Month: April 2018

Live coding Tokyo Yorkshire

Renick Bell, Algorave Tokyo

I’m really happy to be arranging a cultural exchange between live coders in Yorkshire in Tokyo, with Access Space and in collaboration with Renick Bell. We are still working things out but so far have funding support from Arts Council England, the British Council and Great Britain Sasakawa foundation.

Lucy Cheesman, Algorave Sheffield

We’re still making the final programme and searching for additional funds, but it looks like we will have events in Sheffield and Leeds between 30th August and 4th September, and in Tokyo and Osaka between 8th and 18th November, including micro residencies, workshops, concerts and algoraves.

The funding will help support artists traveling between Tokyo and Yorkshire. From the Tokyo side we have:

From the Yorkshire side we have:

Hope you can join us if you’re nearby Sheffield/Leeds or Tokyo/Osaka! We’ll share more details on the events soon. As a special preview Renick will join us in Sheffield for a performance this very Saturday..

Too many projects

I have a lot of projects. Let me count them

  1. PENELOPE – exploring weaving as a technical mode of existence
  2. Spicule – trying to get an ultra-complicated and overdue crowdfunded album project finished
  3. TidalCycles – free/open source project for live coding of pattern – lots of coding + documentation to do
  4. Dorkbotsheffield – electronic art meetings in Sheffield
  5. Eulerroom – streamed algorithmic music events
  6. Tidalbot – Currently a twitter bot but with expansive ideas behind it feeding into patternlib
  7. Feedforward – New text editor for tidal (also a dependency of spicule)
  8. Bands, loads of bands – slub, ccai, and many more on the back burner and without names yet, as well as performing solo as Yaxu. Doing a lot of performances
  9. AlgoMech – Growing annual(ish) festival around algorithmic and mechanical movement, third edition May 2019
  10. Access Space – on the board of trustees, research director (on a volunteer basis)
  11. Code Access – work-in-progress project working with people with sensory impairment and live coding, currently working with Childrens’ Media Conference towards an exhibition in July
  12. Lurk.org – project with Aymeric Mansoux building alternative internet services like talk.lurk.org and we.lurk.org
  13. Algorave and TOPLAP, quite amorphous collectives but I still do a fair amount of coordination despite actively trying to share the keys.. Plus helping with the steering committee of the ICLC and ICLI conferences I started.
  14. A book on live coding with some great people – I owe them a lot of writing!
  15. An international exchange between live coders in Tokyo and Yorkshire this summer/autumn
  16. A remix + tidalcycles samplepack project with Blood Sport

+ probably a fair few more I can’t think of right now… Plus a lot half-started and half-finished projects I’d really like to work on. Visual programming, being part of FoAM, etc. Plus being a father. I could just about imagine doing any single one of the these as a full time occupation, really, but only the first one actually pays me money (it’s a part-time position, 50%). I can’t really imagine dropping any of them. What to do? It doesn’t help that I’m terrible with time management.

I’m not sure what the point of this post is, apart from to stare at this problem in the face, and to explain why I’m sometimes a bit slow with finishing projects or replying to email. Any advice warmly received.

Tidalbot is back

TidalBot is back! You can tweet tidal patterns to @tidalbot on twitter, and it will give you back an mp3 of the pattern, as well as a PDF with a visualisation of it.. Here’s a couple of examples:

As a bonus, the latest pattern is currently being projected into the shop window of Access Space Labs on Fitzalan Square in Sheffield.