Research Catalogue

Algorithmic project, where two computer music systems, written by Hanns Holger Rutz and David Pirrò, collide. In progress.

The image of coding/decoding often includes the ideal of perfect reconstruction. Something real—an experience, a thought, a movement—can be transformed into a finite set of elements that may then be transported and unfolded as an evocation of that original experience or movement. Something is communicated (duplicated and made equal). It bothers us when the reconstruction is not complete, when the distance between the pairs of conceptualisation/perception, intention/interpretation… is not annulled: somebody did not understand. What we are interested in for this exhibition are those distances and gaps that produce imperfection, understood as the resistance of thoughts and movements to become determinate; understood as their durational and iterative configuration. Located at the intersection of computer art and sound art, we are primarily interested in algorithmic movements. In algorithmic practices pieces of code assume the production of forms and establish mutual writing processes between human and computer. Imperfect Reconstruction is an exhibition project for 2016. This RC entry serves to trace its process.

TRANSPOSITION NOT EXHIBITION A RESEARCH EVENT BY Gerhard Eckel, Michael Schwab, David Pirrò and Artemi-Maria Gioti Angewandte Innovation Laboratory, Franz Josefs Kai 3, Vienna Transpositions Lab May 14 – 16, 2016 10:00 – 17:00 daily with interventions by Paulo de Assis, Florian Dombois and Lucia D’Errico Symposium May 17, 2016 10:00 – 17:00 organised by Cecile Malaspina

Transposition not Exhibition

Log book for Algorithms that Matter

Continuous Exposition is a dissemination strategy of the project Algorithms that Matter (ALMAT). It serves as an entry point to the mesh of our activities. ALMAT aims at understanding the increasing influence of algorithms, translating them into aesthetic positions in sound. It builds a new perspective on algorithm agency by subjecting the realm of algorithms to experimentation and diffractive reading.

Discourse and materials pertaining to the experimental iteration with Ron Kuivila, during the Algorithms that Matter (Almat) artistic research project.

Process of creating a new sound piece around questions of algorithmic bodies.

Exposition for the workshop-in-exposition taking place in Bergen, Norway, June 2018. This event is a collaboration between Almat and BEK Bergen for Electronic Art, and part of BEK and Notam’s ongoing series of workshops for advanced users. It is a hybrid format that places the workshop inside an exhibition context, where the exposed works and artefacts form the basis of the workshop’s activity. Instead of “closed works”, what is exposed to the general public are objects, sounds or installations that are open to engagement and reconfiguration during the workshop. Theme: Thresholds are locations of transitions, points where one modality becomes another, where a qualitative change occurs. In physics the point where an aggregate state changes—the phase transition—is a distinguished transitional location where the properties of the adjacent states become evident. Similarly, in this workshop-in-exposition we want to study the properties of the algorithmic by putting ourselves in threshold positions and actively shape them. More than merely separating two sides, one can spend time on a threshold, move along a ridge, performing a tightrope walk while trying not to fall to either side.

Algorithms that Matter (ALMAT) focuses on the experimentation with algorithms and their embedding in sound works. Rather than conceiving algorithms as established building blocks or the a priori formalisation of a compositional idea, we look at them as performing entities whose consequences are irreducible to models. Algorithms “matter” in the sense that matter and meaning cannot be distinguished, neither can artists and their computational tools. Algorithms actively produce spaces and temporalities which become entangled with their physical embeddings. In 2019, we created a workshop within the impuls . 11th International Ensemble and Composers Academy for Contemporary Music, taking place in the Museum of Perception (MUWA) Graz, February 11–21, 2019. It focused on the development of a site-specific sound installation. The installation explored the interactions of algorithmic and physical spaces and their dynamic and mutable properties. Participants worked on the premise that spaces and our perception of them change depending on presence, absence, the movement of visitors, the time of the day, the rhythm of the surroundings as well as the sonic and algorithmic interventions we bring into them. The workshop sought to attract computer music practitioners, sound artists and composers by offering a platform for exchange and reflection about their personal approaches towards algorithmic experimentation. The participants were invited to develop their various approaches within an atmosphere of collaboration, where special emphasis was given to the translation of environmental data (such as sensor input from the surroundings and visitors) through computer music systems developed and assembled by the participants and tutors. The workshop was held with technical infrastructure provided by the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM), including an 48-channel sound system and a selection of sensors. The workshop ALMAT was developed by David Pirrò and Hanns Holger Rutz (both IEM Graz) and was held together with the special support by Robin Minard.

Segmentation is a core principle of analysis in many different disciplines, such as biology (literally to disassemble organisms, but also the sequencing of DNA), in music and phonology (to structure the stream of sound), or in informatics (to formulate and implement an algorithm). It is also an artistic operation, ranging from film cut to the sampling of sounds and other existing smaterials. What we are interested in this project is to understand the segmentary, not as an expression of isolation or fragmentation, but on the contrary, as a decentralised surface of "fitting pieces" whose meaning emerges through assembly by the audience.

