Alternative Party 2005 (Alt Party Inc)
Business as usual
Tanssi by Grey Park won the music video competition with an artistic and beautiful entry
At Alternative Party 2005, the last party to be held at Gloria, we parodied business culture. The party website was designed to reflect the usual colour scale and atmosphere of serious company websites. We even made many business-style photographs to accompany the website.
On 14-16 January 2005 we had Gloria once more to receive around 150 friends of alternative computers and art. As before, the performing bands and artists were top quality. David Hasselhoff Big Band played familiar game and demo tunes with real instruments, Virta of Amiga fame played a techno set and StatikBuzz performed an extremely noisy set of industrial hardcore.
After the successful gig at Alt V, DHBB went on to perform at Breakpoint 2005 and Assembly '05 as well, drawing big audiences.
The dynamic way
Lobotomy posing as a businessman in a promo picture for the website
An interesting addition to the competitions of this year's party we had the presentation competition. The point was to make (and present) a presentation using either MS Powerpoint or OpenOffice. The winner (who was Nofe) got the newest version of MS Office, sponsored by Microsoft. Having the world's biggest software company as a sponsor for the party was, as we expected, a controversial decision.
In the music video competition there were several professional-quality entries. The winner was Tanssi, a music video for Grey Park's song of the same name, featuring computer-rendered robots and landscapes.
As for the demo competition, we wanted to bring the dynamic demos back. Even though the concept may still be a bit radical, we felt that it was worth experimenting once more, but this time in combination with an "ordinary" demo competition. In this model, dynamic demos compete both in their own series and with the participants in the normal competition. This year, the dynamic demos did have the potential. MFX's Brokk1500 won the dynamic demo competition. Jumalauta did well in the demo competition, their demos We Are Going to KILJU and Buick ended up first and third. The winning demo run on Sega Dreamcast game console.
In the place of a special guest, Vili Lehtovirta of Electronic Frontier Finland ry presented us some views of copyright laws and the rights of a digital citizen.
Aftermath
Even though the party was fun and once again we saw some alternative ideas being pushed further, we felt that we were not going to have a fifth party in the same venue. The number of visitors had been in decline after the excellent Alternative Party 2003, the one with Jeff Minter as the special guest, so we really had to consider the financial part and our personal priorities.
We still organised The Alternative Zone (with the usual competitions) at Assembly '05 and were looking for new ideas. At Assembly we participated in the closing ceremony, stating that there will not be an Alternative Party next year, instead, there will be one in 2007! After several iterations and finding new people, we retreated and regrouped, ready for a new coordinated attack against the majority.
In 2007, we were back with Alternative Party 2007!
