Happy to announce that I’m organising an Algorave at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery on 15th October in the Tearoom!
On the decks code will be myself, bundy, and nadya via proxy.
I’ve been going to BMAG since I was really young so I’m very excited that I get to perform there soon! Go get your tickets!
On 17th and 18th July I was in Lake District to perform at QUOB. It’s a relatively new festival, with the first edition only taking place in October 2025. It takes place in Fell Foot Woods in a barn/shed-type structure that can probably hold no more than 200 people.
In many ways it reminds me of a much smaller version of SUPERNORMAL Festival, in that I went there not knowing many of the artists but knew I was in for a well-curated series of weird and wonderful performances.
On the first night I was most looking forward to seeing Slikback. I’d played his music many times on my Mondo Radio and (Algo|Afro) Futures radio shows and so was really excited to see him perform. When he dropped Armada I joined the mosh pit! My back hated me the next morning but it was worth it.
On Saturday I did two performances. The first was my usual footwork-inspired tracks with a bit of chaos on top. I will get around to doing a proper release of these soon, I promise!
Following that I did an unannounced super-secret visuals performance for Slikback’s DJ set (omg!). For this I used my modular video synth. It was also the first outing of my newly acquired Glitch Boy module. Definitely more that I want to explore with that. For example, it has bluetooth support so I want to hand out a controller to the audience so that they can play a game as I glitch it.
A huge thanks to the organisers for inviting me to perform. It’s not often that I get to do live coding outside of the usual Algorave and Algorave-adjacent contexts. I get a bit nervous thinking about how unfamiliar audiences will react to something very different but thankfully many people seemed to enjoy it!
Of course I really loved everyone’s performances but particular highlights were from Slikback (obvs), Bathing Suits (who gave me a shout out aieeee!), A’Bear, Alex Izaak Milling, CURRENTMOODGIRL, Kelly Jayne Jones, Grasping at Reality, and Brawny. Go support them, and of course support the festival itselef!
I started writing this blog post in the Summer of 2024. At the time I was on a game development course where we had a workshop on building a successful portfolio website. Many of us held our heads in shame as we looked at our horrible, barren, and outdated websites.
Shortly after this wake-up call I published a “back soon” blog post and hoped that I’d find the motivation to finally give my website some attention. Of course “back soon” turned out to be nearly two years. I’m now here on June 3rd 2026 returning to this half-written blog post which explained my absence but this time with an actually presentable website. So, let’s return to the original provocation of this blog post: What happened to my website and what can you expect going forward?
The tl;dr answer is that Wordpress became unbearable to use, the other services I relied on became shit, and a secret third thing which I’ll talk about in a later blog post.
Since the beginning of time (2008 I think) my website was built on Wordpress and focused on blogging. Prior to Wordpress I was a livejournal user and so the idea of blogging felt natural to me, which Wordpress excelled at. Eventually, though, I really needed a way to showcase artworks without asking viewers to have to scroll back through the feed to find specific artworks. Since around May 2014 I used the Touchfolio theme which mostly solved this. It gave me a way to put images and videos of a project on the front page and add a short description. It did most of what I wanted with a few quirks.
However, despite its popularity and mostly open source status, it was rarely updated and the bugs started to pile up. One issue was that Wordpress’s newly introduced custom widgets feature wasn’t supported. In general, Touchfolio seemed to implement its features in its own custom way and wasn’t being updated to do things in newly introduced “Wordpress” ways. So, any new features were a no go for me. For the most part that didn’t matter. I just needed to use Touchfolio’s in built gallery features and blog posts. As long as that worked I could mostly ignore its shortcomings.
Then, one day, the whole site broke. I can’t recall exactly what happened, but I think Wordpress dropped support for older versions of jQuery or some other software in the early 2020s. Bug reports on github suggest this happened around 2019 or 2020. There were various hacks and temporary workarounds but eventually, around April 2021 the solution was to drop the front page gallery, turning my website back into a blog.
What happened next is still a bit hazy to me. Either the Touchfolio theme became more incompatible with newer Wordpress versions and stopped working or I became sick of having an outdated theme. In any case around July 2023 the theme changed once again to one of Wordpress’s default themes.
Then, finally, some time in November 2024 I decided to replace my whole website with a one-pager that had some basic information, contact details, and links to places like instagram and youtube where you could find more up-to-date information. My website had gone from being useful repository of information and archive of my projects to being a functionally identical but expensive linktree that pointed people to other websites.
