ToplapUKPress

"Live coding has so far flourished, but under a bushel. Perhaps it's time the rest of us got a look in." - The Wire magazine, June 2008

Experimental musicians have long written music in the form of rules and algorithms, but live coders take this to further extremes by treating algorithms as live artistic material. They write and modify algorithms while the computer runs them. Rather than using software, they create it, improvising with code before an audience. The code generates music -- live coders improvise music through code. Think of musicians burrowing around within the innards of computer music and you get an idea of the sorts of truly live activity that live coding covers.

TOPLAP ( http://toplap.org ) is the Temporary Organisation for the Promotion of Live Algorithm Programming, formed in 2004 to bring together live coders of all backgrounds, musical genres and programming environments, and further to encourage wider adoption of live coding techniques. TOPLAP UK is the UK base of TOPLAP, meeting regularly for live coding events from ad-hoc group improvisations (laptop drumming circles) to larger gigs, as well as hosting international festivals.

TOPLAP UK ( http://toplap.org/uk/ ) consists of eleven people actively organising events, leading workshops, developing live coding environments and languages and of course performing live coded music.

TOPLAP UK members have live coded performances widely including at Ars Electronica (slub, 2003). Sonar (slub, 2005), Transmediale (TOPLAP supergroup 2005), International Computer Music Conference (yee-king, 2008) and NIME (nilson, 2007). TOPLAP UK have become increasingly active in the past few years. 2007 was marked by the release of a successful CD compilation and organising the "LOSS Livecode" Festival with Access Space in Sheffield (supported by the PRS Foundation and ACE Yorkshire). 2008 featured TOPLAP UK presentations and workshops at the Secret Garden Festival, the SuperCollider summer school at the University of Westminster, the Thursday Club at Goldsmiths College, the Computer Arts Society, the Make Art festival in Poitiers, and an off-conference live coding concert at the International Computer Music Conference in Belfast.

TOPLAP UK members

• Alex McLean is a member of slub and PhD student at Goldsmiths Digital Studios. He co-organises a number of events including the dorkbotlondon meetings and the placard headphone festival. http://yaxu.org/
• Adrian Ward is a member of slub, a very part-time software artist and technical director of a company specialising in software for interactive experiences. http://adeward.com/
• Dave Griffiths is a member of slub and programmer/artist creating installations, open source software and teaching workshops around the themes of games, music and the lisp programming language. http://pawfal.org/dave/
• Nick Collins is a lecturer at the University of Sussex, with a research interest in the theory and practice of live coding, maintaining both UK and international livecoding collaborations. With Alex McLean, he is one of the co-founders of the mother organisation TOPLAP. http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/nc81/
• Matthew Yee-King is a performer and producer in the new London Jazz scene and has released music on Rephlex Records. He is finishing off his DPhil in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Sussex University, researching machine intelligence applied to sound synthesis. http://www.yeeking.net/
• Jamie Forth is a musician, programmer and PhD student at Goldsmiths, University of London. He hacks lisp and SuperCollider to help computers enjoy and create music.
• Chris Kiefer is a Brighton based musician, a PhD student at Sussex, and an active technologist. He performs solo as Luma and in the electronic ensemble Swarf
• Click Nilson is an anagram, and thereby the performing alter ego of one other within this list
• Thor Magnusson is part of the ixi-software collective. He is an Icelandic musician permanently settled in the UK, and responsible for a huge number of computer music workshops around the country. http://www.ixi-audio.net
• Scott Hewitt is a PhD Student and part time lecture at Huddersfield University who spends his time improvising with his laptop.
• Evan Raskob is a performer, consultant, and artist living in London. His work takes on many forms, such as video and sound pieces; interactive art including new musical instruments; interactive physical spaces; and VJ'ing. He teaches interactive art at University for the Creative Arts.
• Dan Stowell is a beatboxer, programmer and computer musician. Currently he combines the three in a PhD research project (at Queen Mary University of London). He is a lead member of the team developing the open-source SuperCollider platform, and performs as one half of Spoonfight. http://www.mcld.co.uk/