This guest post is by Majd Al-Shihabi, he is a systems design engineer and urban planning graduate student at the American University of Beirut. He is the inaugural recipient of the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship. You can find him on Twitter as @majdal.

 

On the 15th of May, Palestinians across the world commemorated Nakba Day, literally translating to “catastrophe”. It is the day where they remember the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their cities, towns and villages, and the destruction of the more than 500 localities, as a prelude to the creation of the State of Israel.

Often, those villages are completely erased. Take for example Lubya. Maps made by the British Society called Palestine Exploration Fund in 1870s mark Lubya on the map, with some farmland in the east and south of the village:

 

In the 1940s, in the last years of the British Mandate over Palestine, the mandate authorities created a set of “topo-cadastral” maps at scale 1:20,000, showing details of the village, including the location of the school, a shrine to El Khadr, and seasonal activities like the threshing floor.

 

Another set of maps, created in 1946, just before the Nakba, this British Mandate map shows Lubya, with the major road that connects Nazareth to Tiberias passing just north of it, as well as some minor roads leading to the village.

1946 1:250,000 map showing Lubya

 

Just three years after the creation of the State of Israel, in 1951, an almost identical map is published, with one major difference: Lubya is literally erased from the map:

1951 map showing the same major and minor roads, with the minor roads leading to nothing

 

This is what the village’s location looks like right now:

The bold spot among the trees is where the village’s houses used to stand.

The Palestine Open Maps project has been collecting those public domain maps and making them available as a tool for storytelling, to add nuance about life in pre-Nakba Palestine.

However, those maps have limited research value as static paper maps. That is why the Palestine Open Maps team is working on extracting the geographic data contained in those maps, making them available to researchers, academics, artists, and anyone who wants wants the data, under a permissive license. The team is using the open source tools of OpenStreetMap to vectorise the data. Those tools are optimised by years of open source community contributions for ease of use and collaboration.

The Palestine Open Maps team will be running a mapathon on Saturday the 8th of June at 14:00-17:00. Register here to reserve your spot. See you soon!

 

Interested in literature, sound recordings, place, technology and walking? Then you may wish to attend our upcoming Exploring with Sound Walks event at the British Library on the afternoon of Friday 7th June. Places are free, but please book here; https://soundwalks.eventbrite.co.uk.

Following on from our recent ‘Season of Place’, which was about all things digital mapping; at this Sound Walks event Mahendra Mahey from BL Labs will talk about the Library’s current Imaginary Cities exhibition, which showcases fantastical cityscapes created by the Library’s artist in residence Michael Takeo Magruder. Michael used cutting–edge digital technologies to remix images and live data from the Library’s digital collection of historic urban maps to create fictional and beautiful cityscapes, including an explorable algorithmically generated virtual reality work.

Imaginary Cities exhibition trailer

Bringing us back to exploring real world physical cities; Andrew Stuck, Founder of the Museum of Walking and podcaster at Talking Walking will talk about sound walks, explaining what they are and giving an overview of Sound Walk Sunday, which is scheduled for Sunday 1st September 2019 and the week following.

A sound walk is any walk that focuses on listening to the environment, or adds to the experience for example through the use of sound recordings; a scripted narrator, or choreographed score etc.

Sound Walk Sunday has a map and directory of sound walks on their website, and they facilitate a worldwide network of creatives, institutions and museums to share practices and knowledge around sound walks and walking pieces. Furthermore, this initiative curates a collaborative resource of educative materials, which is available to the public, empowering people to create their own sound walks.

