Art-of-Coding*, an initiative to enlist the demoscene as first digital culture on the list of UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage
Latest News
- Demoscene covered broadly by German Culture Council
- Demoscene became national UNESCO cultural heritage in France
- Demoscene now also recognized in Sweden as UNESCO cultural heritage
- New exhibition ‘PROW:ESSE – Gender Diversity in Digital Arts and Craft’
- Demoscene entry to the official list of living tradition in Switzerland has been published
For full list of all news check here.
Not sure what is the demoscene?
The Demoscene is a living digital culture that unites technology, art, community, and competition.
Emerging in the 1980s from early home computer and cracker communities, where programmers began adding audiovisual signatures (“cracktros”) to demonstrate their skills, the Demoscene grew over the years into a diverse network of creators. These artists, musicians, designers, coders, organizers, and thinkers collaborate to produce real-time audiovisual works known as demos, along with music, graphics, text art, photography, videos, and interactive installations.
While some describe the Demoscene as a subculture because of its shared rituals, aesthetics, and social bonds, it is better understood as a scene-based cultural movement: open, transnational, and intergenerational. It thrives on the creative tension between collaboration and rivalry — a culture where experimentation, mastery, and playful competition inspire ever-new ways to express ideas through digital media.
Today, the Demoscene stands as a pioneering digital culture and creative movement, now recognized as part of our intangible cultural heritage — a unique synthesis of human creativity, artistic expression, community spirit, and technological ingenuity. Recognized by UNESCO in several European countries, it continues to show how collective passion, shared challenge, and community exchange can turn technological skill into cultural expression — and how this ongoing practice forms a translational culture* connecting art, technology, and people across generations.
What is the broader context of the mission?
The Demoscene, which is born at the heart of the home computer revolution, shows how skills and creativity can be stimulated and implemented in a dynamic cultural practice adopted to digital contexts. Many of its techniques and mindsets became core techniques and influences of the digital change and are still vibrant today. Seven decades after the invention of computers, we think it’s time to push for the next step to take born-digital culture seriously as part of our cultural heritage, starting an initiative to bring the demoscene onto the list UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage. So we invite all sceners and non-sceners to join us and support the initiative in the upcoming years.”
Andreas Lange & Tobias Kopka, April 2019
Initiators of the campaign “Art of Coding”The initiative will take some time, so naturally this page is work in progress and evolves over time
Please note: This page serves as a basic information page and works in the progress repository. The initiative will take years (check the NEWS section for on RECENT UPDATES), and hence everything on this website is to be understood as a work in progress.
Like everything in the demoscene, it is a non-commercial and voluntary project, pushed forward as work and time permits.
In April 2020, Art of Coding achieved a breakthrough in Finland, which recognized the Demoscene as part of the Finnish UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. Shortly after this, Germany’s nomination confirmed this major milestone, and thus Art of Coding became a serious international campaign. As of October 2025, Finland, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden and France recognized the demoscene as national cultural heritage, and applications in Denmark, and more countries are in preparation. But even things are looking great, it is an open process for the upcoming years.
If you are an (ex-)demoscener or from other interested parties open to help in any way, please get in touch personally, as our next steps after the achievements in above countries are to continue gathering a strong international group of people interested in pushing forward the initiative and in bringing up further applications in other countries. As this is not about us (and the longer it takes time, the less it should be), this is about the demoscene – and in a broader sense – the status of digital culture in general.
- * Despite the title Art of CODING it´s also important to be aware, that the demoscene is not only creating an humongous output of demos, but is also producing heaps of music, graphics, fotos, text-art (ANSI/ASCII-Art), videos, interactive-installations and many more kinds of cultural artefacts on all kinds of hardware-platforms for many decades.
- ** Translational culture describes a form of cultural practice that connects and communicates across different domains — such as art and technology, generations, or local and global contexts.
In the Demoscene, this means that creative and technical expression continually inform each other: code becomes art, competition becomes community, and innovation becomes shared heritage. The Demoscene thus acts as a translator between worlds — turning digital creation into a deeply human, cultural act.