Algorithmic Pattern

Konnakol is a South Indian, Carnatic musical practice involving the recitation of syllables while clapping the underlying tala. Here is a very fine, and accessible example from B C Manjunath and Varijashree Venugopal: I’ve been deeply inspired by Konnakol while learning its fascinating geometric rhythms, and some of this inspiration has found its way into…

I’m just back from a productive week working with Mika Satomi and Lizzie Wilson on a mini project ‘Modulating Time’ at the annual, week-long PIFcamp gathering in Slovenia’s Julian Alps. We worked on handheld stick-based and woven devices for tactile control of musical pattern and tempo, so that audience members could manipulate our live coding…

Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, Dave Griffiths and myself Alex McLean have been talking about making an tangible algorithmic pattern interface inspired by Andean Khipu for some time, including during her residency visit to Sheffield. Dave has been making some progress towards a workshop exploring the use of these tactile pendants to describe robot movements…

Live coding is a creative practice centering on live interaction via programming languages, often in performance in music, choreography, video animation or other time-based artform. Live coding has been around for over two decades now, and I (Alex) have had a great time being involved from the early days, including attending the first live coding/live…

It’s been masses of fun collaborating with Luke Iannini over the past year or so, including presenting some work-in-progress in our talk on “Making Space for Algorithmic Alphabets” at the Undone Computer Science conference last month. It was good to have a deadline for our pretty speculative explorations, and share some work-in-progress. We did really…

After a long journey, the journal article “Live Notation for Patterns of Movement” is published! This shares thinking behind the algorithmic choreography collaboration between Kate Sicchio and myself Alex McLean, where they have been exploring algorithmic patterns of movement in robots and humans (including themselves). The article explores false assumptions in generative arts, before exploring…

Back in the summer of ’22, Dave Griffiths, Lizzie Wilson, Iván Paz and myself Alex McLean ran a workshop introducing tablet weaving to live coders (musicians who manipulate algorithms to make their music or other performing artform), to introduce them to ways of thinking about the algorithmic patterns they work with from the standpoint of…

The draft schedule and free signup for the Algorithmic Pattern Salon is now live! The salon is an international effort by Laura Devendorf, Vernelle Noel, Iván Paz, Anuradha Reddy, Elizabeth Wilson and myself Alex McLean, with the help of many folks who helped review all the submissions. We’ve put together a schedule of dozens of…