The topic of this paper belongs to the history and sociology of innovation, or what Joseph A. Schumpeter called ’the carrying out of new combinations’: to do new things, or the same things differently, by combining ’materials and forces within our reach’ in a new way. The question addressed has been surprisingly little explored in the literature: How are staged demonstrations used in the creation of technical standards? The paper attends to this question by discussing the (re)production of demonstrations in the context of what in the 1980s and early 1990s was publicly reported upon as a ’war’ or ’battle’ over which technical standards should ultimately carry future ’high definition television’ (HDTV) and its market(s). The author tells a story of the circumstances of a particular demonstration: the HD-Divine demonstration at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam in 1992, planned to demonstrate that digital HDTV was technologically feasible over conventional television networks. Based upon the story of HD-Divine, it is suggested that demonstrations are good points of departures for analyzing how new as well as old combinations are linguistically (re)named, categorized and publicly visualized in attempts to define, control, extend or destroy particular types of interactions and relations.