To give examples of the types of works and digital technologies that can be used to create sound walks, there will be a series of short talks and videos by:

• Fred Adam from the GPS Museum and Geert Vermiere of the Milena principle & Made of Walking about their CGeomap platform
• Marcin Barski, curator, music publisher, sound and installation artist
• NG Bristow, writer, director, filmmaker and installation artist
• Babak Fakhamzadeh, Dérive app, Kompl and Sauntering verse
• George Fort, Placecloud.io
• Alastair Horne, a British Library and Bath Spa University PhD student who is making a creative audio work set in Brompton Cemetery
• Josh Kopeček, Echoes

Trailer for Alastair Horne's creative audio project set in Brompton Cemetery

We are hoping the Exploring with Sound Walks event will encourage people to make entries for the current Sound Walk Sunday open call, which is inviting people to create outdoor audio, geo-located, immersive performances, listening walks and sound walks.

Furthermore, we would be delighted if any new sound walk works use our Wildlife Sounds. To explain more about these recordings, Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds at the British Library will talk about this fabulous collection, giving examples of how they have been used creatively by sound artists and game designers, to sow some seeds of inspiration.

Hope to see you there! - Friday 7th June, British Library, book here; https://soundwalks.eventbrite.co.uk.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) 

This post by the British Library’s Digital Curator for Asian and African Collections, Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, reports on a training ‘season’ dedicated to digital mapping.

One of the British Library Digital Scholarship team’s core purposes is to deliver training to BL staff on a wide variety of digital humanities skills, and we’ve been doing so for over seven years. Since last year, we’ve been experimenting with a new format to deliver our Digital Scholarship Training Programme (DSTP) – that would allow flexibility and adaptability through modularity. We offer a thematic series of talks, hands-on workshops and courses in different shapes and sizes. We call this series a ‘season’ or ‘strand’. Digital Curator Mia Ridge has succinctly described this experimental training format in her recent blog post.

Mia was the first to co-ordinate a series of training modules around a specific topic – content mining for digital scholarship with cultural heritage collections. I was next to organise a second series of training, which we called the ‘Season of Place’. With the help of colleagues such as Gethin Rees (Lead Curator for Digital Map Collections) and Magdalena Peszko (Curator for Map Collections), we’ve planned, co-ordinated and delivered a series of modules on digital mapping, running from December 2018 to the end of March 2019.

The ‘Season of Place’

Creating web maps, visualising collections spatially, and understanding the research potential of digital maps are all unsurprisingly very popular topics among BL staff. Our collection items are naturally rife with associated geographical information, whether place of publication/creation or the mention of place names in the text. Mapping collection items data, whether catalogue records or textual content, in isolation or in conjunction with other data, could offer fresh perspectives on heritage material, boost discovery and empower analysis and research.

The aim of the ‘Season of Place’ was therefore three-fold:

• To demonstrate the importance of geographical information embedded within BL collections, and the applicability of geospatial tools and technologies to these collections.
• To provide staff with the skills to use a set of online tools to perform actions such as mapping historical data, geoparsing content and enriching catalogue records with geographical data.
• To spark inspiration through case studies and examples of cutting-edge visualisations and research using digital maps.

What did we cover?

Our training sessions included talks, courses and hands-on sessions delivered by internal and external experts covering topics such as cataloguing geospatial data, geoparsing, georeferencing, working with online mapping tools, digital research using online maps, and public engagement through interactive platforms and crowdsourcing.

Online tools and platforms included (but were not limited to):

• Recogito: recently winning Best DH Tool Award, Recogito is an online platform for collaborative document annotation. It is maintained by Pelagios Commons, a Digital Humanities initiative aiming to foster better linkages between online resources documenting the past. Recogito provides a personal workspace where one can upload, collect and organise source materials – texts, images and tabular data – and collaborate in their annotation and interpretation. We had Dr Valeria Vitale deliver a fantastic workshop dedicated to this platform. 

• Google My Maps: as Google Fusion Tables is shutting down in December 2019, we’ve decided to teach how to use this mapping tool instead. Google My Maps is a free tool that allows the creation of custom maps online in a straightforward way. A great BL case study is an interactive map created by Nick Dykes, visualising the spatial spread of hand-drawn maps and other documents from the War Office Archive.

