Diogenes meets Demo Festival

Below is the written version of my talk at DEMO Festival in Amsterdam, January 2025. I’ve also recorded an audio version:

It’s a January morning in Amsterdam, 2025. A few people are standing and smoking in front of the breathtaking station building, a castle made of Lego bricks. The Demo Festival is taking place here today for the third time. “Demo” stands for “Design in Motion”. This is where the scene for motion design meets, it’s all about moving images created with computers. Thousands of people from all over the world have submitted works and a small number of them have made it to the final selection. Today, their animations are being shown on large and small screens in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Hamburg, London and many other cities. Advertising makes room for 24 hours of concentrated creativity.

This is my second time as a curator, speaker and workshop leader at the DEMO Festival. Basically, this day is a grand finale for me, because most of the work has already been done: a few months ago, I was sitting with the curation team in a glass conference room in Rotterdam, sifting through a total of 6000 submissions. A mammoth task, and yet an infinitely rewarding zoom into the latest trends in the scene. Where does (motion) design stand today? What role does Creative Coding play in the context of motion design? How have technological developments affected the subject? Who does motion design actually serve and for what? How do designers deal with the absence of a concrete brief?

There is a tradition among us curators that we also develop and submit works for the festival. This has been a particularly appealing challenge for me at previous demo festivals. Working without a briefing and working creatively within technical boundaries; for me, that creates the kind of ground on which valuable ideas can grow.

While I was thinking about possible ideas for my animations, I read a book by Jenny Odell called “How to Do Nothing – Resisting the Attention Economy”, which inspired me a lot. It contains a historical scene that the author uses to illustrate her stance on the attention economy:

In ancient Greece, there lived a philosopher called Diogenes who was known for rejecting everything he did not need to live. He lived like a homeless outcast – he slept in a large round barrel in the centre of Corinth. During the day, he provoked passing citizens with ascetic performances. One example: he is said to have walked through the city wearing only rags and carrying a lantern at the brightest hour of the day. When someone asked him what he was doing, he replied: ‘I am looking for a true man’. This was one of his deliberate provocations and a direct criticism of society’s fixation on wealth and the lack of integrity of his contemporaries. Diogenes was not a nobody, on the contrary, he was one of the most famous philosophers of his time, a representative of the Cynic school of philosophers, the punks and hippies of the ancient world. And he had made a name for himself with his actions, which became so famous that the most powerful and brutal warlord in the Greek world took notice of him: Alexander the Great.

Alexander, who paradoxically, despite his lust for power and fame, had the highest regard for Greek philosophy, arrived with a pompous entourage of nobly dressed men, stood before the old Diogenes, who was chilling in front of his barrel and announced that he now had one wish. Diogenes’ answer to this question has become legend: “Step aside, you are blocking the sun”.

This was perhaps the boldest rejection that the feared Alexander ever received. A powerful statement, a clear criticism of opportunism and a shining example of uncompromising integrity. When I read this story, a momentous question came to my mind: was there a way to develop motion design in the spirit of the philosopher Diogenes? What would that look like?

Inspired by Diogenes

I am a creative coder. And I’ve been thinking intensively about the tools we use as designers today for a long time. High-tech hardware and software are marketed with a clearly formulated promise. We buy a share of acceleration with these tools. And because everything around us is constantly accelerating, we need this boost – behind the desire to work more efficiently is ultimately the deep-seated fear of being left behind in the race. What would it mean to face up to this fear, to stop and perhaps even dare to look backwards, into the past? Could I perhaps make Diogenes speak by deliberately renouncing modern software and hardware?

I bought a cheap, outdated laptop – a Thinkpad x260 – for €129 from an online retailer called Lapstore. The computer falls into the category of obsolete technology – hundreds of thousands of technically functional devices like this one end up in landfills in countries of the global south every year, discarded simply because they no longer meet the latest requirements (link).

