**ALMAT - Algorithms that Matter**
**Symposium on Algorithmic Agency in Artistic Practice**
6--7 July 2020, Graz Austria
https://almat.iem.at/symposium.html
Please feel free to distribute this call to your networks.
**Submission deadline: 31 January 2020**
Artists and scientists have worked with digital computers for over
seventy years, and algorithmic practices exist for a lot longer. But in
recent years, increased computing power and decreased costs and
miniaturisation of machines have created a new quantity and quality of
everyday exposure, economic and political criticality, and with it a
wave of public attention and discourse. As artists-researchers, how do
we incorporate this new situation into our practices, and more
importantly, how does this changed situation retroact on our
understanding of the role of digital art, sound art and artistic
practice itself?
Rather than understanding algorithms as existing and transparent tools,
the ALMAT Symposium is interested in their genealogical, processual
aspects and their transformative potential. We seek critical approaches
that avoid both mystification and commodification, that aim at opening
the black box of "wonder" that is often presented to the public when
utilising algorithms.
The foundation for the symposium is given by the eponymous project ALMAT
- Algorithms that Matter. ALMAT is an artistic research project by Hanns
Holger Rutz and David Pirrò funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF AR
403-GBL) and hosted by the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics
(IEM) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.
ALMAT 2020 will take place (06–07 July) adjoining the 8th Conference on
Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X – xCoAx (08–10 July). xCoAx
is an exploration of the intersection where computational tools and
media meet art and culture, in the form of a multi-disciplinary enquiry
on aesthetics, computation, communication and the elusive X factor that
connects them all. xCoAx has issued a separate call for participation –
http://www.xcoax.org – and reduced combi-tickets are available for xCoAx
+ ALMAT.
**Call for Contributions**
The ALMAT Symposium calls for artistic research contributions in the
following two categories:
1. Contributions exploring the symposium's theme and the questions
arising from it. This may include:
- What are the material qualities specific of algorithms and
algorithmic practices? How does the algorithmic become malleable
as material?
- Are there particular affordances of the algorithmic?
- How does algorithmic agency unfold, how can it be observed,
formulated, or communicated? Which alternatives to traditional
concepts such as control/controller could be formulated?
- How does the reconfigurative "intrinsic" or "speculative"
movement of algorithms extend to or retroact on the artist or
recipient, how does it shape their interactions?
- How can artistic experimentation with algorithms be communicated
to an audience, how may it help sensitise and empower people to
take ownership of the algorithmic?
- Which are the thresholds of heteronomy/autonomy, what makes an
algorithmic practice become generative?
- What are philosophical, technological, aesthetic or artistic
consequences of acknowledging the agency of algorithms?
2. Contributions that explicitly refer to the research, the
experiences and the case studies of the ALMAT research
project. Contributions may be commentary, continuation, critique
or, more in general, a response to one or more aesthetic and
theoretic manifestations and artefacts reflected in the project's
documentation. The project's (ongoing) documentation is an online
hypertext starting at the Continuous Exposition:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/381565/381566. In
particular, we identified a number of works that are
good candidates for responses, as they will be visible or audible
during the symposium (see submission page).
For more information and details of contribution formats and
application process, please refer to:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/381565/698006
Contact: For any questions, please write to <almat(a)iem.at>.
To Pd announce:
Pd 0.50-2 is out. It fixes key binding trouble in MacOS (the 64 bit version
only). In particular the backspace key no longer acts as "delete" as it did in
0.50-1.
cheers
Miller
[please forward]
Georgia Tech School of Music
Guthman Musical Instrument Competition
2020 Call for Submissions
Deadline extended to October 6, 2019
http://guthman.gatech.edu
Georgia Tech's 2020 Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition is an
annual event aimed at identifying the world's next generation of musical
instruments and unveiling the best new ideas in musicality, design,
engineering, and impact.
The Guardian called the competition "The Pulitzer of the New Instrument
World," and The New York Times described the "special, otherworldly sound
that you can feel permeating your soul" which became the hallmark of the
competition. Fast Company explained how Guthman's "Futuristic Instruments
will change how we make music," and the Atlanta Magazine suggests that "at
the Guthman Competition, innovative instruments just might predict the
future of music."
