This is a kind of end of year review, with a look ahead to plans for 2025.
After an initial very slow start, the live coding (and adjacent) scene really kicked into gear this year.
I should add that I generally tend to live under a metaphorical rock so it could well be that events have escaped my attention.
My livecoding year opened up with the fake[dac~] meetup organised by monz. Nice to have a good chat and was a key event in terms of getting to know monz better. We ended up working a lot together this year in one way or another. Then I wrote this post in which I managed to talk myself into taking matters into my own hands and organise an algorave. I started the ball rolling by reaching out to Alex and Lucy who I knew from my time in Sheffield. They both gave their blessing and Lucy actually arranged an hour call to talk through everything, which was very kind and helped a lot. I also contacted Antonio Roberts (hellocatfood) who jumped on board straight away. Unfortunately Lucy was unable to make the date which was given to us by Corsica Studios, but I was able to pull together a stellar lineup. The concept was simple - to simply follow the tried and tested recipe for an algorave, with perhaps a couple of tweaks here and there. The idea from the outset was to make it a sustainable event in the long term - live coding in London really deserves a regular event such as this to build on and from. Well the event went ahead and was a success, phew!
And from then on things started hotting up :)
Earlier in June was the ICLC fringe event at St Giles Church Crypt, Camberwell. I took some photos, like this one of Mizra performing:
This was a great event, as always with some great conversations alongside the performances.
I was lucky enough to present on Syntə at the prestigious London Gophers which as really fun and had some great chats afterwards. Someone involved with the Florence Go conference suggested I present there too, which would be awesome but we’ll see if I have time among everything else. (Go or Golang is the language I wrote my live coding platform in.)
Then came fake[dac~], also at Corsica Studios. Stephen (m-onz) has done several of these already and usually features a blend of live coders, electronic musicians and DJs. I helped rig up Stephens projectors and in return he had let us use them for the algorave.
Just a couple of days later came the excellent Peckham Digital festival, which among the many interesting workshops featured an algorave party on the Saturday evening. I volunteered all day and got to sit in on Lucy Cheesman’s excellent ‘from scratch’ workshop. I helped coordinate the open slots at the beginning of the algorave and managed to fit in a sneaky ten minutes myself 🤭 - I couldn’t get my laptop to connect to the projector but Lucy kindly shared my screen via her webcam setup she uses to display her keystrokes. Lucy being an all round excellent human is quite a theme for this year, as you will see.
Alex (yaxu) who played at the June algorave came down again from el sheffo for an event in Limehouse Town Hall, which is an amazing venue. This was a great event, Alex got the dancefloor going followed by psychedelic liquid light show (sorry, I can’t remember the name of the artists) which was impressive.
In September we had the first in this series of London Live Code meetups. This was a good turn out and only marred by me being in frenetic/excitable mode, something which has happened all too often this year. So I wasn’t 100% effective in chairing the meeting. However, we all had fun and it was a great start. To avoid overly diluting this one, I’ll leave more details on that for a future post when I get round to it :)
In October we were lucky enough to have a second Peckham Digital for a one-day event of workshops followed by an algorave. I was volunteered all day again and also managed to sneak in on the end of the open slots too hehe. Great fun and exhausting day. And I got to keep a poster, whoop.
We also had meetup two in October. Improving on the success of the first one after some really helpful feedback, this was a lovely atmosphere.
I was kindly invited to play at Noughty Fingers Halloween event organised by June and Thomas at Spanners. This was an awesome event and the strong theme really helped push me out of my comfort zone and develop further. I had a haunted bassline and wav sample which both went missing, but luckily was able to pull off a fun performance 🥳
I met someone there who told me not to bother with trying to build community within the live coding scene. I found this a deeply cynical view point and replied that is my entire project - humans are intensely social animals - all we have is community… Can’t be doing with this outdated Thatcherite nonsense. And the success of all these events speaks for itself :)
In November we changed meetup venue to the lovely Sekforde which had been suggested by a previous participant, Evan. This was awesome and ended spilling over into an extended international(!) Strudel/Flok/Hydra jam, so fun much code! I got to meet the lovely and inspirational Lu Wilson whose enthusiasm and efforts really made it a special event. We also got the open slots sorted for…
Algorave #2! This was mindblowingly good and took we two days to recover even though I only had one beer ha. Much to say, but one thing that I loved the most was how everyone rallied round to make it happen. Such vibes. All the performances were amazing and including the open slots we had 19 people perform, oof! Sadler was a real star in last minute unanticipated assitance on the a/v, Xinde kindly brought a spare projector unnannouced and Lucy was amazingly supportive and did a really fun ‘from-scratch’ set - so impressive. But I really loved them all.
Looking ahead to 2025 in Jan there is the next meetup on the 27th at the Sekforde. And two days later another fake[dac~] event at Corsica Studios. Looks to be a gud’un.
Well that was a whistle-stop tour - I may have forgotten/mis-remembered pertinent details - please reach out if I have!
Why am I telling you all of this? Well first I believe in openness, and then from that openness stems the potential to inform and inspire other events to happen, which is something I’d love to see. And I want to make my intentions clear - someone asked me at the last meetup why do I love live coding so much - I was like, erm… Well, I thinks it’s just a confluence of wonderful things. I love coding, I love music and performance and I love community and socialising.
Going forward I want to prioritise performers who feel the same way and want to invest in the scene. We owe everything to that - as Eno says there is no such thing as genius, only scenious!
I wanted to say more about my creative process and how it’s developed, but lets save that for another day.
So in summary, this year been so special to me, and why exactly is that?
…I must be Algoraving Mad :)
EDIT: I completely forgot about hellocatfood’s really cool performance at Tate Modern in Nov! It featured a video modular set projected on a huge screen, accompanied by tidalCycles music. We all went to the pub after, fun times! Oh, and HUGE omission - I went to two lovely Pattern Clubs. This was a big inspiration for the other meetups, check one out!
updated on: 4 / 1 / 2025