Algorave on the CyberYacht


The lovely people in TOPLAP Berlin, CNDSD (@CNDSD_ on twitter) and Alexandra Cardenás organised an Algorave on the CyberYacht, a VR-ish “cyber party” on Mozilla hubs. I performed my work-in-progress live 3D printing techno set, which you can see here (my set starts 32:42 into this video):

There were some other great performances – the one right after me, celeste, was a great mix of very danceable techno that had me bouncing on my yoga ball chair at home (don’t judge me, I have to sit a lot).

There is a whole underground community of virtual techno clubs, like https://www.uxr.zone/ and the Yacht. If you’re brave, there’s a discord channel or the main one at the Toplap livecode chat forum.

Some reflections on LivePrinter (which has been undergoing a lot of development recently as I try and finish up the PhD):

  • It was fun to make repeated note runs and the timing of the printer movements was tight enough to work alongside a 110 bpm drum machine and synth setup. The reverb adds lots of atmosphere, as if we’re in a cavernous factory making things with whizzing machinery.
  • For discordant techno, starting on a note and rotating back and forth at slightly uneven angles created some nice chordal sounds. If I had more inputs it would have been more interesting, stereo-wise.
  • Setup was complicated and I think I double-monitored Bitwig because the recorded gig sounded lower in Bitwig and louder in raw inputs. Have to check monitoring in OBS and do a how-to.
  • It was helpful to get the camera right in front and show the filament coming out. It was fun to mess with it dripping down.
  • I need to re-think the Logo-like chained language that I originally used for series of movements. What used to be # turnto 90 | dist 50 | speed 20 | go 1
  • New idea – in grammar, specify moves in terms of beats. Set bpm in LivePrinter class var and calculate mspb (milliseconds per beat) and use that like: move x:1b to move in the x direction for the duration of one beat. Already have m2s 48(midi to speed, convert midi note 48 to a speed value in mm/s based on printer motor characteristics). Then I could also specify movements as time: 1s, 20ms, for example

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