Craft practices, knowledges, and communities are disappearing. These practices carry with them histories and cultures of people, knowledges, and social ties to communities. One of these practices is wire-bending in the Trinidad Carnival, which began in the 1930s. Some reasons for its disappearance include dying practitioners, lacking pedagogy, changing practices, and techno-centric developments. How might we employ algorithms, patterns, and mathematics in the restoration, remediation, and reconfiguration of this practice, knowledge, and community? In this talk, I share The Bailey-Derek Grammar, a mathematical description of this dying craft which has aided in documentation and transmission of this knowledge.

This event took place at the end of May 2022. You can watch the recording below. The live captions from the event are now embedded into the video as subtitles.

Vernelle A. A. Noel, Ph.D. is a design scholar, architect, artist, and Director of the Situated Computation + Design Lab. Currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech., she investigates traditional practices, digital practices, interdisciplinary creativity, and their intersections with society. She builds new frameworks, methodologies, expressions, and tools to explore social, cultural, and political aspects of computation and emerging technologies for new reconfigurations of practice, pedagogy, and publics. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, ideas2innovation, and others. She is a recipient of the DigitalFUTURES Young Award for exceptional research and scholarship in the field of critical computational design. Dr. Noel has worked at the University of Stuttgart, the University of Florida, Penn State University, MIT, the Singapore University of Technology & Design, and has practiced as an architect in the US, India, and Trinidad & Tobago.

Alex McLean and Anu Reddy will be talking on “Algorithmic Patterns after AI” at the online “After AI” symposium, on 17th May 2024. You can register for free and see the rest of the schedule at afteraisymposium.com.

Abstract

In use, the term ‘artificial intelligence’ is often conflated with the idea of the ‘algorithm’. As protesters chant “fuck the algorithm”, AI and algorithms in general have become known as technologies of control; practically unexplainable, yet governing what we read on social media, what we see in search results, and how we are ourselves profiled and assessed.

Will AI tech culture continue to accelerate towards information and environmental overload, or will it hit a conceptual and/or financial brick wall, allowing us to relax back into yet another AI winter? In either case, we propose a post-AI future, based on an alternative history of algorithms as patterns.

Algorithmic patterns are creative, culturally-embedded ways to work beyond our imaginations, where complex and surprising results can result from the combination of simple parts (or rules). Humans have explored algorithmic patterns obsessively, across practices and in many forms, for millennia. This can be seen in ancient practices such as geometric Kolam drawings, the discrete mathematics of textile weaves and braids, or more recent developments such as juggling siteswap patterns, and creative code-based practices such as live coding.

Through our presentation we will introduce Algorithmic Pattern as an emerging, interdisciplinary field of research and practice. We will showcase examples of various algorithmic pattern contributions whose outcomes are deterministic yet unpredictable, as they emerge into great complexity from simplicity. This will include our own work in Kolam drawing and live coding. Through this we will signal a Luddite reclaiming of algorithms as technologies of human craftwork. When AI has exhausted itself, we shall return to human-centric algorithmic patterns, which offers us rich ways of making that are easy to learn but taking lifetimes to explore.

I’m happy to be giving an invited talk speaking on “Live coding algorithmic patterns in music and textiles” as part of the ethnomathematics seminar series at EHESS in Paris on the 10th June.

Abstract:

The words ’algorithm’ and ’pattern’ are synonymous, but where the former stands for unfathomable technologies of control, and the latter stands for culturally-situated technologies of craft. By bringing them together, we can find alternative, long histories for contemporary technology, as well as imagine alternative technologies that are more grounded, and more open to change. Through this talk, I’ll explore these possibilities by comparing heritage algorithms in textile culture with the developing use of patterns in live coding culture, particularly in music performance.

Invited keynote talk by Alex McLean at the grassroots coding festival Zurihac 2024.