Call for Papers: AlgoMech Symposium: Festival of Algorithmic and Mechanical Movement

Festival of Algorithmic and Mechanical Movement (AlgoMech)
http://algomech.com/

Arts Research Symposium


9:30 - Coffee + live coding performance
10:00 - Paper session (8 papers - we will issue a call for papers soon)
12:00 - Lunch
13:00 - Panel 1 (on fictive materials - chair Derek Hales)
14:00 - Keynote talk with Godfried-Willem Raes
15:00 - Coffee with a performance
16:00 - Panel 2 (on maker culture - chair TBC)
17:00 - Performances at the Millennium Gallery

Call for Papers

The AlgoMech Arts Research Symposium takes place within the Festival of Algorithmic and Mechanical Movement, on the 13th November 2016 at the Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, UK.  
AlgoMech will celebrate a resurgence of making in performance, where creative processes are made visible during a live event. Rather than presenting technology as seamless, we pick at the seams, exposing its innards as human-made and reconfigurable. We will also go beyond fashionable notions of technology to take the long view; bringing together mechanical, kinetic, electronic, and software arts, from periods spanning the stone age to present day, building a picture of the human maker as both digital and analogue, thinking and feeling, embodied yet reaching beyond what is bodily possible. The festival will take place across Sheffield, and will include concerts, talks, hands-on workshops, and a club night.

The arts research symposium will focus on the latest developments in this field, drawing on both academic and artistic perspectives. The day will include talks from artists contributing work at the festival, and panel sessions on fictive materials and maker culture.  We welcome submissions from areas that intersect with the conference themes.

Themes
• Human and mechanical motion
• Human-machine interaction and embodiment
• Creative computing and (live) coding
• Robotics in the arts
• Design and physical computing
• Machine creativity
• Algorithm aesthetics
• Mechanical automata in history
• Kinesthesis and art
• Machine choreography
• Maker culture
• Materialities for motion
• Generative design and architecture
• Alternative histories of algorithms and mechanisms

Keynote speaker

We will have a keynote by Godfried-Willem Raes, of the Logos foundation, and who is well known in this country for his work on musical robotics with Aphex Twin.

Submissions
We invite proposals for 15 minute research presentations (10 minutes talk + 5 minutes questions).  Proposals should be a one page abstract describing the presentation.  Please also submit a short (200-300 word) biography for each author and an image describing your project. Submissions should be made in PDF format.

Submission Process
Submissions will be selected by a panel chaired by members of the Experimental Music Technologies (EMuTe) Lab at University of Sussex. Please email your submission in PDF format to [email protected]

Important Dates
10th October: Submission Deadline
17th October: Notifications
12th-20th November: AlgoMech Festival
13th November: Arts Research Symposium

Contact
Symposium chairs:
Thor Magnusson, [email protected]
Chris Kiefer, [email protected]