Research Catalogue

Configuration was the title given to a site-specific installation in Riga. This RC entry both documents work in progress and fragments of an ex-post reflection on the piece.

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.

"Schwärmen + Vernetzen" (swarming and networking) explores the possibilities of transdisciplinary work in art, realising them through forms of "movement profiles", retracing the vacating of individual viewpoints of the participating artists and the emergence of joint forms of movement. The project is a collaboration between writer Gertrude Grossegger, installation arts and trained molecular biologist Nayarí Castillo, and sound artist Hanns Holger Rutz. In order to make novel connections between text, visual elements and sounds possible, the three artists put themselves into an experimental arrangement, topically structured around dynamical systems of swarming and networking, originating from biology; we are interested in systems in which new organisms develop without dissolving their partial structures, individual media, and individual scopes of work. Stages of the project are a series of encounters of the artists, the outcome of each of which is a further development of materials, an intensive retreat over several days, a publication in a literature journal, an exhibition at Akademie Graz, a symposium, and a printed catalog.

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.

Log book for Algorithms that Matter

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

Acoustical surveys of the city. An experimental radio piece. The spatial design of a city seems to dictate who moves around in it and how. Mäanderungen (“meanderings”) is an acoustic suggestion for developing alternative forms—in real, physical space; in electronic, radiophonic space; and in the imagination. Meanders are created by friction, by the sensing of irregularities, between depth and surface, in motion. The exploratory process developed by the temporary production collective corresponds to a form of walking, being and moving in the city that arises in the here and now, free from purpose, and that is individual, subjective, and inquiring. Peculiar views of the urban space are made possible—unusual, temporary units of measurement introduced. Part of the material created is based upon an interpretation of different spatial realities such as facades or gaps. They are photographed, drawn, captured by sensors or pressure and combined with text fragments to create a composition that manifests both as a radio drama and in the form of a spatial installation. The translation process is driven mainly by an algorithmic generator that is constantly allowing new coincidences. Mäanderungen was the winning project of the lime_lab 3 prize for experimental radio play. lime_lab is a cooperation of Akademie Graz, Forum Stadtpark, Literaturhaus Graz, ORF Steiermark, and steirischer herbst.

On the development of the computer music framework 'Sound Processes' and the workspace environment 'Mellite' in the context of the research projects 'Algorithms that Matter' and 'Simultaneous Arrivals'.

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

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

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

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.

Art project in public space, connecting Mexico city and Graz.

This piece is a reworking of a sound installation from 2012 with a similar title, Unvorgesehen–Real–Farblos (Engl. "unforeseen, real, achromatic"). I am currently interested in the dynamics and consequences of coming back to existing pieces and reconfiguring them with new ideas, new context, or new algorithmic embeddings. What is lost, what enters, what is transformed by this operation. It is also an opportunity to try out things, and by giving a new title the old configuration is not superseded or made obsolete.

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.

Work-in-progress for the development of a sensorial piece, first explored during the workshop Augmented Attention Lab.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

This exposition documents a series of reconfigurations of a piece originally conceived in 2011, 'Writing Machine'. The series continued with 'Wr_t_ng M_ch_n_' (2018), attempting to implement all aspects within a Mellite workspace, and 'Writing (simultan)' (2020), highlighting a new interest in the coming-together of otherwise independently operating processes. The current reconfiguration is 'Writing (suspend)' (2023), which returns to a single circle form, but replacing the display tables with a light-weight suspension as well as introducing kinetic and sensorial elements. The series is an exercise in understanding the concept of reconfiguration (algorithmic and not), conducted first within the Algorithms that Matter framework, and currently within the Simultaneous Arrivals project.

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

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.

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.

This is an open-ended project or research process around extremely slow growth, and the contact between glass and biological material. It aims to implement a model of un-synchronisation, perhaps through the form of a modular installation. The “narrative” and linear scale of materials is reworked to transplant them into a spatial setting where individual nodes embody and reinterpret parts of these materials, creating a field of sonic or visual encounters.

Today's situation can be characterised as the result of growing entanglement, simultaneity and proximity within a networked world. At the same time, global instabilities demand new practices of sharing responsibilities. While the data economy stresses the need to interface, to connect, to make compatible, as artists-researchers we look for a new mode of working-together and thinking-with that resists becoming compatible. Individuals should take a respectful and careful distance to one another, and develop a common movement that results in artefacts and propositions that reflect this work process and can coexist in a simultaneous aesthetic experience. The idea of simultaneously relaying as the foundation of a new type of collaborative practice in artistic research for us is captured by the combination of a transformative practice of relaying as described by Isabelle Stengers, and a singularly plural conception of being devised by Jean-Luc Nancy. Relaying then is not seen as a succession of states, as a temporal transition from one to the other, but as suspended in a space of simultaneity, as an ongoing circulation. Presented at SAR Conference 2021.

A work-in-progress artistic research project. Initiated by Hanns Holger Rutz and Nayarí Castillo in autumn 2021, it develops into multiple intermedia objects that involve collaboration between different artists, objects that engage in sensorial exchange among themselves and with humans. This exposition is very much in flux, trying to capture the meanderings of the process.

Work in progress, on a small five nodes based sound piece in public space.

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.

ARTikulationen 2022 - Subjective/Intersubjective - is an artistic research event conceived and organised by the Doctoral School for Artistic Research (KWDS) of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG). It takes place at Theater im Palais, Graz, 05–08 October 2022. ARTikulationen interweaves in-depth artistic research presentations, a festival character (intermezzi-performances), and a mini-symposium on the topic of research journeys between artistic and scholarly or scientific practices. Topics range from current acoustic, electroacoustic, and computer composition, historically informed and contemporary performance, to improvisation and theatre.

A new filigrane sound object (or series of objects) in the making, w.i.p.

Internal development workspace for the exhibition 'Die Häutung der Schlage', Erfurt Dec 2025.

This exposition will be the landing page, introduction and table of contents of said symposium.

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.