Buenzli 20 - the Demodées
Like every serious scener visiting the cozy annual Swiss Scene Event is a mandatory part of a pleasant summertime. However, this year things were different: As we found out, the old proven and tested location had started to hate us (see the Buenzli 19 fast compo releases for further uninformation) and urged our fellow organizers to relocate to a yet unknown place.
Finally after months of uncertainity it was announced that Demodays 2011 would take place inside the Schützi in Olten, CH - and a lot of open questions popped up: What happened to Buenzli? Will there still be cowees? Will the new location rule or suck? Is it easy to find or will we get lost in the dreaded traffic sign maze intended to trick foreign visitors into expensive toll roads? And what is all this scenepoints stuff about?
Thus an expedition of two fellow Stuttgart sceners consisting of Styx/Headcrash and myself started in order to discover the truth. Travelling worked rather well, with only minor difficulties finding the right direction when compared with the first travel to Winterthur in the previous years. However, it was pretty astonishing to find out that the target of the Aarau road planning department seems to put as many 90°-turns into a flat valley, rendering the route into something that looked more like a Pipe Mania display than a real journey.
The Schützi turned out to be an old sports hall now primarily used for concerts and similar events, with a huge parking lot and a public bath next to it (hooray, no neighbours who might complain!). Unfortunately, the weather wasn't friendly enough for swimming there, but having showers and parking right next to the party place is an improvement nethertheless.
Interestingly, every extra feature from the old location was also available in the new one: A cozy chillout/compo watch area (now with sofas instead of carpets), a (small) grandstand, the Chefkoch foodsupport area and - most important - the stairs outside large enough to socialize with beer & barbecue. Even better, the barbecue grill was now provided by the organizers, a nice gift following the success of its predecessor at Evoke.
As Unlock told us, the name "Demodays" was introduced to make the event look more appealing to officials, companies, media and other possible supporters - makes sense given the fact that "Bünzli" means something like "Babbit" ("Spießer" in German). But maybe it was also due to the fact that other sceners read last year's logos as "Bünzu" or even "Binnzu" (german for "I´m drunk"). Anyway, most sceners ignored the name change, and we'll see if next year will continue using it. It was good to hear that setting up the party worked pretty well, even for a fresh location, thus chances are good that the Schützi will host more Bünzlis in the future.
Robocop, the second main organizer, was already busy handing out delicious Swiss cow meat. Or as it was written on a sign: "Wir haben alles Schweizer Fleisch", which originally means "All our meat is from Switzerland", but is understood as "All Swiss meat are belong to us" by almost every non-Swiss speaker. The first steak was given away for free - or, more precise - in exchange for a bunch of scenepoints which was exactly the same amount of scenepoints one got for buying the entrance ticket (go figure!).
What are scenepoints anyway? Well, it is the leading scene rewarding system, freshly introduced at Buenzli 20 as the first officially scenepoints certified party. One could get scenepoints for visiting the party, registering at the party network using the brand new partymeister support DFox had hacked into it, uploading releases and so on. But beware - while being a hipster (using a mobile browser) or early adopter (using a HTML5 compliant browser) increased your credibility, doing nasty things like using IE6 or flooding the partynet with too many oneliners
would reduce it pretty fast! Once you've proved being a scenepoint certified scener, one could get an official scenepoint ID card custom printed by Styx. Thus he was busy pushing scenepoints rather than stil being grumpy on the mess crafmans caused at his home the week before - or, as DFox said: "Der Schwabe vergisst nicht", which turned into another meme that weekend.
Other sceners were busy as well - Urs and Las for doing their spikeball shaders again, The Compiler and others with their wild entry featuring a line printer, Gita and Mme. Grotesque with their animation entries, Topy44 with his shirts, SquoQuo with providing their famous sound support, Pixman whom I haven't seen for years, H2O who came all the way from France with a great release and his wannabe-ghettospeak son, the Nuance crew, Ber - coding on stuff like there is no tomorrow - and many others I don't remember right now due to increased partying.
Later on we discovered a flyer advertising a tough and dirty Sido concert in this cozy unspoiled area and had a lot of fun with it which got turned into a fast release the next day. The night ended pretty late with a lot of boozing, chatting and Pixman thinking about whether to go on a mushroom foray in the middle of the dark night or not.
Saturday was compo day, including the new short animation compo. Most of the entries were just short movies using common streaming formats rather than special vector or web animations as expected, but the creativity expressed in the high number of releases was pretty astonishing.
Other competition highlights were the Boombox demo by Rebels & Farbrausch which really fits its name, "Schweizer Verkehrsführung" as a 4k Gfx entry which pointed out that other sceners felt the same confusion during their journey to the party here as well, "krawall" by TRSI which picked up a meme which got popular at Evoke a couple of days before using delicate lyrics, and two rather artsy demos from Satori and Calodox.
The "Schreimaschine" from The Compiler & Freelancer finally got working and started to disgorge a large pile of continous paper filled with one liners from the web printed in realtime. Unfortunately, trying to print ascii pr0n with it just failed due to excess flooding since the I/O stuff turned out to be way more tricky than expected. After taking part in the wild competition, the Schreimaschine is going to be presented at an electronic art exhibition - let´s hope it works well there, too.
Of course no Buenzli would be complete without the OHP competition, this time with two rather standard entries only. Mine was called "Démodées" in order to make fun of the new party name and basically consisted of throwing a lot of old rubble onto the projector with a track SagaMusix had generously ruined for that purpose, and the other entry consisted of well-executed water waves following a pumping track.
"Say my Büüüüüüüüünzli" is the catch phrase of Netpoet's invitation tune, and the fun compo consisted of karaoke singing it. Among the participants were Netpoet, Pixman and Unlock - and for sure they will still hear this inescapable earworm in their dreams.
Another highlight was Weasel celebrating his 40th birthday right at Buenzli - this is what I call real scene spirit!
The end of the compo night was formed by an improvised night bacon session which turned out to be quite difficult without a pan. In the end it worked out well anyway, due to the right amount of faking skills involved.
The last day awakened rather slowly, thus there was enough time to refresh yourself, visit the village (with a nice ancient center and a riverside part), buying Swiss souvenirs and finding out that the local flea market took place as well. As Scythoior told me he had some fun walking with all his baggage from the station to the party place, thus confusing some local residents which would not expect strange tourists in the late evening.
Finally, the pricegiving was held and SagaMusix earned a major scene points reward for providing most entries, thus causing a irrepealable inflationary damage on the scenepoints economy. And all I got was a cool Atari shirt for it ;)
Overall Buenzli 2011 was a great success and I'll be there in 2012 for sure!
T$