Loveland
The 909 identity, turned into code you can play.
909 is an Amsterdam dance event named after the Roland TR-909, the machine that made techno and house what they are. Its ASCII identity was sharp, and completely static. We turned it into code: a renderer the team feeds an image, a site they maintain themselves, and a playable TR-909 in the browser that doubles as the ticket campaign. Build a beat, post it, win tickets. 909 went first of Loveland's five festivals, and set the pattern for the rest.
The idea
One festival as the test for how a whole network uses technology.
Loveland runs five festivals on culture-sector budgets. The question was never what 909 should look like online. It was what a network like that actually needs from technology: what it can afford, what it can run itself, and what keeps working after the studio leaves. 909 went first. Smörgåsbord had given it a sharp ASCII identity, built from 9s and 0s. It looked right. But it was static.
What we made
An identity in code, a site the team runs, a 909 you can play.
We turned that identity into code. Feed it an image, get back a rendering in the exact 909 style, with controls the team can adjust. The identity went from something the festival received to something the team makes. We rebuilt 909.nl around it: the classic number rotating on scroll, the full lineup revealing as ASCII portraits, all in blocks the team maintains.
We built a working TR-909 in the browser. Sixteen steps, ten channels, a per-channel panel for decay, tune, filter, reverb and swing. A Lite mode walks first-timers through their first beat. A Pro mode opens the full machine. You don't read about a 909. You play one.
And the drum machine is the campaign. Build a beat, name yourself as the artist, export it as video, post it tagging @909_festival, and enter to win tickets. It runs at any size, from a phone to a wall at an event. The audience doesn't watch an ad. They make something.
Where we went beyond
The machine left the browser
The last step was physical. We took the drum machine to the festival itself: a touchscreen on the terrain, Lite mode, visitors programming a beat between sets and sharing it for a prize. The campaign stopped being something you scroll past. This year ran as a beta, with a dashboard behind it that showed what people made and shared, so steering happened on numbers instead of on a hunch. The version for the next editions is drawn out and on the table.