Page for the xCoAx 2020 special performance call in MUMUTH, KUG Graz.

The Metaboliser is a computational artefact which produces temporal visual and auditory forms. It bases on a continuous and re-iterated calculation of the unfolding of a system of interconnected agents. The dynamics of those elements, their changes and movements over time, produce traces which are transposed into sound and images.

The "Artistic Research in Generative Arts" SAR Special Interest Group.

Swap Space is a pilot project at KUG Graz that focuses on novel forms of collaborative artistic research in which otherness, difference and distance between the participants are central and are brought into a cohesive form via the concept of the spatial. Selected questions and previously sketched procedures are an important part of Swap Space and will be tested for their validity and feasibility in a time-limited experiment among six artists-researchers as a proof-of-concept. Thus, on the one hand, the pilot project provides important data and preliminary results, sets the course and ensures that the future project design is viable. On the other hand, Swap Space takes up new decisive impulses for thought - such as the concept of contact - the elaboration of which aims to determine the form of a multi-year research project.

Contingency and Synchronization is a series of artistic research works by Luc Döbereiner and David Pirrò, exploring the relation between deterministic synchronization algorithms and contingency. Each iteration in this series renegotiates this relation and attempts to connect computation, site and listening in ways specific to the material format (live performance, spatial installation, web-based installation, visualization, closed-off rendering). We are interested in the emergence of sonic forms from the interaction of deterministic algorithms and the contingency of their material performance, which includes their connection to spaces, performers, listeners and machines. We use algorithms that have a strong internal telos in order to let the generative power of disturbances and deviations unfold. The tools and setups we develop render internal and external contingency perceptible in certain intended ways, which can be said to limit the radical otherness of contingency. At the same time, it is only through this form of aesthetic transposition or translation that we can explore and expose the contigency of our material. The encounter of these two opposed tendencies creates singularities that constitute the works of this series. This collaboration started during Luc's residency in the context of the ALMAT project, but has since developed further. The works we collect here take multiple forms. e,g textual, auditory, visual etc. and employ multiple perspectives: conceptual, reflective, scientific, technological, phenomenological, aesthetic etc. Each of these layers has its own autonomy but affects the other layers. These artefacts should help to trace the process we have followed.

Page for the Speculative Sound Synthesis Symposium in Graz September 2024

The Bureau for Artistic Data Exploration (b-a-d-e) in collaboration with the Lansner Lab, Computational Neuroscience and Neurocomputing research group at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, as part of Transpositions [TP], an artistic research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

Rebody (2010) by Gerhard Eckel, Michael Schwab and David Pirrò is a video and installation piece in which the captured motion of a dancer is transformed into a dynamic drawing that informs a musical composition. The piece explores the dance movements, the drawing algorithms and the musical structures in an attempt to create aesthetic resonances and convergences. The work investigates how structured creative processes can transpose rather than represent the dancer's movements. Rebody is based on motion-capture data collected from Bodyscapes (2009), an intermedial solo dance performance by Valentina Moar (choreography/dance), Gerhard Eckel and David Pirrò (composition).

The research project investigates the possibility of generating new auditory and visual forms based on the analysis and mathematical transformation of scientific data. In addition, the project studies whether and how these new forms are of scientific significance by asking the collaborating researchers to scientifically analyze the artistic outputs. By remaining true to the data while employing an artistic working method and, thus, by combining scientific and artistic values, the project contributes to the conceptual development of a space for research that is shared between art and science. This, however, implies that during the project both scientists and artists will be challenged to work in ways that are unfamiliar to them, either through confrontation with complex artistic interpretations of data or through exposure to very specific scientific working methods. On a meta-level, the project will report on the types of interactions that are deemed to be of value to either the artists, the scientists or both. At present, scientists use a variety of sonification and visualization procedures to analyse and communicate their findings. For artists, those representations are often of little artistic value since they are geared towards a transparent communication of the data creating little space for artistic interventions. Conversely, by foregrounding aesthetic effects, the expanding field of artistic data sonification and visualization runs the risk of producing art works that only superficially related back to the scientific research from which the data originated. While giving the arts an important role in the communication of scientific activity, the artistic exploration of scientific data may thus add very little to the research itself. Given the ever-increasing amount and importance of data representations, it is of particular importance that artists become engaged with their fabrication and to identify how in spite of their very different constitution aesthetic and epistemic research aims may support each other. Three case studies from different scientific fields provide data to be transposed by the artists into artistic outputs, which are in turn analysed by the scientists. The artists have an established practice in music composition and visual art, respectively, and have been collaborating very productively for the last 3 years. Given the transdisciplinary nature of the artistic collaboration it is possible to investigate issues of intermediality not only between art and science but also from within the arts. The process of creation and analysis is continuously exposed on the Research Catalogue online platform while a number of performances/exhibitions make the outputs tangible to the scientists and the general public.

