Alex McLean

yaxu@post.lurk.org

Non-academic <a href="https://post.lurk.org/tags/UKRIFLF" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#UKRIFLF</a> research fellow at non-profit org <a href="https://mastodon.thentrythis.org/@thentrythis" class="u-url mention">@thentrythis</a>, working on algorithmic patterns (<a href="https://mastodon.thentrythis.org/@alpaca" class="u-url mention">@alpaca</a>).Instigator of <a href="https://post.lurk.org/@tidalcycles" class="u-url mention">@tidalcycles</a>, and co-founder of <a href="https://post.lurk.org/@algorave" class="u-url mention">@algorave</a>, <sp

Posts

Post #4244071
Thinking about earlier days of free software, I guess GPL was designed for a world where you might get a program on tape, floppy disk, or downloaded from a local BBS (probably historically inaccurate, but stay with me..). You might have an address to write to a human to get the source code off them, or find them and ask for it in-person. I guess the code would move slowly, getting improved in different ways depending on the community it reached. In the corporate internet days, almost everything...
Post #4211856
What's your favourite music with five or fewer supporters on bandcamp?
Post #3587871
TOPLAP is the *Temporary* Organisation for Live Algorithm Programming, but is 22 years old and still going. I think it was actually disbanded at some point over 10 years ago but it carried on by mistake. The problem with vaguely anti-hierarchical and distributed organisations is that they&#39;re quite difficult to disband.
Post #2545760
An incomplete list of people excluded from &#39;international&#39; conferences that are in-person only and aren&#39;t streamed or recorded - People with caring responsibilities - People with disabilities - People with health vulnerabilities - People who don&#39;t fly in recognition of climate emergencies - People who work for orgs with ethical no-fly policies - People who have their travel disrupted due to climate chaos - People who only engage with fully open access scholarship...
Post #2545757
Alpaca 2025 (https://2025.algorithmicpattern.org/) is going to be great! Running a new event about a seemingly niche topic like &#39;algorithmic patterns&#39; across all the creative arts was a risk. We&#39;ve had no media coverage so far, have paid social media tech oligarchs no advertising money, but through the power of email and word of mouth there&#39;s been loads of interest. For the festival in Sheffield I&#39;m especially surprised + happy that most music ticket sa...
Post #2472599
Richard Dawkins has again jumped the shark with his bonkers drivel about Claude, on top of his racist, transphobic, sexist rants. He&#39;s become a caricature of sozzled oxbridge self-obsessed &#39;genius&#39;. As a life-long atheist myself I would love it if more people embraced humanism and believed in our ability to achieve astonishing, good things outside of the hierarchical, dark structures of religion. In general I feel it&#39;s just not something I can even talk about wit...
Post #2241414
One of the great things about the Lyon Algorave was the huge diversity of live coding languages and systems being used, all kinds of strange experiments making weird noises.. with hundreds of ravers dancing to them
Post #2028304
Loving the machine - Sarah Angliss and Caroline Radcliffe on the relationship between Lancashire Clog Dance, Kraftwerk and early Detroit Techno https://www.sarahangliss.com/lovingthemachinenotes/
Post #1974557
LIVE programming workshop open call: https://liveprog.org/ Deadline 21st July Get involved!
Post #1931309
Lyon knows how to algorave
Post #1931308
Tour done ! Our final epiploke tour date in Lyon was probably the most banging. Grnnnd Zero Lyon was a dream ! https://www.youtube.com/live/414h7Vqk2r8?t=20620s
Post #1902075
Turing: &#39;The ... question &quot;Can machines think?&quot; I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.&#39; Every computer scientist ever since: &quot;Turing said we can prove that machines think by making them trick people.&quot;
Post #1705878
This from Stockhausen is remarkable in a couple of ways.. First it closes his book and clearly he felt it was important, but as far as I know &#39;social dancing&#39; is completely absent from computer music/electroacoustic education institutions that otherwise laud Stockhausen. Secondly for the subtle dogwhistling - e.g. dance music from African continent and diaspora is first slated and then ignored. https://archive.org/details/stockhausenonmus0000stoc/page/170/mode/2up
Post #1703521
Heh just noticed that there are auto-generated subtitles for this set with @hellocatfood@mastodon.social .. in vietnamese https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vomnc9R-7mw
Post #1390745
I am trying out sleep restriction to get a healthier sleep pattern. Apologies for any grumpiness
Post #1390744