Alongside my theme breaking I was also battling with plugins. Plugins were one of the big features of Wordpress. I liked the idea that any problem you had could probably be addressed with a plugin. One of my favourite plugins was the Broken Link Checker. Link rot is definitely a real problem and so being able to identify broken links across my website and replace the link with a Archive.org link was great.
Over time I noticed the plugins becoming worse. To use a modern term they became enshittified. Plugins that were once independent were being acquired by larger plugin developers like WPMU Dev. Some started asking if they could track me, or prompting me to upgrade to a premium version. The most visible sign of the enshittification of plugins was when they turned my Wordpress dashboard into an advertising nightmare. So many requests to upgrade to premium that I never asked for.
This screenshot was from June 2026 but it has definitely been this bad for a long time.
Plugins can of course just be disabled, but my issue was that I had long relied on a few for core functionality. For example, I used The Events Calendar and Events Calendar Shortcode plugins for my events page. It provided a really easy way to display events show more information. However, with each update brought the possibility of enshittification. I don’t remember if The Events Calendar did the ol’ bait and switch and put once core functionality behind a paywall, but tbh I stopped inputting events in the early 2020s and I didn’t want to stick around to find out.
In the early 2000s/2010s APIs were the all the hype. The idea is that you would put all of your data, e.g. tweets, listening habits, reading lists, into a service and then you or anyone could utilise an API to interface with that service and potentially build services on top it. This is why, for a time, there were a number of alternative twitter clients, or widgets that would display your last.fm listens or recent Facebook updates.
Having all of these connected services was actually quite cool. btw do you also hear that foreboding music too? Anyway…
An external service I relied on heavily was Flickr. Very early on I was using Gallery 3, which is why some very early posts have these weird embed codes instead of images. It was functional but also a bit cumbersome whereas Flickr seemed to understand that artists and photographers wanted an easy way to view and share photos. For a very long time nearly any photo or short video was an embed from Flickr. It was so useful that I even bought a pro subscription.
By 2020 I was using Flickr less and less. This could have been due to using instagram more (I even toyed with having a separate artist account for a time), but also lockdowns had just started and so there were fewer opportunities for me to take photos to upload.
For a few years I begrudgingly kept paying for a pro subscription. By this point Touchfolio had stopped working so the albums for each artwork and project became my pseudo-portfolio. But over time I resented paying for a service that I was barely using. I only kept paying because some others relied on it (e.g. Algoravers used photos I had taken for press shots) and I had invested so much time and effort into it (sunk cost fallacy anyone?).
Once Flickr raised their subscription prices a few too many times I decided it was time to stop paying. My account reverted back to a basic one and I got warnings saying that photos that went beyond my free account quota would be deleted. The only concern I had about this was that if photos beyond a certain date or count were deleted many blog posts would have gaping holes where photos once were.
I honestly now regret relying on these external services so heavily.
And it’s not just Flickr. I have similar feelings about Vimeo. For a few years I had a pro account. Once I stopped paying I was assured that uploads that went beyond my free account quota would still be accessible but I just couldn’t upload any more. Then, in May 2026 they reversed this and there are probably now videos which are inaccessible.
All of this showed me that using Wordpress with other services for embedding media/content wasn’t working. It used to work but the internet changed, and my needs changed. So I began the long task of finding an alternative.
So many artists and graphic designer friends and peers have really nice websites built on top of Squarespace, Wix, or some other portfolio service. I briefly considered this as it would make my life so much easier but I would essentially be trading one walled garden for another. Whatever framework, CMS, or service I did adopt would have to do a few things:
Honestly, I liked the Touchfolio full-page showcase (I think this is called hero images). It would have been great if those linked to project pages where I could show more information.
RSS does one thing and it does it well: It lets people subscribe to and read my blog. Sure, it’s not new and fancy, but it works.
This is one of the most important requirements. My blog has posts going back nearly 20 years. In many ways I see my website as a resource for other people. It is a showcase for my work but it is also where I share progress updates, code, and tutorials, the most well known of these being my Databending in Audaicty tutorial.
It was posted in 2009 and in the years since it has been referenced, linked to and replicated so many times. Sure, it doesn’t show at the top of search results anymore, but I feel that this is an important part of glitch art’s history and so I want to try and preserve it as much as possible.
