Chris McCormick

I am playing algorithmic rave music at Rhetoric in Western Australia.

• February 5th, 2016
• Game city { Raine Square / Perth Train Station }
• Doors open 6pm
• $10 Entry
• Free arcade games
• With: chr15m, cbat, marko maric, atomsmasha, kataplexia, amnesia, polite society & free arcade games.

My buddy Fenris and I are playing at Square Sounds Festival in Melbourne next week, Saturday the 21st of March, 2015 at The Evelyn Hotel.

I hacked together quite a bit of new software for this gig and I am tremendously excited about it. I think we are even going to practice our songs first this time. See you there!

I'm very lucky to be a small cog in a larger movement of new music called Algorave. This is dance music made by software algorithms, or to put it more poetically "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive conditionals," in the words of Alex McLean who coined the term.

I'll be playing some music from this genre live at the following places and times in the days and weeks ahead:

• 2014/05/31 - This Saturday at Maker Faire Torino here in Italy.

• 2014/06/27 - at the xCoAx conference official Algorave in Porto, Portugal.

• 2014/07/04 - at an Algorave in The Loft in Brighton.

I am very excited!

The software I am using was developed inside Miller S. Puckette's Pure Data.

I don't talk about my professional work a lot on this blog so this is a bit of a departure. Lately I've been very lucky to be working on some really interesting projects with really great people. Here is something I've nearly finished (shipping to app stores as we speak!) with the wonderful PVI Collective and friends:

how to play deviator movie from pvi collective on Vimeo.

deviator is an immersive, real-world, outdoor game which invites players to temporarily transform their city into a playground. your mission is to seek out 15 audio instructions hidden in public spaces and play as many of the games as possible. as a deviator you can explore the local area, play a series of on-site games, interact with on-site performers, receive points and send text messages within this application.

using gps and the camera on your phone, deviator allows you to select a game from an on-screen map, locate it and scan a strategically placed qr code to activate the game instructions. games are scored in terms of difficulty and range from activities such as "guerrilla pole dancing" and "ring-a-ring-a-roses", to "spin the bottle" and "twister". each game encourages the player to explore their public space in a new way.

There were just so many great things about working on this project.

• As an artwork I think it's pretty compelling.
• The technology was a lot of fun:
  • Fully "vertically integrated" software stack - got to code up both the clients and server.
  • Cross-platform smartphone clients for Android OS and iOS using PhoneGap (HTML5, Ajax, etc.).
  • Python + Django back-end and API.
  • Multiplayer game-like server features, messaging, point scoring, real-time map with player locations.
  • QR codes!
• PVI Collective are just really nice people and easy to work with (happily this seems to be a trend with my clients at the moment).
• Got to ride my bike to work which is always invigorating.

The first tour of the work is showing in a few weeks - the last week of July 2012 - at Surge Festival in Glasgow, Scotland. I'll be there as "tech guy", so if you are a fellow geek into Free Software, video games programming, Pure Data, makerbots, etc. and want to share a beer look me up!

There will be other tours coming up around the world, and if you are interested in booking the tour at a festival in your city, please contact projects@pvicollective.com for more info.

Bye!