Virtual Dance Clubs Are Creating New, Thriving Communities

With all of the physical dance clubs closed, people are looking to emerging digital venues for entertainment and community. One of those is Club Quarantine, a queer online rave that hosts shows on Zoom every night of the week.

On April 27th, live coder Lil Data performed a set at Club Quarantine while creative coder Cabbibo controlled the visuals through a Glitch project. They were nice enough to answer some of my questions about the performance via Twitter and email.

Have you ever done a remote live show before? What was the experience like, how does it differ and how is it similar to a show at a venue?

Lil Data: I've been doing remote works and working with themes of telematic intimacy for almost as long as Lil Data has existed since 2014. When I was at SXSW 2015 playing the first big PC Music Showcase I simultaneously had a remote interactive installation happening as part of an Algorave at Access Space, Sheffield, UK.

That piece is still online — for the audio to work you need to perform some user gestures before the page finishes loading. The page features a grid of words which when clicked turn into their opposite (good turns to evil, etc) and flip the generative music that's running on the page. It's like a jukebox but operates at the abstraction level of a track rather than a music catalogue.

The word-music mappings came from an interactive essay I did for DIS Magazine (RIP). The mappings are mirrored across all viewers, so the webpage was projected in the venue walls in Sheffield and the audience were controlling the music via their phones. I was also viewing the live stream and the webpage from Austin, Texas, watching and hearing as people collectively played this web-based multiplayer musical instrument. Initially people tended to press all the buttons, but after a surprisingly short time a collective sensibility and stability emerged.

For me, it doesn't make sense to differentiate shows as IRL versus URL, what's important is the atmosphere created by the context and audience, and on my side the depth of flow I am able to access.

Performing to me is like being an energy conduit channeling through a membrane that varies in thickness depending on those factors I just mentioned. If I'm really in the moment that membrane disappears and everything becomes attuned, and everyone mutually senses each other's attunement, and this feeling is the same for me wherever I play.

I definitely felt attunement and transparency when playing this show for Club Quarantine, even more than I've felt at some IRL shows. Their use of Zoom as a jumbotron, and how hyped and dressed up and gorgeous everyone is, made it really intimate for me and gave me permission to express myself.

Even more special in this case was Cabbibo live coding a website via Glitch based on a sketch by Mr.doob, where people could control little avatars on screen that you can see in the video. We first did an interactive together for my Sup EP in 2014 (also still live, buried in data.pcmusic.info), and I was supposed to be visiting Cabbibo last month but my trip got cancelled. So this was important for us to do something in spite of the pandemic.

How did you decide on what music to play? Did you make any decisions because of the virtual venue?

Lil Data: This show was celebrating Namasenda's new single Dare AM/PM on PC Music, and I was playing first, so my set was designed to welcome everyone and get them excited for Hannah Diamond who was playing after me. Namasenda and me share a love for euro trance, dance pop, nightcore, generally anything fast and bouncy with high-pitched vocals, so I did live edits of Venga Boys and Special D specially for her.

Another edit I did was of GAIKA whose music I adore, plus edits of Charli XCX's new singles Forever and Claws which are both really amazing, along with a re-edit of my Vroom Vroom edit which is a crowd pleaser. I had to put this set together really fast but was quite pleased with it in the end, had a couple of hiccups so only uploaded about half to YouTube in the end. This was my first live stream since the pandemic began and it was great so I'm up for doing more, although I really want to go beyond video streaming and explore ways of streaming computation itself.

What kind of changes did you make during the show?

Cabbibo: Part of the show, for example, it was just emojis on a white background, but then I would push something that would make it so the background would clear [and] everyone’s movements turned into drawings.

Then [I] would push a change so it would glitch the background while people were moving around or change the background color and pattern, or make it so everyone’s emojis were different sizes or whatever.

How did you decide what to do for the visuals? Did emojis, glitches, etc. come to mind immediately or was there a lot of experimentation?

**Cabbibo: **[We] tried a few different things, sort of starting with Mr. doob’s multiplayer sketchpad. The more we did it the more we a) wanted it to feel like a party and b) wanted to fit as many people as possible, but also didn’t know if it would work at all, so [we] wanted to make it fun even if no one was there.

From there it was just like “what set of emojis should we use?” and “what will make people get excited for what’s next?” For me it was also like “how the heck do I use the Canvas API?” so I sort of coded up a few things to parameterize beforehand, but ended up making the glitch effect for the first time during the show.

*Check out Lil Data, Cabbibo and Clu*b Quarantine to keep up with their upcoming projects and shows.