Artists and scientists have worked with digital computers for over seventy years, and algorithmic practices exist for a lot longer. But in recent years, increased computing power and decreased costs and miniaturisation of machines have created a new quantity and quality of everyday exposure, economic and political criticality, and with it a wave of public attention and discourse. As artists-researchers, how do we incorporate this new situation into our practices, and more importantly, how does this changed situation retroact on our understanding of the role of digital art, sound art and artistic practice itself?
Rather than understanding algorithms as existing and transparent tools, the ALMAT Symposium is interested in their genealogical, processual aspects 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 project ALMAT - Algorithms that Matter. ALMAT is an artistic research project by Hanns Holger Rutz and David Pirrò funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF AR 403-GBL) and hosted by the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. The project started in 2017, and over the past years has developed a series of case studies, research iterations, and accompanying workshops and meetings, of which the Symposium 2020 is a major concluding event.
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.
Important Dates
- Submission deadline: January 31, 2020 EXTENDED: February 18, 2020 (24:00 CET)
- Notifications of Acceptance: March 24, 2020
- Registration Deadline: May 3, 2020
- Symposium: July 6 & 7, 2020
- Online exposition: inaugurated September 15, 2020
Symposium an online-only event due to the Coronavirus
Since the face-to-face exchange and the physical encounter was always dear to us, we decided not to turn this event into yet another virtual conference. Instead we created a smaller scale, alternative representation of the effort of the ALMAT 2020 symposium, honouring the work of the proposals that had been selected. This happened in the form of an RC exposition showing the selected contributions.
