Old French Amiga demoscener leZone/Marshals scanned an incredible amount of demoscene paper artefacts from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s for our project. This is just the first batch of his kind contribution.

Why?

The historical heritage of what was once the “illegal”, “pirate”, or “cracking” scene, and what evolved later on into the “demoscene” – it is not just digital. Think of party flyers. Think of swap letters. Think of scene papermags. Think of disk covers and group stickers. And while our digital legacy is safely stored, the scene’s material artefacts are permanently endangered. Imagine your parents cleaning out their basement and throwing away your old stuff. What if the papermag in that box was the last existing copy on Earth?

How?

To prevent this impending loss of the scene’s material heritage, we call on sceners to rummage through their stash and to look for paper artefacts. As part of a historical research project that explores the history of the scene in the 1980s and early 1990s, and in cooperation with scene.org, demozoo.org, and mags.c64.org, we want to facilitate high quality scans of your old scene materials and make sure they are preserved for future generations. We are looking for papermags, flyers, scene stickers, swap letters, wristbands, party/group t-shirts, and other material artefacts particularly from the 1980s, but also from later periods of scene history. Please get in touch if you have any materials you would like to share. You can send your items to us by post, which we scan in Zurich and make sure they reach you back safely. If you consider your items too precious to be sent by post, we will surely find another solution.

The scans of your items will be stored in a dedicated archive at scene.org, including metadata on the items’ history and their donators. Items related to the C64 scene will be additionally passed on to mags.c64.org. Incoming additions will be posted here.

Who?

The project is maintained by Gleb J. Albert, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. A member of the demoscene since 1997, he is co-organizer of the Evoke demoparty in Cologne/Germany and an active contributor to scene databases / preservation projects such as pouet.net, demozoo.org, and scene.org. Outside the scene, he is a trained historian and received his PhD at Bielefeld University in 2014, having worked on the history of the Soviet Union and the labour movement. His second book project, conducted within the “Media and Mimesis” research group, deals with the software pirates / crackers culture before the internet age, its global networks and local practices, and its interrelations with the software industry and the general public.