Discourse and materials pertaining to the experimental iteration with Erin Gee, during the Algorithms that Matter (Almat) artistic research project.

Discourse and materials pertaining to the experimental iteration with Jonathan Reus, during the Algorithms that Matter (Almat) artistic research project.

The iterative nature of algorithms, their provisions of repetition and the possibility to rerun them, lead to a straight concept of algorithmic space, as the breadth and organisation of all the forms they are able to produce. Data and algorithms are not only operating machines but they increasingly influence our thoughts and actions, and consequently art and science. The departure point for the course Space Material Detail are algorithmic elements, created within the development of the project Algorithms that Matter that provides an open source for inspiration, exploration and manipulation. Some elements of software, sound and graphics can be translated into models to the (physical) three-dimensional space in order to create an installative expierence of space(s).

Discourse and materials pertaining to the experimental iteration with Luc Döbereiner, during the Algorithms that Matter (Almat) artistic research project.

'Simulation and Computer Experimentation in Music and Sound Art' was the title of an artistic research seminar conducted through a collaboration between Algorithms that Matter and Orpheus Instituut Ghent, taking place at Orpheus from March 21, 2019 until March 22, 2019. The seminar brought together practitioners and scholars to discuss the wide-reaching implications of the ‘agential cut’ (Barad) or ‘ontic cut’ (Rheinberger) – the separation between operationalised model or abstract theory and perceived or experimentally verified ‘reality’, the fissure already indicated by Husserl and realised in experimental computational systems. Computational models afford a way to test theoretical constructs or observe the consequences of non-physical or even imaginary hypotheses. One arrives at a critical conception of computation, situating it beyond the dualism of a deductive, representational approach and an inductive, empirical approach, acknowledging a speculative quality of algorithms that ‘are not simply the computational version of mathematical axioms, but are to be conceived as actualities, self-constituting composites of data’ and ‘equipped with their own procedure for prehending data.’ (Parisi) The very activity of experimentation and augmenting the language of artistic creation is exposed through the use of algorithms.

Algorithmic Spaces was a collaboration between Algorithms that Matter (ALMAT) and Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), taking place in December 2018 within ZKM's festival inSonic. We selected talks and pieces based on a call works engaging with the space and spatialities of computational processes. Are there inherent spatial properties to algorithms? For example, what is the relationship between the iterations of code, the behaviour of multi-agent systems, the exploration of databases, and their inscription into the perceptual, auditive space? We were interested in pieces that use generative processes to produce space, rather then applying a secondary “spatialisation” procedure. We were looking for approaches that treat spatiality as a critical phenomenon emerging from the work with algorithms, for sonic artefacts that probe concepts of spatiality through embedding in algorithmic processes.

Development of an installation piece with sound, space, light, sensors, fabric with ALMAT @ MAST at esc media art lab 2020. Further development of in|fibrillae, a sound poem for personal computer.

Through Segments is a sound installation in an unusual interstitial space—the staircase of the Kunsthaus’ Iron House that connects to the “Friendly Alien”. Four artists listen into the storeys using real-time computer algorithms, taking an acoustical image of the visitors’ movements, forming four individual reactions. It is a poetic attempt to think about the distributed, the fragmented, the parallel. During the development phase, the artists work independently, but at the same time they observe and interrogate each other, performing the gesture of a “simultaneous arrival” (Sara Ahmed). They enact a human algorithm, informed by reiteration and duplication but never being identical. The aim is not one “of all converging towards the same, but circulating, making common relaying, relaying back, being relayed” (Isabelle Stengers).

Discourse and materials pertaining to the fifth experimental iteration with the core team (Pirrò, Pozzi, Rutz) and guest artist Ji Youn Kang, during the Algorithms that Matter (Almat) artistic research project.

Threading time. Algorithms and dynamical systems for real-time sound synthesis and processing. Masterclass by David Pirrò at the Conservatory of Piacenza, Italy, November 2019.

The ALMAT 2020 Symposium is interested in the genealogical, processual aspects of algorithms 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. We depart from the assumption that algorithms possess an inherent material agency that emerges from the intra-action between human and machine (K. Barad). In these exchange processes, we experience gaps, breaks and bends in the flow, the reconfigurative nature of the algorithmic which bounces back and reconfigures our thinking and approach to artistic work. When algorithms are inserted in the creative process, they actively shape this process and spread outside the boundaries of a particular medium or artefact. The symposium looks to rethink the relation between humans and algorithms (N.K. Hayles) in terms of an organic or ecological perspective (Y. Hui) in which actors are entangled and co-generative. The foundation for the symposium is given by the eponymous artistic research project ALMAT - Algorithms that Matter, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF AR 403-GBL) and hosted at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. ALMAT 2020 was originally planned to 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. Due to the Coronavirus crisis, xCoAx is going into an online-only mode, and the ALMAT symposium has been replaced by an online assemblage of the submitted proposals only.