• Bounding Box: with this tool for metadata enrichment for catalogue records one can create basic geospatial metadata. This has been used, for example, in Qatar Digital Library catalogue records.

• Palladio: this set of web-based tools, created by Stanford’s Humanities + Design Lab, can be used to create maps and network visualisations. It’s very useful for showing connections between various entities across time and space.

• Georeferencer: this is a British Library platform created to crowdsource the georeferencing (assigning points on a map image to corresponding geographical coordinates) of over 50,000 digitised maps from the BL collection. This has been a massive hit, with many people helping us create digital geospatial data for these historic maps.

• ESRI Story Maps: unlike other ESRI products, this online tool is free and open source. We explored the use of this tool to create captivating stories with media and maps, using this Story Map Tour Tutorial. This has already been implemented by the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership team for International Women’s Day – check out the Sounds of the Past

• Tableau Public: this free service allows anyone to create interactive data visualisations online. Visualisations could be embedded into web pages and blogs, shared via social media or email, and made available for download. We appropriately focused on how to create map visualisation, using Kristen Mapes' brilliant tutorial. Tom Derrick, Digital Curator for the Two Centuries of Indian Print project, is already experimenting visualising the activities and location of printers in 1867 Kolkata using this tool. Other examples include two BL PhD placement students, Sarah Middle and Sarah FitzGerald, whose web maps effectively convey their research data.

 

 

• OpenRefine: Owen Stephens delivered his superb OpenRefine course, teaching BL staff the basic capabilities of this tool to clean and normalise data (e.g. in preparation to be mapped). However, this time Owen added some extra location-related topics: retrieving data from online sources (using Name Entity Recognition) and using ‘reconciliation’ services to match local data to external data sources. OpenRefine is a popular tool at the BL, and Graham Jevon from the Endangered Archives Programme is now working on a sequence of regular expressions to standardise EAP data.

We were honoured to have several external speakers coming to the BL and telling us about their ideas and projects. These included Sally Bushell and Rebecca Hutcheon (Lancaster University) talking about ‘Chronotopic Cartographies and Litcraft: Mapping Space and Time in Literature’; John Hessler (Library of Congress) presenting on ‘Machine and Deep Learning for Librarians: Designing Tools for Collections Discovery in the 21st Century’; Leif Isaksen (University of Exeter) on ‘How to Decide What to Where: Semantic Geo-annotation and the Pelagios Network’; and Sam Griffiths (UCL Bartlett School of Architecture) talking about ‘Exploring the interface of political meeting places and urban space in Ancoats, Manchester c.1780-1860’.

This impressive line-up was complemented by a public ‘Digital Conversation’ talk and panel on ‘Data, Place and Digital Economies’, chaired by Ian Cooke and included Mark Birkin, Miranda Marcus, Jeremy Morley and Emmanouil Tranos.

What’s next?

My colleague Stella Wisdom has embarked on her promising ‘Season of Emerging Formats’ (based on the BL Emerging Formats project), looking at publication types that are a bit more challenging to curate and preserve. Nora McGregor also has a thing or two up her sleeve, so stay tuned!

 

The Emerging Formats project, started in 2017 by the British Library and the other five UK Legal Deposit Libraries, has been investigating the rise of new complex digital publications that could pose new challenges for libraries and other cultural institutions in terms of collection and preservation. In particular, this project has chosen to prioritise three formats: eBook mobile apps, web-based interactive narratives, and structured data.

These formats reflect the changes and developments in both technology and storytelling in contemporary digital culture. This project meets the Legal Deposit Libraries’ purpose to respond to innovation and to represent the changing nature and diversity of the UK publishing industry. It also fulfills the libraries’ role of long term preservation, as these formats are by their technical nature ephemeral and at risk of loss.

