UXRZONE Event Archive

The Origin Story

UXRZONE didn't start as a radio. It started as a place — and for a few strange months in 2020, it was one of the only places open on Earth.

The seed was an act of endurance. In 2018, for thirty unbroken days — #30daysinVR — Enea Le Fons refused to take off the headset, living inside the machine in an Art Deco apartment in Turin. What came out wasn't a stunt; it was infrastructure: UXR.zone, a decentralized, privacy-first metaverse, founded in 2019.

Then the world locked down, and a Turin cultural project called algo:ritmi — a festival of live-coded music that was supposed to happen in a bunker — had nowhere physical to go. So Karin Gavassa, Enea Le Fons and Edoardo Salviato moved it inside the machine. Every Monday night, a virtual club called The Circle opened its doors on uxr.zone. You logged in anonymously from a laptop, chose an avatar, and watched musicians write music as code, live, in front of you — over two months, more than sixty artists from Argentina, France, Colombia and India played rooms that existed nowhere and everywhere.

The lineups read like a who's-who of live coding. Sam Aaron, the creator of Sonic Pi. Alexandra Cárdenas, the Berlin-based algorave pioneer. Graham Dunning's mechanical techno. Baseck from the LA underground. French immersion artist Maotik. And on the decks of a virtual yacht, Cárdenas and CNDSD live-coded TidalCycles while avatars from three continents danced in spatial audio.

On 25 April 2020, UXRZONE opened The Dome — a virtual art residency and shared atelier space, a 33-floor augmented-reality skyscraper hosting interactive installations. Corriere della Sera and La Stampa put it in print, comparing it to the British Library's virtual programme. Three artists built works specifically for the space: Franz Rosati's Hyletics, Nesso's HyperGlass, Toshikazu Jayson Toyama's Truth of The Universe. Two days later, Algo 24/7 opened — a 24+7 stories museum with digital artworks from livecoders and digital artists from the algorave and demo-scene. By June, CYBERSPEAK turned The Dome into an album-release rave with Baseck and The Doubtful Guest. That autumn, UXRZONE brought the experience to the physical world at the Live Cinema Festival in Rome, with Maotik live. By February 2021 it was a node in TOPLAP's worldwide Transnodal marathon.

UXRZONE even ran a school — the 2020 Academy, the first workshops taught inside a fully immersive VR world: Cárdenas on TidalCycles, Sam Aaron on Sonic Pi, Matthew D. Gannt on spatial sound, Le Fons on building for the open metaverse.

Then the platforms moved on. Mozilla sunset Hubs in 2024. The rooms went dark. The avatars logged off.

But the signal didn't stop — it changed frequency.

Today UXRZONE is the synthetic metaradio network: the same privacy-first world, transmitting as audio. The algorave DNA is still in the grooves. We started as a place you could stand inside. We became the sound it makes.