The brilliantly-programmed graphic demos of Assembly Summer

Digital Tools offers a selection of the demos on show at Assembly 2011 Summer. For the uninitiated, demos are short multimedia hits similar to music videos, originally intended to demonstrate the potential of a computer's media capabilities. Pushing the limits of specific platforms' processing power and limited memory made for an enduring and highly competitive art scene—procedurally-generated textures and chiptunes ahoy! Pictured above is my favorite so far, Fairlight and Alcatraz's Uncovering Static, programmed so elegantly that it fits in a 64kb executable file. That's roughly equivalent in size to one frame of the YouTube video of it embedded above.