After holding a workshop last November to better define the challenges related to complex digital objects preservation, the British Library organised a series of user experience testing sessions, with the help of an external consultant, Bunnyfoot Ltd. A first round of interviews was carried out at the British Library and at the library of Trinity College Dublin and it identified a strong user interest in collecting and preserving emerging formats, which was later confirmed by two service design group workshops at Bunnyfoot Lab.

Interacting with the 80 Days app for iPad

We are now in the process of testing different collection management methods, using a number of publications selected during the scoping phase as case studies. For example, we are collecting Inkle’s eBook mobile app 80 Days in different file formats (Android app; PC version) and through different acquisition methods (file transfer; download via access code) to test their viability and the different implications they might have in terms of access and preservation. 80 Days is a narrative-based interactive adventure, which offers a unique take on Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days – set in an alternative steampunk universe, the story requires the reader’s active participation in order to progress, with thousands of different routes and possible outcomes.

In the case of capturing web-based interactive fiction, two different web archiving tools have been tested – The British Library’s own Annotation and Curation Tool (ACT) and Rhizome’s WebRecorder. While each tool has distinct characteristics which might make it more suitable to a specific type of interactive fiction, both tools proved effective in capturing web-based narrative to a degree. A collection around the topic of e-publishing trends and emerging formats is currently being developed on the UK Web Archive website, with the possibility of nominating yours or someone else's work for inclusion.

As well as investigating collecting methods for complex objects, we are also exploring the requirements for access. At present, only the websites that we have collected using our ACT tool are available in the Library. We are also exploring the possibility of collecting contextual information around these publications. Collecting descriptive material around an object has been tried for time based digital media and digital games. Capturing and preserving sources of information such as websites, trailers, and press kits might prove invaluable in clarifying authorial intent and object use once a format is obsolete or cannot be accessed anymore.

To find out further information about the Emerging Formats project, please see our project page.

This post is by Giulia Carla Rossi, Curator of Digital Publications on twitter as @giugimonogatari.

This guest blog post is by the team led by fashion designer, Nabil Nayal - winner of the BL Labs Commercial Award for 2018 - for his Spring/Summer 2019 collection, presented at the 2018 London Fashion Week.

Nabil Nayal's SS19 Collection: fashion shoot at the British Library

The Nabil Nayal SS19 collection (The Library Collection) made history by becoming the first fashion show, on the official London Fashion Week schedule, to be hosted at the iconic British Library. The British Library’s digital archives deeply informed the collection. The Tilbury Speech, delivered by Queen Elizabeth I ahead of the attempted invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588, was central to the use of print, as were other manuscripts, digitised images, maps and hymn sheets from the era. The collection encapsulates Nabil’s obsession with Elizabethan craftsmanship, whilst symbolising the power and strength of a woman who succeeded in bringing England into its Golden Age.

Nabil undertook historical research in the British Library for his PhD on Elizabethan dress, so the opportunity to collaborate with the Library in order to emphasise the importance of research in fashion education and practice was something he felt passionately about doing. Paying particular attention to the Library’s Elizabethan and Medieval Manuscripts archives, Nabil conducted his research with guidance from expert curators and with support from the Reading Room staff. Using key word search terms and date limitations to search through the digitised archives was particularly useful to find historically accurate documents to incorporate into the collection.

Nabil's design takes inspiration from the British Library's digitised 1588 manuscript of Queen Elizabeth I's 'Tilbury Speech'  © Nabil Nayal 2018

Elizabethan silhouettes were modernised in this collection by printing these manuscripts onto Nabil’s designs, including a three-metre-long cloak featuring the Tilbury Speech. A UK-based supplier, Silk Bureau, digitally printed the archival material on to a range of fine silks and cottons, which were then used to make garments within the collection. Nabil’s love of the classic white shirt was further explored too, offering a puritan backdrop that ‘whitewashes’ the complex hand-cut embellishments made of bonded poplins and marcella.

