Errorcamp 2026

From 23rd - 26th July I was somewhere in rural Exeter for Errorcamp, which is a semi-annual gathering of live coders. It’s not really an official event, festival, or conference, so the best way to learn more about it is to become part of a local live coding community.

I had gone to previous Errorcamps and one thing I really valued about it was having the opportunity to spend time with live coders in an informal environment. My understanding is that it was started as a way to reconnect after being locked away indoors for much of 2020-2021. As a global community of live coders we had been regularly organising week-long live streams and attending conferences like ICLC, and I think we were missing having that semi-occasional meeting of international live coders. This story might not be accurate, but it’s how I think of it. In any case, one thing I like about Errorcamp is being able to be in a space with people you may only know by a username or code contributions.

There was a loose agenda and activities list which was largely decided by the attendees themselves. Anyone could propose an activity whether that be a workshop on knitting (everyone loved this), deep listening, building robots, or just a walk up a hill. Unlike previous Errorcamps this year I purposefully set out to do less. There’s always an interesting workshop, or a demonstration of a synth, or a live coding jam happening, and it can sometimes be overstimulating. If I were to try to do everything it would lead to, as it has done in the past, a bit of burnout and not really fully engaging in anything (is this fomo?). So, this year I did less.

I had a lot of fun choreographing robots with Joana and Alex, learning about making heavy metal in Strudel with Boggo, and learning more about TouchDesigner from Chau. Aside from that here’s a few of my outputs from the weekend:

Algo Grime

At some point I got speaking to Nkosi Khumalo. He mentioned how he’s been trying to create grime music using live coding. Here’s what he had accomplished already:

I am by no means well versed in grime, let alone algorithmic grime, but I have dabbled a bit in this via the remix badcirculation did of Gaika’s song Forward. My own songs which explore footwork and house also brought a bit of knowledge too. Nkosi mentioned that he was inspired by or wanted to reference Don’t Waste my time by Krept & Konan, and so with that a few hours later here’s what I created:

This was a very fun challenge figuring out which aspects of grime to replicate e.g. the triangles, wub wub bass, and the quite sparse 808s. I can definitely see myself adopting this more in the future. I’m looking forward to hearing Nkosi’s lyrics on top of it.

Silent Running

On the final night we all had an interesting option of doing a live score to the 1972 film Silent Running. The idea was that during the many sections without dialogue we could separately or collaboratively do a score for it. I’d never heard of the film before but Sheffield’s own 65daysofstatic had done a new score for it in 2011 for Glasgow Film Festival.

I asked to score the opening title sequence and the section following it, with each being about three minutes. I wanted something slightly sombre sounding to match the dystopian tone of the film. I was also imagining something minimal like the opening of Idaho by Open Mike Eagle. For chords I basically opened this chord voicings list and picked chords until I was happy.

I really really really love cello and upright bass sounds. There’s something about the dry, deep, gravelly sound that I enjoy, so I was happy to see Strudel already has some synthesisers (gm_cello:1 and gm_acoustic_bass:2) for this.

Finally, I added in some weird synthy noises from a Korg Monotron Delay. Here’s a recreation of the opening credits with the code overlaid.

If the complete rescoring of the film from Errorcamp is uploaded anywhere I’ll edit this post with a link to it.

For my second section I reused the first part of my contribution to the Behind the Screens series. It didn’t fit too well but it was interesting to give a new context to an earlier work.

Dude chilling

Aside from that I really just had a great time chillin’ out maxin’, relaxin all cool and learning about what everyone else is up to. Here’s some photos:

Thanks to the organisers and hosts for such a great weekend!