Some 100 people gathered for a Halloween-themed dance party in the Mission District on Saturday. While some moved their bodies to the EDM, half of the participants were obsessed with a wall-sized screen where lines of code popped up, one after another.
That was a scene from an “algorave” event, during which people danced to algorithmically generated music. Unlike most dance parties, technology is the musical instrument here.
“The music is happening right in front of you, in realtime, because of the programs written in the code,” said R. Tyler McLaughlin, organizer of the event at the Gray Area on Mission Street between 22nd and 23rd streets. He’s an early member of the artist collective AV Club, the only San Francisco group that hosts algoraves, a coding event invented in London in 2012.
“There’s only, like, 20 people in the Bay Area who do this,” he said.
Some 16 artists from San Francisco, New York City and Berlin, Germany, took part in the five-hour event, mostly performing in pairs, with one coding the music and the other coding the visuals, bringing futuristic sci-fi soundscapes, retro visuals influenced by the ‘80s and ‘90s and laser beams. Some incorporated morphing data and characters from foreign languages into the visuals.
Artists usually pre-write a foundation of the music and the visuals so that they can execute different parts in time during the event, writing new code to add different parts and to remix existing lines of code.
“It’s like we’re writing our own complex math functions to create beats and time,” said McLaughlin, who usually pre-writes the arrangement of the music and breaks those rules during the show, based on what he feels people need at that moment.
The audience was a mix of artists, musicians and programmers in their 20s and 30s. “I like it because it is like a live performance,” said Henry Tran, a former engineer who wore squares labeling his hands and head, as if he were in an object-recognition system. “These events bring me a little bit of joy, because a lot of people wanted to move out of San Francisco for these kinds of things,” and algorithms have brought a little life back to the city, he said.
“These people are inventing [a new art form]. Every show, they’re figuring out how the art form works,” said Chris Guichet, a former mechanical engineer at Apple, who dressed as Bob Ross by carrying a drawing board and a brush. “When you go to an art show. and half the time at the art show, you’re uncomfortable. That’s how I feel here. Like, half of the music, it makes you uncomfortable.”
That was the intention, or at least part of the experimental performance of the algorave. “If the performers write the code in a way that makes the music scary, the music will be scary. What if they want the music to be warm and delightful? They will write the code to do that,” said McLaughlin.
“The music scene is mostly just DJs pressing play on other people’s tracks, and then turning a couple knobs. But it’s the same knobs everywhere,” said McLaughlin. “This is more like watching the creators of the music and the art perform it. Just like a band.”
Photo by Yujie Zhou, Oct. 28, 2023. 
Photo by Yujie Zhou, Oct. 28, 2023. 
Photo by Yujie Zhou, Oct. 28, 2023. 
Photo by Yujie Zhou, Oct. 28, 2023. 
Photo by Yujie Zhou, Oct. 28, 2023. 
Photo by Yujie Zhou, Oct. 28, 2023. 
Photo by Yujie Zhou, Oct. 28, 2023. 
Photo by Yujie Zhou, Oct. 28, 2023. 
Photo by Yujie Zhou, Oct. 28, 2023.
