Technologies must be assimilated into cultural domains before they can become active as cultural artifacts. This assimilation can happen in numerous ways and on various levels of complexity. 8-bit music is, in our view, an interesting response to the friction between the engineering culture and the arts. 8-bit (numeric representation in 8 binary digits) computing systems were the state of the art during the first generation of video games in the 70s. Over the last 30 years, computing hardware has made enormous increases in its data handling capacity and allowed for the kind of visual and auditory immersion that is typical of current computer games. The audio domain achieved, early in the course of digital media, perhaps the highest level of artifice and complexity. At the same time it was the first domain that opened itself to amateurs, tinkerers and artists. Today, 8-bit music is a cultural statement of data-bloat defiance, a deliberate act of limitation, a music genre dedicated to the art of low tech audio synthesis because and despite of the possibility of infinite auditory fidelity offered by modern computing systems.

The limitation to a given platform (8-bit) is one type of cultural assimilation. In the gaming community, similar but different acts of technology appropriations are occurring. Some artists have brought old video games on old hardware platforms to new life. Cory Archangel of the Beige Ensemble, for example, selectively reverse-engineers software code of old Nintendo games. In one of his best-known works he removed from a Mario Brothers' game all elements of the game except the endlessly scrolling white clouds on a crisp 8 bit blue background. This is a different kind of optimality, as it were, one found on the fringes of the original design, one the original system developers created but never recognized as such. The new game only becomes alive with the removal of the original main (game) components. And this selective, reductionist strategy is our cue.