we want to try something new, shake things up or go about the same ideas in a new angle. This year, we're trying Blockparty Camps, extended periods during the event where attendees are encouraged to stretch out and learn a new concept or skill related to various scenes. Presentations are just that: presentations, with a person at the front of the room telling you what they know. These camps are intended to be workshops, playgrounds of experimentation where you can ask questions, wander off into tangential experiments, and get in-depth explanations from the "counselors" that would stop a time-limited talk cold. Hours have been set aside in a second-floor area for these camps, and all are encouraged to stop by, observe, and learn a little.

I am not an Atomic Playboy: Mode 13h to Direct X and back again - tales and techniques from the field

"I am not an Atomic Playboy" is a interactive demoscene class. The hands on material taught spans roughly ten years of graphics technology; starting in MS DOS MCGA and ending in the latest Direct X techniques of today. New demosceners will be introduced to the challenges and techniques of oldschool MS DOS programming, and how that lead to the modern graphical api's currently in use. Long time demosceners that might have felt "left behind" when windows changed the world - will benefit from real advice about moving on from Mode 13h. All class members will have an interactive experience in creation of a "rotozoomer effect", and then slowly transforming the effect as a windows executable with hardware acceleration.

No prerequisite knowledge is required, however understanding of basic programming concepts will ensure you can enjoy the content as effectively aspossible. As this is a "hand on experience" a laptop capable of basic Direct X 9 rendering is required.

The class will have on hand all required files, resources and materials.

Polaris is the founder of the Northern Dragons demoscene group. The groups is one of the historically most active group in North America since 2001. Polaris is also the co-founder of in4k, a web portal dedicated to 4kb intro development. He lives in Manitoba, Canada with his wife and two children.

That Was Easy: Mind-Bending Circuit-Bending

A companion to the circuit-bending presentation given by Owsley and Edwards, this workshop will take a commonly available sound-generating item and mess with it, making it do unexpected sounds and actions. The goal is to try new and interesting experiments, ideally ending up with a working item but maybe ruining the little sucker forever - failure is an option. Also covered will be general hard lessons learned by the counselors in years of playing with items, as well as showing off a few examples of projects they succeeded at.

Additional soldering kits and supplies are always appreciated. Intermediate and expert attendees are welcome to bring items they think will make the proceedings fun.