Then there’s my other tutorials such as Seamlessly loop Wave Modifier in Blender, Datamoshing using Avidemux 2.7.0, and (mis)Using FFmpeg’s Motion Interpolation Options. These posts provide specialist information to a small group of people but I still want to preserve it and have it be of service to others who have the same unique needs that I do/did.
If the service or framework that I adopted couldn’t import blog posts then it would have been a no from me.
So, in reality if my new website could be like Wordpress + Touchfolio in 2014 then I would be happy.
I had heard of static website builders for a while. Conceptually they are like like a modern day equivalent of Dreamweaver or Front Page Express in that you do all of the building and editing locally and then upload it to a server. One difference is that you keep the content and theme/styling separate: you write your content in markdown files and it takes that content and builds the website for you. No server-side dynamic page building at all!
When I started (Algo|Afro) Futures in 2021 I needed a very basic site for it and so chose the Hugo static site builder. I don’t know if there was any big-brained process behind this decision but I liked how it worked. Most importantly it was lightweight and fast. I could do an update and be confident that there would be no plugin or backend updates that would break the site. I could set it and forget it. This positive experience convinced me to use Hugo for my redesign.
Migrating was a gargantuan task, and one that is still ongoing. As mentioned earlier, I had two decades of blog posts to migrate, and then there was embedded content from Flickr that was going to disappear so I needed to account for that too. Fortunately for me there are a few plugins and services for migrating. I think I used this WordPress to Hugo Exporter which had the added feature of including any embedded media in its export. This meant all external Flickr photos were included! I would still have to do manual work to get attachments working and redirect some links, but this saved me a lot of work.
I had this exported archive sitting in various location on my computer for maybe two years before I got the motivation to do the migrating.
2025 -2026 saw the website rebuilding process pick up pace and now it’s in a fairly usable state. I think I officially uploaded the new site on 5th July. The most remarkable thing about it is that, well, it’s unremarkable! It doesn’t do anything other than display my art, events, projects, and blog. On the viewer-facing side the most “fancy” thing is does is have an image carousel on the front page. On the user-facing side (that’s me) I’m just happy I have a reliable way to host and update my art. Of course there’s always a chance that Hugo could become unmaintained, but having everything in plain text files that can easily be parsed (thanks yaml!) means that it’s easy to migrate should I need to do it again.
Now that my website is back, what now?
I’ll be gradually adding old projects, fixing links and embedded content, and making sure that my archive is up-to-date. For example, you may have seen that I have events listings going back to my graduate show 2007! Many of those listings still have their original event urls. 99% of people won’t look at anything older than two years, but for me it’s important to have a record of everything that I’ve done. As a solo freelance artist I find all too easy to fall into pits of despair, particularly after waves of rejections or comparing myself to people on Instagram. Seeing my events listings and old projects helps to remind me that, even in periods of down time, I have accomplished things and I hopefully will again in the future.
I can also see myself getting back into blogging again. In fact, I already have been posting a few things since relaunching. I prefer blogging over (or in addition to) posting social media as there’s a sense of permanence. For example, Sometimes I like to write essay-length posts on Mastodon, and on occasion a late-night sketch gets lots of attention on Instagram.
I’m glad that there’s an audience for these posts but after a day or two they get lost in the feed. I would spend hours agonising over how to distil an idea into Instagram’s rigid formats or Mastodon’s content limits (word count, images or videos, not both), find an optimal time to post, pick my best/most optimised content only for the post to get little attention and then promptly get lost in the feed.
Sinking so much time into posting on social media feels like lost time. But, I recognise that it is necessary for artists and musicians to have a presence on these platforms. So, I will continue to post on social media, but for when I really want to do a “deep dive” into a topic or have something more permanent that I can point people to I will post/cross-post onto my blog.
Overall, I’m just happy to once again have a place for my art and writing that I can call my own.
From 23rd - 26th July I was somewhere in rural Exeter for Errorcamp, which is a semi-annual gathering of live coders. It’s not really an official event, festival, or conference, so the best way to learn more about it is to become part of a local live coding community.
I had gone to previous Errorcamps and one thing I really valued about it was having the opportunity to spend time with live coders in an informal environment. My understanding is that it was started as a way to reconnect after being locked away indoors for much of 2020-2021. As a global community of live coders we had been regularly organising week-long live streams and attending conferences like ICLC, and I think we were missing having that semi-occasional meeting of international live coders. This story might not be accurate, but it’s how I think of it. In any case, one thing I like about Errorcamp is being able to be in a space with people you may only know by a username or code contributions.