The Guthman Competition will take place March 6-7, 2020 at Georgia Tech's
Ferst Center for the Arts, in Atlanta, Georgia.
The deadline for submissions is October 6, 2019. Approximately Fifteen
semi-finalists will be invited to demonstrate, discuss, and perform with
their instruments as they compete for $10,000 in cash prizes.
Submit Your Instrument at: http://guthman.gatech.edu/guthman-submissions
///////////////////////////////////////////////////
:::: This Year's Judges ::::
REBECCA FIEBRINK - Reader, Goldsmiths, University of London
JORDAN RUDESS - Composer, Keyboardist, Member Dream Theater
DAVE SMITH - Engineer, Musician, Founder of Sequential
///////////////////////////////////////////////////
To learn more about the competition, visit guthman.gatech.edu or our
Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/guthmancompetition
We’d love to hear your comments!
I've just did a big update to the easyflow library
You can already get easyflow v0.3.0 on deken or on github<https://github.com/HenriAugusto/easyflow>!
Since this is a big update be sure to read the change log<https://github.com/HenriAugusto/easyflow/blob/master/changeLog.md>!
(There is some minor backwards incompatible changes)
Some highlights of new abstractions:
-[dictionary] - getting and retrieving (key,value) pairs
-[listCollect] - useful for reconstructing lists after processing them element-wise
-[iterator] - list iterator
-[public][private][member][getMember][setMember][method][callMethod][methodInput][methodOutput][objAccess] - experimental workflow to give more control over data sharing across patches.
big bugfix:
-the library now can be used in OS with case-sensitive file system
Dear list,
my "audiolab" abstraction library is now available on deken. You'll
need Pd-0.50 or later to run this.
Please report any bugs on github: https://github.com/solipd/AudioLab
cheers,
philipp
Hey all
On Mon, 2018-04-30 at 11:20 -0400, William Brent wrote:
> Has anyone done something like this using [struct]/[polygon], even
> just for sequence display purposes and not editable via mouse
> clicking/dragging? I did a quick search of the archives but haven't
> found anything.
Late, but nevertheless, I had another go at this:
https://github.com/reduzent/unpunch/
Roman
To Pd-announce:
Pd 0.50-1 is available on http://msp.ucsd.edu/software.htm
or (source only) via github: https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data
Only two small changes from pd 0.50-0: the HTML-opening command to teh new
pdcontrol object handles spaces in pathnames, and, on PCs, typing tildes is
fixed for Spanish and Portuguese keyboard layouts.
cheers
Miller
ELSE 1.0 beta 24 is out along with Live electronics tutorial 1.0 beta 14!
Quite a few new objects in the update (16 new ones for a total of 458),
highlighting here: a group of multichannel objects ([out1~], [out4~],
[out8~], [meter4~], [meter8~] and [pan8~]), a general binary operator:
[op~], a [gui] object with the functionality that didn't make into
[pdcontrol], a new [canvas.mouse] object that gets mouse interaction with
the patch window. I also fixed bugs in [dir] and added a new functionality
to [mtx.ctl] to get the value of the cells. Check more details and binaries
at: https://github.com/porres/pd-else/releases/tag/v1.0-beta24 - wait a bit
for raspberry pi binaries and for all of them to show up in deken.
Some objects here were included by request for Jose Ignacio Lopez
Ramírez-Gastón and Mark Edward Grimm. So yeah, I take requests... just
saying...
The live electronics tutorial has also received updates to the latest
version of ELSE and is available at:
https://github.com/porres/Live-Electronic-Music-Tutorial cheers
Hello everyone,
The jmmmp library of abstractions has been updated.
New features and improvements to [multiarray] were added:
- read and write audio files
- show ID
- y-window scaling
- fixed a bug in "size" method
- configuration file to load at startup
- background
- general setting for color, thickness, visibility
[multiarray] is an abstraction to store and operate several graphical
arrays in one graphical container.
You can download it soon through deken, or follow the link below.
For more informations and a tarball file, visit http://bit.ly/jmmmp_056
Best,
João Pais