29 March 2019
Staying Late at the Library ... to Algorave
Blog article by Algorave audio-visual artist Coral Manton. Coral is curating this British Library Lates Algorave in collaboration with British Library Events, BL Labs, Digital Scholarship and The Alan Turing Institute.
On the 5th April British Library Lates will host an Algorave in the atrium. Algorave artists will live-code music and visuals, writing code sequences generating algorithmic beats beneath the iconic Kings’ Library Tower.
The scene grew out of a reaction to ‘black-boxing’ in electronic music - where the audience is unable to interface with the ‘live-ness’ of what the performer is making. Nothing is hidden at an Algorave. In an Algorave you can see what the performer is doing through code projected onto walls in realtime. The creative process is open and shared with the audience. Code is shared freely. Performers share their screens with the crowd, taking them on a journey through making - unmaking - remaking, thought processes laid bare in lines of improvised code weaving it’s way through practised shaping of sound.
As a female coder, becoming part of the Algorave community has led me to reflect on the power of seeing women coding live, and how this encourages greater participation from women. Algorave attempts to maintain a positive gender balance. More than this the joy of seeing women confidently and openly experimenting with code, sharing their practise, making mistakes, revelling in uncertainty and error, crashing-restarting-crashing again to cheers from the supportive crowd willing the performances to continue sharing the anarchic joy of failure in a community where failure leads to new possibilities.
Algorave is a fun word - an algorithmic rave - a scene where people come to together to create and dance to music generate by code. Technically Algorave is described as "sounds wholly or partly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive conditionals”. The performers writes
lines of code that create cyclic patterns of music, layered to create an evolving composition. The same is applied to the visuals: live coded audio reactive patterns, showing shapes bouncing, revolving, repeating to the beat of the music. All of this creates a shared club experience like no other.
Visual Artists Antonio Robert AKA hellocatfood: “I like to do Algorave because I think it runs an otherwise perfect black box computer into a live performance instrument. Playing at an Algorave forces me to abandon what I know and respond to everything happening around me. It shows me that even something as meticulously designed as a computer is a living tool that is subject to randomness and mistakes.”
Algorave is an open, non-hierarchical global community, with it’s hub in Sheffield. There have been Algoraves in over 50 cities around the world. Algorave is not a franchise, it is a free culture, anyone can put on an Algorave - however their approach should align with the ethos of the community. Algorave collapses hierarchies - headliners are generally frowned upon. Diversity is key to the Algorave community. Algorave is open to everyone and actively promotes diversity in line-ups and audiences. The community is active both online and at live events organised by community members. The software people use is created within the community and open-source. There is little barrier to participation. If you are interested in Algorave come along, speak to the performers, join the online community, download some software
(e.g. IXI Lang, puredata, Max/MSP, SuperCollider, Extempore, Fluxus, TidalCycles, Gibber, Sonic Pi, FoxDot and Cyril) and get coding.
If this sounds like your scene or you want to know more, please join us at the Algorave Late Event. Tickets available here: https://www.bl.uk/events/late-at-the-library-algorave
Also check out https://algorave.com & https://toplap.org