There was a loose agenda and activities list which was largely decided by the attendees themselves. Anyone could propose an activity whether that be a workshop on knitting (everyone loved this), deep listening, building robots, or just a walk up a hill. Unlike previous Errorcamps this year I purposefully set out to do less. There’s always an interesting workshop, or a demonstration of a synth, or a live coding jam happening, and it can sometimes be overstimulating. If I were to try to do everything it would lead to, as it has done in the past, a bit of burnout and not really fully engaging in anything (is this fomo?). So, this year I did less.
I had a lot of fun choreographing robots with Joana and Alex, learning about making heavy metal in Strudel with Boggo, and learning more about TouchDesigner from Chau. Aside from that here’s a few of my outputs from the weekend:
At some point I got speaking to Nkosi Khumalo. He mentioned how he’s been trying to create grime music using live coding. Here’s what he had accomplished already:
I am by no means well versed in grime, let alone algorithmic grime, but I have dabbled a bit in this via the remix badcirculation did of Gaika’s song Forward. My own songs which explore footwork and house also brought a bit of knowledge too. Nkosi mentioned that he was inspired by or wanted to reference Don’t Waste my time by Krept & Konan, and so with that a few hours later here’s what I created:
This was a very fun challenge figuring out which aspects of grime to replicate e.g. the triangles, wub wub bass, and the quite sparse 808s. I can definitely see myself adopting this more in the future. I’m looking forward to hearing Nkosi’s lyrics on top of it.
On the final night we all had an interesting option of doing a live score to the 1972 film Silent Running. The idea was that during the many sections without dialogue we could separately or collaboratively do a score for it. I’d never heard of the film before but Sheffield’s own 65daysofstatic had done a new score for it in 2011 for Glasgow Film Festival.
I asked to score the opening title sequence and the section following it, with each being about three minutes. I wanted something slightly sombre sounding to match the dystopian tone of the film. I was also imagining something minimal like the opening of Idaho by Open Mike Eagle. For chords I basically opened this chord voicings list and picked chords until I was happy.
I really really really love cello and upright bass sounds. There’s something about the dry, deep, gravelly sound that I enjoy, so I was happy to see Strudel already has some synthesisers (gm_cello:1 and gm_acoustic_bass:2) for this.
Finally, I added in some weird synthy noises from a Korg Monotron Delay. Here’s a recreation of the opening credits with the code overlaid.
If the complete rescoring of the film from Errorcamp is uploaded anywhere I’ll edit this post with a link to it.
For my second section I reused the first part of my contribution to the Behind the Screens series. It didn’t fit too well but it was interesting to give a new context to an earlier work.
Aside from that I really just had a great time chillin’ out maxin’, relaxin all cool and learning about what everyone else is up to. Here’s some photos:
Thanks to the organisers and hosts for such a great weekend!
July 6th - 12th was a self-directed Week of Patching, initiated by Paloma Kop.
Week of Patching is a playful invitation to spend a week, in parallel with other people across the internet, engaging with a patching-based practice.
[…]
Each day, create a patch and then make a recording of its output.
At the end of the week, take pieces of all of those recordings and edit them together into a single composition. (It doesn’t have to be long; for example, you could take 30 seconds of each patch in series to create a 3.5 minute composition.)
From my earliest days of doing creative coding I have been really interested in patching environments, specifically Pure Data. I like how I can trace the flow of data by simply looking at patch cable, even if the actual patch ends up being a mess!
Since 2023 I’ve also been into hardware video synthesis via LZX/Syntonie Eurorack modules, which I really love for the same reason, but also because, unlike software, you can really just plug something in and see what happens. As long as you’re not literally giving something too much electricity it’s pretty hard to generate no output.
I go through phases of being really into patching and then not touching it for weeks or months. Seeing the announcement of Week of Patching I was excited to get the motivation to do it again. Alas, life always finds a way to interfere with plans, so in the end I only did day #2.
The tl;dr is that I wish I dedicated more time to experimenting and not try and rush something to meet a deadline. I should also try and decide on a recording setup ahead of time. And finally, I also think the heatwave massively affected my ability to think and deal with technical issues.
