La demoscene es una subcultura informática. Las demos comenzaron siendo una firma de los crackers de software, quienes se daban crédito modificando los programas para que, cuando se iniciaran, se viera una presentación gráfica impresionante, también llamada “intro”. Más adelante, estas intros evolucionaron hacia una cultura independiente de los grupos de cracking. Muchos de los jóvenes talentos que crecieron programando demos, y de esa forma adquiriendo experiencia en programación de gráficos de computadora, luego terminaron trabajando para la industria de los videojuegos, cuyos productos habían violado anteriormente. El objetivo principal de una demo es demostrar que se es mejor programador, y se tienen mejores habilidades gráficas y musicales respecto a otros demo-groups.

Procedural generation is a widely used term in the production of media, indicating the possibility to create content on the fly rather than prior to distribution. This is often related to computer graphics applications and video game level design.

The term procedural refers to the process that computes a particular function. Fractals, an example of procedural generation, dramatically expresses this concept, around which a whole body of mathematics—fractal geometry—has evolved. Commonplace procedural content includes textures and meshes. Sound is often procedurally generated as well and has applications in both speech synthesis as well as music. It has been used to create compositions in various genres of electronic music by artists such as Brian Eno who popularized the term “generative music”.

While software developers have applied procedural generation techniques for years, few products have employed this approach extensively.

The modern demoscene uses procedural generation to package a great deal of audiovisual content into relatively small programs. Farbrausch is a team famous for such achievements, although many similar techniques were already implemented by The Black Lotus in the 1990s.

Procedurally generated content such as textures and landscapes may exhibit variation, but the generation of a particular item or landscape must be identical from frame to frame. Accordingly, the functions used must be referentially transparent, always returning the same result for the same point, so that they may be called in any order and their results freely cached as necessary. This is similar to lazy evaluation in functional programming languages.

Generative art is a system oriented art practice where the common denominator is the use of systems as a production method. To meet the definition of generative art, an artwork must be self-contained and operate with some degree of autonomy. The workings of systems in generative art might resemble, or rely on, various scientific theories such as Complexity science and Information theory. The systems of generative artworks have many similarities with systems found in various areas of science. Such systems may exhibit order and/or disorder, as well as a varying degree of complexity, making behavioral prediction difficult. However, such systems still contain a defined relationship between cause and effect.

An artist or creator will usually set down certain ground-rules or formulae and/or templates materials, and will then set a random or semi-random process to work on those elements. The results will remain somewhat within set limits, but may also be subject to subtle or even startling mutations. The idea of putting the art making process in the place of a pre-generated artwork is a key feature in generative art, highlighting the process-orientation as an essential characteristic. Generative artists have explored processes of physical and biological systems in artistic context.

Generative art can also evolve in real-time, by applying feedback and generative processes to its own created states. A generative work of art would in this case never be seen to play in the same way twice. Different types of graphical programming environments, are used in real-time for generative audiovisual artistic expressions for instance in the Demoscene and in VJ-culture.

Artificial intelligence and automated behavior have introduced new ways of seeing generative art. The term behavior is particularly useful when describing generative qualities in art because of the associations to biology and evolution.

The term generative art does not describe any art-movement or ideology. It’s a method of making art. The term refers to how the art is made, and does not take into account why it was made or what the content of the artwork is.

Artworks, in Generative Art, can be identified in the creative processes and not only in the results. Also because the results of each generative process are endless variations belonging to the same idea. Generative Art create an artificial DNA able to generate individuals of the same species.

Farbrausch, or Farb-rausch, is a German group of demomakers. “Farbrausch” literally translates to “rave of color”, “color rush” or “color frenzy” in English.

Using techniques like procedural textures, scenes and animations together with a high-quality software synthesizer, they´ve maked 3-D show featuring complex scenes which opened a new era in demo making, showing that CPU power and mass storage are not a substitute to the creative human brain. This is an achievement since most demos created in the 21st century tend to focus much more on the aesthetic rather than optimization skills and number crunching. Farbrausch introduced the idea that you can still do both in the modern computer age.