Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Algorithmic Art Assembly Archived

The 2026 edition at Gray Area in San Francisco

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Just a quick note that talks and performances from the 2026 edition of the multi-day Algorithmic Art Assembly event have begun popping up on YouTube thanks to the tireless efforts of its founder, my friend Thorsten Sideboard. I had the pleasure of giving a talk (“The Woodshed Is a Black Box”) at the first AAA and interviewing Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, and James Bradbury during the second AAA. As with those years, the 2026 AAA was held at Gray Area in the Mission District, here in San Francisco. I sadly couldn’t attend this year because as timing worked out, I was across the country in New York City when it happened (March 26 – 28), so I’m especially happy the material is getting a second life online. There’s — among many other videos — a performance and separate talk by Keith Fullerton Whitman, a live set by Kara-Lis Coverdale, and a lecture by Daniel Temkin, author of the excellent book Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, which I’m currently reading. Can’t wait to spend time checking out everything I missed.

“Avril 14th” Turns 25

My kinda holiday season

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

April 14th is up there with August 8th (aka 808 Day, after the classic Roland drum machine) as the best electronic music holiday of the year. And you can fold in July 18, World Listening Day, timed to the birthday of Canadian acoustic ecologist and composer R. Murray Schafer.

Each year, musicians around the world record versions of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” and share them on YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp, and elsewhere. Collected here are some of the covers to appear this year in the week leading up, and on the day itself. I kept some threads of these rolling throughout the day on social media, collating ones I located, or that I had recommended to me, like the Shane Parish one (via Curtis Burns on Threads). The first four here are particularly solid. I may add some more to 2026’s list before winding down from the festivities.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the song, which first appeared on Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs. When something cultural like this takes root, as enough time passes that you can think of it as an annual tradition, you start to wonder if and why the communal activity might ever stop — which is to say, in 25 years we will likely still be celebrating “Avril 14th” Day, and doing so on instruments and technologies that don’t yet exist, as well as on ones that predated the late-1980s technology, the Disklavier, on which it was first recorded. In that way, the song moves both forward and backward in time as it nestles deeper into the collective culture.

Agency & Gadgetry

Now emerging

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Continuing to really dig my Xteink X4 ereader, a tiny eink device that easily fits in a shirt pocket, where mine has now semi-permanently taken refuge. I outfitted the gadget’s sleep screen with the central image from the American edition of William Gibson’s 2020 novel, Agency. Doing so was simple: You just make a 480 x 800 bitmap file and pop it on the memory card. Because the CrossPoint Reader alternate firmware provides wifi access for file transfer, doing so was all the more easy. As for the image itself, I’ve always loved the ingenious way this book’s designer drew attention to how a simple load sigil can signify emergence, especially when combined with the out-of-focus face. Even though you know it’s just a still image, the circle with the arrow suggests motion — or better yet, a software glitch that has resulted in a frozen state. Now reproduced in low resolution here on this cheap digital device, the image has a sense of actual software. This little Xteink ereader is unique at the moment (there’s also an X3, which is smaller but requires an idiosyncratic charging cable, circumstances at odds with the ease of the X4), and it suggests a new category, one in which things can be purpose-built using limited chips, older generation screens, and modestly scoped firmware — and then be hacked after the fact as the GitHub set demands.

Scratch Pad: Cyberpunk, Deadloch, Audiograms

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

First full week back from my New York trip, and I barely posted anything.

▰ Nothing is quite as cyberpunk as mundane cyberpunk. Today I saw power and/or data cables dangling out from under the seat up a motorcycle, from the flap of an elementary school student’s backpack, and in the rear pocket of the jeans worn by someone on a stroll. Then level up to advertisements in GitHub pull requests, work slowed due to AI outages, and RAM shortages. “RAM Shortage,” in 1987, would have been the title of this story. Now we’re just living in it.

▰ No one makes me laugh as hard these days as Madeleine Sami’s Eddie Redcliffe in the TV series Deadloch. No one even comes close.

▰ Acquaintances send pictures. Friends send municipal field recordings.

▰ I guess there’s a chance that the new Westerlies album, on which they perform music by Bill Frisell, won’t be one of my favorites of the year at the end of the year, but such an outcome seems unlikely.

▰ This week I finished reading one novel (Hum by Helen Phillips) and one graphic novel (Cat Mask Boy by Linus Liu).