Algorithmic Pattern is a new conference/festival for people who are curious about the practice and culture of making patterns with algorithms, taking place in Sheffield and online in September 2025. The call for talks/papers is currently open until June. Full details here:
Hi all
The call for talks/papers has been open for a while, and we have now opened a call for performances and workshops. The deadline is early June, but we encourage early submissions for performance and workshop proposals, to help with our planning and fundraising.
Please see our website for details:
https://2025.algorithmicpattern.org/call/
Background
Algorithmic Pattern aims to bring people together who value deep, human curiosity into patterns. We hope this call excites you whether you are exploring patterns in heritage crafts or contemporary algorithmic art.
Humans have always explored algorithmic patterns, as creative, culturally-embedded ways to work beyond our imaginations.
But what is an algorithmic pattern? We invite contributions that focus on one or more of the following aspects:
- Procedures for making, whether notated or passed on through oral culture. These ways of making may be arrived at through playful experimentation, and perhaps reasoned about in terms of geometry, models and representations. Simple procedures (shifting, reversing, etc) in combination can give us complex results.
- Material behaviours, in that pattern-making is always a dialogue between a human maker and their material, and a pattern notation is only complete when considered in terms of the material at play.
- Pattern-making culture is what brings meaning to the procedures and materials of pattern-making, whether through ritual, sharing, collaboration, decoration, trade, or the collective experience of making (or dancing!) together.
We look for a future informed by the past, at the point where ‘information age’ technologies are now becoming ancestral, joining a long history of pattern-making technologies in being passed from one generation to the next.
This is next week! Info on the conference aspect below:
Alpaca conference 2025
12-20th September 2025 (with additional workshop 4th October)
Free and open access, pre-booking required.
Online and in Barcelona, Berlin, Linz and Sheffield
Alpaca conference 2025 is an on-line accessible event exploring algorithmic patterns in the creative arts, including procedures for making, material behaviours, and pattern culture across choreography, textiles, juggling, visual art and music. It brings both heritage and contemporary algorithms together, with human-centric perspectives that look beyond over-hyped technologies.
For full information and free registration, see Alpaca Conference – Alpaca 2025
The conference overlaps with Alpaca festival in Sheffield UK, hosting an additional in-person music and workshop programme. This message focusses on the conference, but for more details on the festival see: https://2025.algorithmicpattern.org/sheffield/
Overview:
Online workshops:
Two workshops. Free pre-booking required.
- 17th Sept - Revisiting Locus: Choreographing patterns through points in space - Kate Sicchio
- 18th Sept - Introduction to the qiudanz technique: computational transformation of minimalist movement sequences – sejo vega and mel*
- 4th Oct - Flip, Rotate, Repeat: Remixing weave drafts through pattern play – Etta Sandry
Conference sessions
36 diverse presentations exploring the conference themes.
Free pre-booking required, whether joining online, or at one of the conference hubs/‘watch parties’.
12th and 13th Sept - hosted as part of the Alpaca Festival in Sheffield UK, streamed on-line.
19th and 20th Sept - focussed online, with ‘watch parties’/hubs in Axolot Barcelona, UdK Berlin, Servus Linz and Pattern Club Sheffield.
Conference talks:
- Techniques for livecoding complex 3D printing patterns - Evan Raskob
- Algorithmic Patterns in Magnetic Resonance Imaging - Mags Tavener
- Fragmented Music - Procedures, Behaviours, and Culture from A record without prior acoustic information (2012-) - JO Kazuhiro
- The Unrepeating-Repeat: A Pattern Logic of Variation, Translation, and Perceptual Shift - Danica Maier
- How a hacked 70s knitting machine became a participant in our lab on weaving sustainable digital future stories - Mario Angst
- An art practice using infrastructure and other systems to create infinitely repeating patterns - Paul Hallows
- Entangled Rituals: Visualizing Chance Through Quantum Algorithms - Agoston Nagy
- Binary trimmings and light-up loops: representing binary numbers with e-textiles and the heritage textile craft of passementerie - Jessica Stanley
- An exploration of the mathematics behind juggling - Mees Jager
- Flitter: A declarative language for structured visuals - Jonathan Hogg
- Tabla to Drumset: Translating Rhythmic Language - Shreya Gupta
- Olio - Sarah GHP
- Kolams, Code, Cultures - Towards a universal pattern language - Lavannya Suressh
- Pastagang: Jamming together far apart - Pastagang
- Count your Chickens – Pattern generation as a matter of counting - Rocco Lorenzo Modugno, Amedeo Bonini, Marco Buiani
- Overtonic Pattern Notation Inside Cross-Cultural Feedback Loops - Saydyko Fedorova-South
- Reflections on London Pattern Club - James Walker
- Encoding and Experimenting with Vernacular Quilt Patterns - Lee Tusman
- 3D Patterning in the Cosmoscope - Nick Rothwell
- Steganography within textile - Bérénice Gaça Courtin
- Algorithmic Archaeology of Folk Motifs: Nature, Code, and Cultural Memory - Nicu Popescu
- Arche-Scriptures: Ceramics as a Speculative Medium for Digital Memory - Alberto Harres
- TTT2: The Woven Skin — Coding and Signifying Through a (Proto) Writing (From a Constellation of Language-s) - Maria Jose Rios Araya
- Talavera de Luz - Renovación de nuestra Herencia - Leon Eckard
- Patterns in Inflected Julia Sets - Claude Heiland-Allen
- Thinking About Fractals (Fabric is Fractal) - Patricia Bentley
- Algorithmic Two-Step - Stuart Smith
- Printed Patterns - Blair Subbaraman
- Taking Inspiration from Biochemistry: Small Things with Small Forces forming Complex Patterns - Kristin Henry
- Pulse, Pattern, Permutation: Applying Schillinger’s Pulse Interference in Computer-Assisted Composition - David Chechelashvili, Alan Brown
- Multi-directional pattern repeats – an alternative method for pattern repetition - Tonje Kristensen Johnstone
- MultiWeave. Knight’s Tour and Other Sources of Inspiration - Kadi Pajupuu
- Keynote: Endosymbiotic Computation – Unlearning Alpaca and Why Dissipation is Key.. - Shintaro Miyazaki
- pSine waves: introducing Lp-Spaces for Sound and Graphics - Sol Sarratea
- Algorithmic Knitting Design: Integrating algorithmic computing, fashion design and handknitting - Stephanie Pan
- An Electromagnetic Pattern Journey - Gábor Ugray
I hope you can join us!