It’s been a really great month, going back to Goldsmiths for the astounding NIME, including fine memories playing to a great crowd with Matthew Yee-King as Canute at Corsica Studios (including an encore), then enjoying the fine Brighton Algorave as a (slightly tired) punter, then the excellent discussions at the Live Coding and the Body symposium, and joining fantastic live coders for massively fun algoraves in Sheffield and Manchester.
Most recently though was the 24 hour Access Space Digithon. Last Saturday we spent all day and all night hosting performances in Access Space and remotely around the world (Ontario, New York, Mexico City, Minneapolis, Germany, Italy, plus Birmingham, Cardiff, and London). It was an intense 24 hours (ashamedly I stayed awake only for around the first 22 hours), but really rewarding, and we made over £1500 towards the Access Space.
Access Space is a really great community free media lab, which a helps lot of people who have highly challenging backgrounds and problems. They are the longest running lab of its kind in the UK, and are in need of funds to help stay open and expand their programme. If you have some spare cash, please donate – they have very low overheads and do great work.
This was 24 hours of many highlights, but here’s a few of them that you can enjoy in return for your donation:
- Me and Jake Harries having a pint in the pub “outside broadcast”
- Paul Granjon – one of my superheroes, coding algorave music on a BBC micro.
- Marco Donnarumma – One of the most ‘present’ remote performances I’ve experienced
- Norah Lorway – a super ambient set that was very welcome at the time, as was xname’s streaming from the darkness of an Italian beach, and Susanne Palzer streaming secret cinema from an attic in Germany
- A stunning set from the Juneau Brothers
- Kate Sicchio walking around New York City picking out connections with Sheffield
- Tanya Goncalves, Mike Hodnick, and Richard Eason providing showcasing Tidal 🙂 And a lot of other fine live coding performances..
- Great contributions from Mexican friends – JoseCaos, Diego Madero and harmonipan, Elihu Garret and smellinstereo
- Scott Hawkins starting the whole thing off by playing a ceiling fan with his head until security came and asked him to stop
- Jake Harries with his famous spam songs
- Brian G Gilson with a calm and beautiful a/v performance (we set him behind the projection, on a net screen)
- Julio d’Escrivan with an astounding supercollider set
- Warning, explicit lyrics: Stuart Faulkner shouting at a dinosaur playing the bagpipes
- Hard Shoulder (almost) literally melting his face to live techno
Well it was all good, go and check the full listing. And please donate 🙂 We’ll leave the free gifts up for a couple of days longer, so you could get yourself an algorave tshirt or stickers in return…