There are some challenges when working with older hardware: Manufacturers naturally want us ‘consumers’ to buy a new device every few years. That’s why they actively ensure that their computers give the impression that they are worn out as they get older. The stage on which this technical theatre play is performed is the operating system: error messages and compatibility problems are piling up. Updates are refused. The strategy behind this is called planned obsolescence.

This incentivises the purchase of a new device – and the success rate is quite high. But you can get out of this upgrade cycle. The magic word is Open Source. There is now an immense number of free, Linux-based operating systems that look confusingly similar to Mac OS. Linux-based operating systems are not developed by companies, but by democratically organised communities. They do not follow commercial interests, but the ideal that software should be free and accessible to everyone, no matter where in the world.

I chose the Debian operating system, which is considered to be particularly downward compatible and can be installed on computers up to 20 years old.

One apparent disadvantage is that there is generally less commercial software under Linux. I am a radical supporter of the idea that the best ideas come from limitations. I’ve been observing this phenomenon for almost 20 years and it excites me to look for clever workarounds, to radically rethink things, to find ways that nobody has gone before.

My coding skills are the most important tool here: if the graphical user interface is missing, code becomes a powerful multi-tool for all kinds of applications.

I almost always use Processing for visual applications, which I enjoy twisting and using like a Swiss army knife. From interactive installations to generative typography, from 3D scenes to small games to motion graphics, Processing is my tool to go.

Process

I wanted to make the seemingly inadequate computer appear even worse than it already was in order to emphasise the diognetic gesture – to make it loud and clear. So I decided on a ridiculously small resolution of 72 x 128 pixels, which fits exactly into the given aspect ratio of 9:16.

I wanted to keep the visual abstract and simple, without anything anything symbolic or pictorial, to strengthen the aspect of the story and the underpinning limitations. Within a few hours I had a nice sketch ready. It looked like a weird metallic creature with a flexible amount of tentacles.

I have mostly avoided gradients in my work, the reason is probably that I went through a very rigid typography school during my studies in communication design (2008-2013) where we were taught to cherish black and white simplicity. It took some time to free myself again from this mindset and years ago I started to work with a narrow selection of bright RGB colors, but mostly with hard edges. But gradients became ubiquitous in recent years, especially in the Creative Coding scene, thanks to the work of designers I really appreciate, such as Vera van de Seyp and Lena Weber. I think through their work gradients found their way into my work too. The metallic creature that I had created with code became somewhat alive with the gradients. They added some fake three-dimensionality to the piece.

int elements = 32;
int dur = 100;

void setup() {
  size(72, 128);
}

void draw() {

  background(#0000ff);
  
  float driver = map(frameCount, 0, dur, 0, 360);
  float mag = width * 0.8;
  float step = 360 / float(elements);

  noStroke();
  fill(0);

  for (int j = 0; j < elements; j++) {
    for (int i = 0; i < elements; i++) {

      float mag2 = map(sin(radians(driver + j * 10)), -1, 1, mag, mag);
      float stepOutside = mag2 / float(elements);
      
      float wave = sin(radians(driver + j*4 + j)) * 40;

      float e = map(sin(radians(driver* 4 + i * 10 + j * 10 )), -1, 1, 0, 255);
      fill(e);
      int x = int(sin(radians(i*step * 2))* j * stepOutside);
      int y = int(cos(radians(i*step))* j * stepOutside);
      push();
      translate(width/2 + wave, height/2);
      rect(x, y-5, 5, 10);
      fill(255 -e);
      rect(x+5, y-5, 5, 10);
      pop();
    }
  }
}

In the end I’ve developed a set of five motion pieces from the same system. But after some time I felt like the motifs don’t really emphasize the concept sufficiently. I asked myself: Does the viewer really see that the visual was made with a poor computer? Could I amplify that information aesthetically without loosing the apparent threedimensionality?