RE: https://sonomu.club/@threedaymonk/116408169469726499 Heh I&#39;ve seen this a lot, people posting to their 1000s of followers on mastodon (I haven&#39;t seen this happen on other social media) and then bitterly complaining about replies, usually quite far outside the context of &#39;reply guy&#39; type toxicity, just people trying to be helpful or adding some perspective which the poster didn&#39;t want for some reason. I find this bizarre.
Post #1390740
Knitting the cover for the rumoured upcoming epiploke album #knitting #sanquhar
Post #1212952
As far as I can tell mainstream open source, github-native culture is now completely horrible, co-opted by Microsoft, and destroyed by Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. The free/open source projects I&#39;m involved with are constantly ripped off by vibe-coded interfaces that ignore the license, and when I point this out I get abuse. I just got told by a reddit user &quot;thank you for your work but it doesn&#39;t matter much any more&quot;. Only #pastagang can save us.
Post #981851
Another lovely piece for the FoAM anarchives by @jcalpickard, this one on community and coalition building, with me as one of the interviewees https://anarchive.fo.am/silver/community_and_coalition_building/
Post #941647
Next time someone calls themselves a &#39;futurist&#39;, maybe read the futurist manifesto they&#39;re alluding to.. &quot;We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.&quot; Btw the techno-optimist manifesto quotes...
Post #941638
It&#39;s really tricky to spread the word about events these days! I don&#39;t support corporate social media and you don&#39;t get read attention there anyway, mailing lists aren&#39;t what they once were, and this event wants to reach people across many patterny disciplines.. Any help spreading the word across all the strange pattern-obsessed communities much appreciated! -- Algorithmic Pattern is a new festival and conference for people curious about the practice and cultur...
Post #941637
Rumours of an @algorave in Sheffield on 18th April Small room capacity, get your tickets early ! #algorave #sheffield #kaleidoscopeswelcome
Post #941636
If you&#39;re in/near London then you should definitely come to this live coding party it&#39;s going to be really good #london #algorave tix: https://ra.co/events/2108876
Post #941634
Live stream from Sheffield https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K1RQwc94Lo I&#39;m not there because I&#39;m ill(gorave) but might try to join remotely
Post #926596
Happy to have a paper, a performance and an &#39;alt.nime&#39; contribution accepted to NIME (new interfaces for musical express) conference London ! The paper is a collaborative one, about Uzu languages, the draft is here https://codeberg.org/uzu/nime2026/src/branch/main/uzu.pdf , we&#39;ll work on it some more so feedback very welcome (although already have a lot of feedback about the typos etc) The &#39;alt nime&#39; thingie is this fun paper with @danstowell , about le...
Post #893391
Epiploke merch + tour ! Lucy (heavy lifting) + I (yaxu) will be infecting algoraves and toplap nodes with our from-scratch live coded bangers in 27 April - Folklore London 28 April - Lambdasonic Ghent algorave 29 April - Koproductions Labor Dortmund (with @flordefuego) 30 April - TOPLAP Karlsruhe 2 May - Lyon algorave To celebrate we are making epiploke tshirts and livecode sticker sheets: https://epiploke.bandcamp.com/ If you will be at one of the above places then please reserve your sti...
Post #891953
We&#39;re making an live code/algorithmic music release in aid of humanitarian relief in Palestine. We&#39;re collecting recordings over this weekend, to release it on (Bandcamp) Friday. If you&#39;d like to join please DM me and I&#39;ll share the upload info, thanks!
Post #859718
On the face of it, this opportunity looks great - paid artist-in-residencies at the Max Planck institute! https://e-recruiting.pro/jobposting/5651c02e14a3f2d4dacf63b4d7156ae2fc744a370 €8k seems like a good fee, until you notice that it&#39;s for four months. That&#39;s a bit less than minimum wage (€2080) in Germany. I don&#39;t know if that&#39;s taxable, but even if it isn&#39;t it still doesn&#39;t seem great when it seems they&#39;re looking for an artist with an...
Post #858587
Maybe one of the more surprising things about the current live coding waves is how queer-lead it has become. I wouldn&#39;t have said it was ever particularly masculine/macho, but live coding was very cis male-dominated and hetronormative in the early days. Now as far as I know all the people blowing up on tiktok and instagram are LGBQT, and the most active live coding software and community platforms for music and visuals include LGBQT people leading core development (I say leadership here...
Post #852163
#pastagang have sampled Lucy and me talking about them on the pattern club radio in the intro to this lovely album https://pastagang.bandcamp.com/album/working-in-cursorland