The designs in the SS19 collection have been sold to prestigious international stores such as Dover Street Market and Joyce and the collection will be launching exclusively in Selfridges this May (2019). The presentation also generated a huge response in key press and social media, including coverage in Vogue.

Nabil's Elizabethan-inspired designs at the BL Fashion Shoot © Nabil Nayal 2018

Nabil’s interest in promoting historical research within fashion was not limited to this collection. Currently, the brand is working with Collette Taylor of Vega Associates to continue to raise awareness of the potential of the Library’s collections to inspire the next generation of fashion researchers. Nabil held a Research Masterclass at the British Library in November 2018 to work with emerging designers as part of a fashion research competition to develop a capsule collection inspired by the Library’s collections.

This collaboration between Nabil Nayal and the British Library highlights the importance of design education and research for the future-proofing and continued success of UK creative industries, which is a pressing issue. Since 2010, there has been a 34% drop in GCSE entries across the arts, despite the fact that the UK fashion industry supports over 880,000 jobs and delivered a direct contribution of £28 billion to the UK economy in 2015. The wealth of free resources at the British Library provides ample opportunity for design students to explore how education and research can enrich their creativity and allow them to succeed within the fashion industry.

Nabil’s work has received praise from the late Karl Lagerfeld and celebrities such as Rihanna, Lorde and Florence Welch. His SS19 collection epitomises the way that the use of archival research within fashion can generate commercial success, suggesting that the ever-changing fashion industry can benefit from becoming more historically informed and that modernity can be evoked through an interest in the past.

Watch Jennifer Davies receiving the Commercial award on behalf of Nabil's team, and talking about the collection on our YouTube channel (clip runs from 7.26): 

You can read other blogs about Nabil Nayal at London Fashion Week and the fashion show at the British Library, and if you're feel inspired, use the British Library's online Fashion resources.

Find out more about Digital Scholarship and BL Labs. If you have a project which uses British Library digital content in innovative and interesting ways, consider applying for an award this year! The 2019 BL Labs Symposium will take place on Monday 11 November at the British Library.

According to Tate, Net Art is art which uses ‘a computer in some form or other, whether to download imagery that is then exhibited online, or to build programs that create the artwork.’ Tate’s recent event, Lives of Net Art, sought to explore some of these unique digital works and the challenges and opportunities associated with creating, curating and collecting them. Highlights included Tate in Space, a BorderXing Guide and Rhizome’s preservation tools and goals.

Tate in Space was a 2002 project by Susan Collins which imagined how and why a British art institution might launch a gallery into space. Essentially an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) before they were a known concept, Tate in Space worked almost too well. Various newspapers, particularly those overseas, took the tongue-in-cheek work at face value and reported as if Tate really had launched a satellite. This provoked concern from the British National Space Centre, who got in touch to ensure all the necessary permissions had been obtained…

Heath Bunting’s BorderXing Guide considered space in an entirely different manner – the spaces between countries and how they are interpreted. Visiting borders across Europe and exploring their viability for making crossings, Bunting meticulously recorded his journeys and made them available via his website. Naturally, border agents became very interested in Bunting’s movements, and this led to his next work, The Status Project, an online database cataloguing how our identities are constructed from the information held about us.

What both these pieces had in common was that the ‘work’ could not be reduced to its website. Experiences outside of the work, reactions to the work (both public and governmental) and related online and offline content all come together in order for the viewer to contextualise it and make sense of it. They are net art not only in the sense of the technology used in part of their construction, but also in the sense of the network of meaning that radiates from them. It is this that Rhizome attempts to, at least partially address with their Webrecorder tool, a curation tool capable of capturing dynamic websites and online content.   

Webrecorder also enables the building of collections so that net art can not only be captured on the website on which it appears, but also in relation to other articles, sites and data that help to frame the work for audiences viewing it outside of its original context. However, Preservation Director Dragan Espenschied was keen to stress that such collections can perhaps never truly recreate the work as it was, but instead aim to create a more fitting record of its existence than merely collecting software and hardware.

