On the 15th April 2025, I promised that ALL my live coding performances would be ones that the audience can join in with. I promised to do this for one year, and I did it! Except for one slip up.
I also promised to do a report of how it went. You’re reading it now.
I did it. The audience was able to join in with any performance I did. “What does that mean in practice?” I hear you ask.
well… for my live coding performances, I started doing ALL my performances in a flok (multiplayer) client, even if it was only me billed to play. And I began sharing the room name at the start of sets as a way of inviting people to join my supposedly solo slots.
Earlier on, I encouraged people more readily: When this gimmick was still new, I made more noise about it and lots of people joined. The first person to do that was Laura who joined a bunch of my solo visual slots over a short period of time. It was really interesting how it made both of us feel to do such a thing. i remember after the first time she was like “I wasn’t sure if I was actually allowed to do it” to me afterwards. But it slapped!!! she gave the set much more energy from down below me, sitting on a bench in a dark part of the club.
there was a magic naughtiness to it. it definitely felt against the rules. it was my set not hers and she was sneaking in 👀
on the other hand, i felt nervous too about whether i was stealing her work as my own. after a set people typically come up to you and say something like “sick set” regardless of how sick it was. i apologised repeatedly: “oh it was mainly Laura” and this surprised people: “oh i thought it was you?” and I’d “well yes it was but you see I’ve recently started this promise and—”
After the next collab performance, Laura got more into it and didn’t feel some of the same “should I? shouldn’t I?” and it’s interesting how quickly it starts to feel normal to share
People joined my solo audio sets too, often trying to throw me off or mess me around, which I found fun. In this performance you can see me react to some of those vandalisms and you can hear some of the crowd-contributed stuttering most of the way through.
I love this kind of chaos. It really injected a load of energy into my sets. I also see it as a kind of flex to let people mess with me like that, which feels increasingly important to me as I learn more about the history of “jamming” including the origin of the word “jam” itself.
It’s also [just] funny to watch someone (me) struggle on stage(?) when performing. This is what I leant into back when I did comedy: We let the audience mess us around and make our life difficult and it was fun. And it was fun to bring this into my live coding performances too. For me, the high moment was at errorcamp when I let people join me in a tool I made called twirl. It’s whole purpose is this kind of audience-interaction-trouble-making. It’s good for joining from your phone, so it’s even easier for audience members to get involved. The set ended when Lizzie did 99999 crow sounds to crash my computer.
This kind of experience normalised collaboration for me. It became natural to hop into a room with anyone and start jamming together and I did a whole bunch of this at errorcamp and also ICLC. There was a lot of “laptop hopping” back then. For me, that practice began at the London algorave at corsica studios where I saw Lucy leave someone else with her laptop for over an hour and it kind of blew my mind. We did a whole lot more of this at errorcamp and ICLC, which is when I began to become comfortable with the practice myself.
Coming home from ICLC, I wondered if I’d ever perform solo ever again. Maybe I should make the promise last longer than one year? Maybe I should promise a lifetime?
There were some cases where I double checked with people that it was okay with them that “me” performing meant “anyone” performing. Like, “just so you know, I made a promise and—” and most people don’t care but some do. Some people want me to perform and no one else and I’ve learned that I can [just] lie to these people. “Yeah don’t worry it’ll [just] be me” 👀
On the other hand, I grew to understand that it was actually [just] me performing. If it was my name on the setlist, then yes, it was a performance “by me”. Not “by pastagang” or anyone else. It was “by me” even if other people got involved. Sure, maybe it was “by me” plus some feature or collab with someone else, but ultimately, I was the one responsible. I felt responsible for the performance either way. It was down under my name, and I noticed how that can be quite a freeing / soulful feeling for the other person and me. It means… if someone else is joining the performance… they’re doing it for the love of the jam, not for any other reason… and they’re free to do whatever they want: it won’t point back at them unless they want it to. They can pick and choose their level of credit / visibility afterwards before and during. So Opening yourself up to collaboration seems like another way of making space.
As time went on, I certainly became less visibly open to collaboration. I’d put up the room name more briefly or cryptically or I’d [just] give people a hint of what it is. But still, for those who knew or for those who I told, it was available, and people sometimes asked, knowing about my promise. So yeah, people kept collaborating with me the whole way through the year!
