Competitions
Demo competitions at the Alternative Party are about experimentation, fresh ideas and being different. Come and show us you can take the challenge and conquer the world!
Competitions are the main attraction of the Alternative Party, as for every decent demo party. The demo competitions at the Alternative Party vary from one year to the next, except for the Alternative Demo competition and the Most Obscure Computer competition, which remain mostly the same every time. Other competitions may get repeated, if they are especially loved.
During the competitions, or 'compos' as they are commonly called, people get a chance to show their skills in graphics, programming, music and design. This is also where you might see productions, which later become milestones in scene history, and compare your ideas to find out how good you really are. As the Alternative Party's compos change every time, this does bring extra challenge to the teams, but the results are also often extremely interesting and some of the competitions have eventually ended up at other parties as well.
In case you are not familiar with what a demo is, see Wikipedia's description. A demo must be an executable computer program showing visuals of some sort.
The Alternative Party includes not only serious demo competitions but also some lighter content contests. Please click here to see the contest site.
Compo deadlines are at noon on Saturday. Upload your entry to the PMS here (Party Management System)
Alternative Demo Competition
Come and bring your most brilliant creations to the Alternative Demo Competition. This is our main demo compo. You may enter with any machine or platform, whatever the power or age. Indeed we openly invite people to participate with obscure or rare hardware. The length and theme is not limited, but we want to see demos pushing the limits of artistic expression and experimentation. Where are the politically inspired demos? The controversial productions? The demos that split opinion? These are the things we are looking for. The prize for the Alternative Demo Competition will be at least 1000 euros in cash. Further prizes will be announced later.
Dynamic Demos
As a special challenge, there is a separate series for dynamic demos, e.g. demos that are different every time they are run. The demos in this category also compete in the main demo competition!
Beginner Demo Competition
Several people are wondering if they should make a demo but the limit is quite high for the first timers. Alternative Party want's to encourage all the first timers to make the decision to do an entry and start their career as a demo artist!
Make your demo alone or together with friends. Read the general rules and follow them - eg. remember to put your entry to our intranet system so it will take part to the competition.
Wild Competition
You can entry with (almost) anything your heart desires - presentation time ~10min, presented compo-primetime!
Nokia Qt Competition
Context aware demos - the final frontier?
This year Alternative Party is happy to announce the Qt competition, with cash and devices prices courtesy of Nokia. The winner leaves the party with 1200 euros and a new N8.
The area of the compo is Qt Mobility, the Qt toolkit that allows access to content and context of the mobile phone. They key question thus is, what can you come up with it: how will demos become interactive by using physical location of the device? Can you abuse the contact list somehow to make things cooler than ever? And remember, you can read and send SMS messages too!
This leads us to my favorite topic, context aware computing. Context awareness was a hot topic when I was young. In practice at that time it was mostly location, but now I've broaden my view to different kind of social contexts too. I see, that mobile phone is just really intimate computer, with all kind of capabilities in both physical and social contexts. What this kind of change means for demos?
Set your mind free, bring back the real demo art.
The target is Nokia N900, and we recommend trying out Nokia Qt SDK to make the warp jump as pleasant as possible.
Get the Qt SDK from: http://qt.nokia.com/downloads
And Qt Mobility from: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qtmobility-1.0/index.html
The money prizes are:
The winner: 1200 eur + Nokia N8
Second place: 500 eur
Third place: 300 eur
Free Music Competition
High-tech, modern beats and melodies with superb sound quality! Draw immense soundscapes and please the ears of all trendy scene-followers at the party!
Obscure Music Competition
The music competition for true sceners with technical skills to abuse hardware and software!
Graphics Competition
Compete with a picture which may be drawn by hand, pixelated, rendered or constructed from taken photographs.
KIDtro Competition
Demos for your and our children. The competition entries will be shown on Sunday 24th as part of the Family Day.
Forget the boring industrial flybies, depressing avantgarde noise art and horrifying heavy metal demos - it's time to release the creative potential of your inner child!
Wait!
That's not all! More competitions will be announced. Stay tuned!
