About 15 years ago when I studied at university we had course of lectures on Assembly language. One day I with a classmate were in process of preparation to seminar where we planned to demonstrate our work with some graphics visualizations programmed on Assembly. During the preparation we had been searching for some useful references for our work over the internet and found some really interesting area called Demoscenes which I personally consider as art in programming and visualization.
“The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual art, and musical skills. Demos and other demoscene productions (graphics, music, videos, games) are shared, voted on and released online at festivals known as demoparties.”Wikipedia
And what I was wondered of is that those demoscenes (with sound and visualizations with awesome by that days graphics and shaders) had size of less than few hundreds of kilobytes. Some of them had unbelievable size of 64 Kb and even less considering the fact that they could last many minutes.
There is a special software called .werkkzeug (Source code) written by Farbrausch team from Germany which helps to create such stuff.
The idea is really simple: all demoscenes consist of MIDI-based music and the visualizations by the fact are very few primitive 3D bodies and base texture with coded sequence of transformations on them. So all graphics and music are calculated right during demoscene execution and as result require significant computing resources.
In 2004 .theprodukkt created a real piece of art called .kkrieger which is a real 10-15 min demo game with cool graphics with a size of ONLY 96 Kb what is awesome!
As for demoscenes, my favorite demoscene is fr-041: debris, I still remember my first impressions on this demoscene when I saw it first time 15 years ago.
Demoparties where demosceners and other computer enthusiasts gather to take part in competitions, where they present demos and other works such as digital art and music are still held today and the biggest demoscene party is Assembly. Demoscene is pretty interesting fenomena of computer subculture with more that 40 years of history.