Michael Takeo Magruder, Imaginary Cities at the British Library, 2019. Photographs by David Steele (c) Michael Takeo Magruder

The British Library may soon face a similar challenge for its latest exhibition, Imaginary Cities by artist in residence Michael Takeo Magruder, which opened on 5th April and is on display until Sunday 14^th July 2019. Drawing on 19^th century maps found in the Library’s One Million Images from Scanned Books collection, the installations not only reflect real world cities and the techniques and practices involved in their construction, but also the digital structures associated with cityscapes, which change and regenerate via the user data of their visitors. Can such a work ever be considered to have been collected? Or, like the cities it seeks to represent, will it leave only a digital footprint of a highly specific experience?

This post is by the Library's Innovation Fellow for Interactive Fiction Lynda Clark, on twitter as @Notagoth. You can find out more about the Library's Emerging Formats project here.

“Our vision is that by 2023 the Library’s collection metadata assets will be unified on a single, sustainable, standards-based infrastructure offering improved options for access, collaboration and open reuse”

Fig. 1: The front cover of the new Collection Metadata Strategy 2019-2023

April 2019 sees the launch of the British Library’s latest Collection Metadata Strategy ‘Foundations for the Future’ .

Fig. 2: A collection metadata tag cloud

‘Collection metadata’ is an umbrella term for structured data capturing the key properties, relationships and holdings supporting collection management. The British Library’s collection metadata evolved from simple inventory lists to encompass all information required to access, preserve and coordinate resources. Efficient exploitation of metadata underpins user services in a networked world. It is therefore a key resource requiring dedicated management to maximise its potential. 

Fig. 3: The front cover of the original Collection Metadata Strategy 2015-2018

The British Library formally acknowledged metadata’s importance in 2015 with the publication of its first collection metadata strategy. ‘Unlocking the Value’ described the foundational principles required to manage metadata as an asset in its own right rather than as a by-product of other activities. This concept proved influential for other national and state libraries with several developing similar strategies. The first strategy period saw great progress in centralising management and support of metadata policy and best practice but also included other notable achievements, including creation of:

• Automated workflows to upgrade publisher eBook metadata to library standards with minimal intervention
• Software tools to convert print catalogues to contemporary metadata formats and to automatically enhance over 1 million older catalogue records
• Open metadata services used by over 2150 institutions in 127 countries

Fig. 4: British Library open metadata users by country – 2019

‘Foundations for the Future’ will build on such achievements to ensure collection metadata becomes even more accessible, relevant and useful by addressing key challenges and new opportunities including:

Increasing Volume and Complexity -Traditional methods of metadata generation, management and dissemination are not scalable or appropriate to an era of rapid digital change, rising expectations and diminishing resources.

New Metadata Creation Options -The changing information landscape presents many new opportunities. Open web resources, automated metadata generation from full text and crowdsourcing offer interesting possibilities requiring exploration.

Improving Visibility - If collection metadata is unavailable, the resources described are effectively invisible. A programme of metadata creation is required to improve visibility of any ‘hidden’ content and enable use.

Fig 5: Users of British Library Collection Metadata

Rights Management – To manage increasingly diverse and dynamic options for hybrid print/digital and local/remote access to content, we must create an equally sophisticated rights metadata infrastructure.

Preservation Metadata – The long-term future of digital collections can only be secured by good preservation metadata. Only by accurately recording key content properties to recognised metadata standards will it be possible to offer current digital content to future users.

Unifying Infrastructure – Collection metadata’s potential is constrained by the requirement to address contemporary challenges with outdated systems, standards and practices. The new strategy proposes the creation of an integrated standards and systems infrastructure capable of unifying and presenting collection metadata in a way unachievable since the British Library’s foundation.