Creating the Cardinal patch was initially quite challenging. I had big ideas but hadn’t patched in a month or two so spent most of time was spent remembering what modules do. Eventually I settled on a very simple but effective ambient pad sound with some modulation.
To create melody I had a couple of options. In most situations I would just use TidalCycles to generate a melody and send midi to Cardinal, but in the spirit of experimentation and using things I already own I opted to use the monome grid. Early in 2026 they released iii, which basically turns the grid into a standalone instrument. I loaded it with the wake script (a standalone variation of awake) which let me play some nice generative melodies.
Next I wanted to add some percussion and granular sounds using TidalCycles. On paper this was very simple but in trying to keep everything in sync I resurfaced a bug that I discovered in 2020. TidalCycles can use AbletonLink for its clock and bpm syncing. Carla is a plugin host (think virtual pedalboard) which can also use AbletonLink. What this means is that any vsts/lv2s that you load in Carla that use clock/bpm will now all be in sync with TidalCycles. Great!
I used Carla to host the Cardinal lv2 plugin. In Cardinal I used delay modules which used the host’s (Carla) bpm. So far no issues. I then wanted to send the clock, bpm and transport information to the monome grid so that it’s melody (generated via wake) would be in sync with everything else. x42 had made a very useful plugin for sending clock, transport, and bpm over midi called mclk.
There is, however, one massive catch: The moment you enable “Use Ableton Link” in Carla the mclk plugin stops working. Or maybe it’s Carla that stops working. Either way, the result is that the clock/bpm doesn’t get sent to the monome grid. When I reported this “bug” in 2020 a fix for mclk was proposed but ultimately not implemented, with x42 saying that it’s an issue with Carla. Yay. With time running out and the heatwave reducing my patience for tech issues to zero I just ditched the idea of integrating TidalCycles.
I similarly had quite big ambitions for creating visuals with the video synth which failed to materialise. What I wanted to do was control my video synth modules with either the monome grid or Cardinal. I would have achieved this by using the Univer Inter module to convert usb midi to CV, and then the SCA-5 Voltage Scaler to scale those voltages down to 0-1v.
I didn’t want to do audio-reactive visuals, but instead have the visuals be closely tied to the audio. In reality, like the audio, I rushed and put a bit too much pressure on myself to create something interesting. A thing that I have learnt about my creative process is that some of my best or most fun work comes out of free experimentation. The moment that I am faced with any deadlines and expectations I essentially freeze up.
I remember reading an interview with Sarah GHP where she talks about her process and has a similar outlook:
So have a goal, have a bunch of happy accidents, and then try to understand things so you can recreate the accidents. You will have more accidents and grow your list of things to understand.
[…]
So, I guess my advice is:
- Look for your starting point. What do you actually like? What do you like that isn’t what everyone else likes? Being a bit of a hater (in your head!) is also a good way to find a starting point. Don’t be mean, but it is useful to know what you do not want to do, especially if you aren’t sure what you want to do.
- Go out and fuck up a lot.
- Find a balance between exploration and deliberation. Don’t try to save everything because you will drive yourself mad.
- Focus on understanding and avenues will open up around that.
The video patch I created was still really nice and gave me room to play, but there’s definitely some playfulness missing.
I haven’t done many at-home recordings of synth jams but this seemed like a good opportunity to do so even if the conditions were not ideal. An issue that I, and many others living in small apartments, faced is I don’t have a dedicated space where I can leave all of my equipment permanently set up. I have to wait for any shared space to become available and then reconstruct my setup each time. It’s inconvenient and takes time away from creating.
Eventually I found a spot on the dining table to film. I spent more time than I should have arranging the synths and laptop so that everything was in shot.
The layout meant that using the video synth was actually kinda difficult. I couldn’t see all of the modules and had to reach over quite far to turn some knobs.
After about 30 minutes of arranging I settled on a setup, sat down and hit record! Enjoy 8ish minutes of me pressing buttons and twiddling knobs.
The result was quite pleasant though not musically or visually very interesting. In an ideal world this would have served as day 0 of the Week of Patching, a day to make sure all of the hardware and software was working as expected and create an environment that I could comfortably create in. But, as the saying goes, life… finds a way to mess up your plans!
Hopefully this will serve as a reminder to me to do more experiments so that I’m not caught off guard for the next Week of Patching. Thanks to Paloma Kop for starting this initiative, it was still a fun learning experience!