DEMO 2025 – My Submissions

Limitations have always been playing a major role in my creative work; I was only able to develop my best ideas because I radically fenced myself in creatively. At first glance, this seems unreasonable – after all, we live in times of unlimited possibilities. But exactly where the tools bombard us with features, the creative brain switches off, struggles against the many options and falls into a paradoxical state of stress and paralysis. My recipe for overcoming this mode is to define limitations, constants, fixed parameters that give a creative work, or a series, its stability.

For my submissions for the DEMO Festival, I set up three rules that I followed consistently and without compromise:

• generate gif animations
• The maximum size is 128kb
• only code-based tools are allowed

I later converted the tiny little gif animations (72×128 pixels) into the right format for the DEMO submissions using FFMPEG.

I’m curious to see how the low-res animations will look on the high-res displays in Europe’s cities. I’m also curious to see how my fellow curators in Rotterdam will react to it during our review session. Will they possibly perceive these animations as retro or nostalgic? Or will they recognize the value that I see in them?

Related

• 128kb at DEMO Festival 2025
• 128kb
• Throwback: My Talk at Demo Festival 2022
• A p5.js starter template for the 128kb Challenge
• The 128kb Framework and its Aesthetic Characteristics
• DEMO Festival 2022 was a blast
• FFMPEG Snippet Collection
• A custom Mockup Tool, built with Processing (updated)
• The Magic Triangle