At some point i came up with a solution: I ran the output images through a Steinberg-Floyd-dithering algorithm which reduces the colors to black and white. For that puprose I’ve used ImageMagick, a software for image editing from the command line.

#!/bin/bash
for img in input/*.png; do
    filename=$(basename "$img")
    convert "$img" -dither FloydSteinberg -monochrome "output/$filename"
done

I was quite happy with this result, but there was still some work to do: I’ve generated these tiny, tiny gifs with my applications, but I needed to upscale the videos to match the Demo-specs (1080×1920, 30fps). For that I used another command line tool for video conversation called ffmpeg.

ffmpeg -y -i input.gif -vf "scale=1080:1920:flags=lanczos,fps=30" -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 18 -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4`

I try to use as little machine learning tools in my work as possible, because I want to keep the control over the tools I use and skills I need. But when I comes to scripting with bash and the command line, I often reach the boundaries of my capabilities. Command line tools like ImageMagick and ffmpeg are very complex and have an overwhelming set of features, at the same time they can be very hard to debug. That’s why I sometimes use ChatGPT to develop conversion scripts. Anyway I find it important to mention that this is one of a very few tasks I outsource to AI. It became something like a design principle for me: If I can only do it with AI, then I mostly let it go.

In the end I had all my videos looking nice and sharp and they were ready to get uploaded to the Demo server. So I grabbed Jenny Odell’s book again to continue reading.

The Twist

The parallels between what I was working on and what Jenny Odell was writing about became increasingly clear to me and some disturbing questions and doubts came to my mind: If one assumes that design always pursues a goal, then I wonder if the goal of motion design is not almost always… simply to capture attention – be it in public spaces on glaring displays or in some roaring social media feed… If you give it a little bit more thought – In the wider context of the attention economy, motion design is by no means a marginal topic. Quite the opposite. It is a fundamental driver of the toxic attention economy.

I remembered the DEMO Festival 2022, where I was also a part of as a curator. There were these hundreds of works by motion designers on all the screens inside and outside of the Amsterdam station. And in the end, I felt as if all these visuals were literally screaming at me: Look here! All these displays tried to catch my attention, without saying anything. The medium was the message. It was as if I was walking through a virtual reality version of my noisy Instagram. Scrolling by walking.

On page 143 of “How to do Nothing”, I came across a surprising anecdote about the American artist John Cage. His composition 4’33’, written in 1952 for a grand piano, is one of the most radical and poetic works of art I know:

Imagine a large concert hall with hundreds of people staring intently at an empty stage with a Steinberg grand piano in the centre. The pianist enters and applause follows, he bows humbly, sits down on the piano bench, opens the black wooden lid and places the sheet music on the tray. He pulls a stopwatch out of his pocket and starts it with an obvious gesture. And then… nothing. The well-dressed pianist looks at the sheet music and waits. He plays the piece, but there is not a single note. Silence. The whole room is silent. But is it really? You can hear rustling in the audience. One minute. Two minutes. You hear a cough. Someone scratches themselves. Three minutes. You feel an ever-increasing tension. Four minutes. Four minutes 33. The performance is over and the audience applauds. The point of 4’33”: Everything we do is music.

In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

John Cage

John Cage’s message seems more relevant to me than ever before. I had already submitted my visuals for Demo 2025 at the time. But I had an idea for a submission to the next Demo Festival: ten seconds of silence, pure black, a reminder of what can happen when we put down our smartphones, take a break and simply pay attention to what surrounds us.

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Related links for further Research

• DEMO Festival
• DEMO Festival 2025 recap
• http://permacomputing.net/
• Jenny Odell
• Jenny Odell – Beyond Repair at re:publica 2024
• Jenny Odell – How to do Nothing – Resisting the Attention Economy
• Hannah Gmeiner on Permacomputing in Graphic Design
• https://timrodenbroeker.de/the-new-demoscene/
• 128KB

Many thanks to Vit and Lara for their feedback!