Fig. 6: The Collection Metadata Strategy Roadmap, 2019-2023

A summary roadmap has been created to show the steps planned to address these challenges and ensure that by 2023:

• The complexity of the British Library’s collection metadata infrastructure will be reduced by convergence on an agreed set of supported standards and systems
• The unified collection metadata infrastructure will offer new access and processing options enabling improved user services
• Efficient, sustainable collection metadata workflows will match the increasing scale and complexity of collection content via implementation of new techniques for record creation and exploitation of external data sources

Through the achievement of these goals ‘Foundations for the Future’ will ensure The British Library’s collection metadata will complete its evolution from passive descriptor to active agent, supporting sustainable and relevant services to new generations.

This is a guest post by Neil Wilson, Head of Collection Metadata at the British Library.

Blog article by Algorave audio-visual artist Coral Manton. Coral is curating this British Library Lates Algorave in collaboration with British Library Events, BL Labs, Digital Scholarship and The Alan Turing Institute.

On the 5th April British Library Lates will host an Algorave in the atrium. Algorave artists will live-code music and visuals, writing code sequences generating algorithmic beats beneath the iconic Kings’ Library Tower.

Alex Mclean AKA Yaxu

The scene grew out of a reaction to ‘black-boxing’ in electronic music - where the audience is unable to interface with the ‘live-ness’ of what the performer is making. Nothing is hidden at an Algorave. In an Algorave you can see what the performer is doing through code projected onto walls in realtime. The creative process is open and shared with the audience. Code is shared freely. Performers share their screens with the crowd, taking them on a journey through making - unmaking - remaking, thought processes laid bare in lines of improvised code weaving it’s way through practised shaping of sound.

Coral Manton AKA Coral

As a female coder, becoming part of the Algorave community has led me to reflect on the power of seeing women coding live, and how this encourages greater participation from women. Algorave attempts to maintain a positive gender balance. More than this the joy of seeing women confidently and openly experimenting with code, sharing their practise, making mistakes, revelling in uncertainty and error, crashing-restarting-crashing again to cheers from the supportive crowd willing the performances to continue sharing the anarchic joy of failure in a community where failure leads to new possibilities.

ALGOBABEZ AKA Shelly Knotts and Joanne Armitage

Algorave is a fun word - an algorithmic rave - a scene where people come to together to create and dance to music generate by code. Technically Algorave is described as "sounds wholly or partly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive conditionals”. The performers writes
 lines of code that create cyclic patterns of music, layered to create an evolving composition. The same is applied to the visuals: live coded audio reactive patterns, showing shapes bouncing, revolving, repeating to the beat of the music. All of this creates a shared club experience like no other.

Visual Artists Antonio Robert AKA hellocatfood: “I like to do Algorave because I think it runs an otherwise perfect black box computer into a live performance instrument. Playing at an Algorave forces me to abandon what I know and respond to everything happening around me. It shows me that even something as meticulously designed as a computer is a living tool that is subject to randomness and mistakes.”

Antonio Roberts AKA hellocatfood

Algorave is an open, non-hierarchical global community, with it’s hub in Sheffield. There have been Algoraves in over 50 cities around the world. Algorave is not a franchise, it is a free culture, anyone can put on an Algorave - however their approach should align with the ethos of the community. Algorave collapses hierarchies - headliners are generally frowned upon. Diversity is key to the Algorave community. Algorave is open to everyone and actively promotes diversity in line-ups and audiences. The community is active both online and at live events organised by community members. The software people use is created within the community and open-source. There is little barrier to participation. If you are interested in Algorave come along, speak to the performers, join the online community, download some software
(e.g. IXI Lang, puredata, Max/MSP, SuperCollider, Extempore, Fluxus, TidalCycles, Gibber, Sonic Pi, FoxDot and Cyril) and get coding.

If this sounds like your scene or you want to know more, please join us at the Algorave Late Event. Tickets available here: https://www.bl.uk/events/late-at-the-library-algorave

Also check out https://algorave.com & https://toplap.org