Towards the end of the year, I got a bit better at prompting collaboration in more natural-feeling ways. My two proudest moments were the two times I’ve jammed with someone on the mic. One of these also involved someone hopping in to take over visuals. I’d love to keep these kinds of collaborations going. I feel like my promise forced me to collaborate in a gimmicky way at first (using the promise as a crutch / ice-breaker / mechanic) and that forced me to learn to kick off collaborations in a more natural way. Long may it continue! And many thanks to Ziraflo and Nadya and Monz for hopping in on those things.
I did a podcast episode with Bundy where he told me all about cyphers, which I knew nothing about then and still know nothing about today. But he suggested we do some live coding cyphers where different people take turns on the same laptop (instead of mic) (though you can also take turns on the mic). It’s like an alternative to the usual pastagang jamming we do where everyone goes at the same time. Though it was similar to the increasingly common practice of solos within pastagang jams.
I brought his idea to the London scene and we started trying it out! We were already doing a lot of laptop hopping so, for us, this was basically another level built on top of that.
We tried it a bunch of times but it really clicked during the first algoravioli event where me and Joey and Jane did a very long cypher with each other and it was fantastic. It felt beautiful! I really like how cyphers feel like a conversation. You do a lot of performing in it, but you also do a lot of listening. It feels respectful: It feels like you can celebrate each other more. We dragged over Daniel to join too. It felt like honouring him.
The three of us (me + Jane + Joey) began jokingly calling ourselves Cyphergang. But it wasn’t just us. “Cyphergang” also means anyone else we drag / invite into the loop for a turn. And we signed up cyphergang for a closing slot at AlgoRhythms one day and it was awesome.
At the following algoravioli, we cyphered again, and at this point it felt natural. In fact, I don’t think I did a single non-cypher slot. Everything was a cypher: It was constant. Me and Joey got used to giving each other a little look with our eyes and we knew what it meant between the two of us. There was one point when we were doing two cyphers at the same time: One for visuals, one for audio. We swapped and swapped and swapped, and Jane joined too. People watching looked a little confused the first time me and Joey both stood up and left our laptops at the same time during our sets. We walked round the table to the other person’s laptop after a little dance on the way past each other.
It’s funny because this is something that I tried with Lizzie way earlier, just after ICLC. We swapped over doing visuals and audio a few times during a set, but I didn’t stick at it long enough to get the hang of it properly. Luckily I did with Joey and Jane!
And yes, at that second Algoravioli, we invited tons more people into the cypher at the end of the night, including enthusiastic newbies.
But really, the entire algoravioli event is a big old cypher. We don’t mark clear beginnings and endings to sets. You plug in your laptop and start outputting noises / visuals while the previous person is playing. It’s one big song and we’re all in it.
I wasn’t there but I heard about how Joey got everyone to do a big goodbye cypher with him at his last event London before flying away. I heard it was very emotional.
I will never shut up about the value of living and breathing openness. I learned / gained so much from opening myself up to collaboration AT ALL TIMES. my life is a lot richer now.
However, Unfortunately, I broke my promise right at the end of the year. I recorded a strudel tutorial and I accidentally got a bit too “into it” during the tutorial so I’d say it crossed the line from “tutorial” into “performance”, and it was, alas, completely single-player. I hope you’ll forgive me. I did a pretty good job apart from that I think. And I hope you appreciate me being honest about my failure.
Since completing the year, I’ve been rediscovering what it means to perform alone again. The novelty feels very exciting to me. I return to solo performance completely different / changed by the year I’ve just done. Performing on my own is a whole different paradigm for me now that I’ve denormalised it for myself.
I plan to explore further what it means to go the other direction: To go completely insular. I think I might do a really really really long solo performance to see what happens. I suspect that I won’t be able to keep it up and I’ll come crawling back to collaboration.
And I do hope to continue all the collaborative work.
As an artist, I want to be known for collaboration. I think I’m already known for a few things: Recursion, openness, sand… And I want to be known for collaboration too. I think it’s interesting how my personal individual reputation can become entangled with this ego death experience thingy. It feels contradictory to me. Or it feels really exciting / magical / illusory / surreal / pop art / ???
I think… Now that I know that I can lose ownership of my own performances, i feel more comfortable with actively deciding to take it back, but this time— I freaked out a bit, a while back, when I was becoming more well-known in certain circles and people started to listen to what I said more: I was worried about what I was becoming: An authority figure, essentially, which I hate(d). It icked me out.
But now I feel like this year has cured me of that
Back to the wikiblogardenite.