Web Residencies »Algorithmic Poetry.«

Anchored by Édouard Glissant’s writings on intertextuality, the situational slant of the Black Atlantic and creolization, and the poetics of interconnection, we can gain an understanding that there are learnings that take place within clashes and between the meaningful connections algorithms pose. The jury found itself gravitating toward proposals that engage with a more collaborative approach to the call out, responding to lived connections and embodied situatedness in relation to sound, sonic cultures, and noisy spheres of (de)-activation.

With this call, the jury was also interested in expanded or critical engagement with algorithms, as well as how data sets are managed and information is collected. We were interested in AI as the basis of working. We sought out proposals that centered criticality from artists who share an awareness of the implications that arise when working with softwares, systems, and data sets in a way that does not describe an adherence or commitment to a particular technological approach, but instead involves contextual inquiry. Echoing technological implementation, experimentation with »slippages,« »in-betweens,« »affections,« »crafting and glitching,« and »creative coding« is the through-line of the selected proposals.

Among the applications, we found artists whose proposals maintained a position of criticality, but also were poetic, sometimes playful or rebellious. They showed individually evocative and prudent thought in addressing these specific dimensions.

Lucreccia Quintailla (for Liquid Architecture), Denise Sumi (for Digital Solitude), and Jazmina Figueroa (Artist and Curator)

Re-Imagining In-Conversation: A New Poetics by Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock  explores the dynamics of hybridity and exchange. Inside an interactive soundscape, visitors of their web project will be invited to compose, gather, and listen, triggering recordings co-created with collaborators. Jones and Ruddock are particularly interested in »cultural hybridity and technocreolization« and allowing for »potential for expanding a new poetics.«

ALTeks: NGLitcholalia. Sound as Search Engine by Sherese Francis  takes inspiration from the artists’ Afro-Caribbean heritage and Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts to continue research on concepts of knowledge-making through a Black, and Afro-diasporic lens, this time producing a radio broadcast, thinking »of sound as a search engine (…) to create communication« and community.

»In what ways can sonic resistance combat the tone policing echo chamber we live within?« The web residency project Sound is the [REDACTED] of the World by Bola Chinelo  questions how concepts such as »poor« audio quality are built upon sonic elitism and anti-primitivism and explores how sound editing can be centered in a decolonial practice that allows little to no distinction between music and noise.

What does it feel like to engage with Indigenous knowledge to build a bridge toward comprehending regret, guilt, and care toward the future descendant? Of Roots and Portals: With-nessing by Fileona Dkhar  intertwines the personal with mythology and history as storytelling devices, by combining text, sound, and images to form an affective story between remembering and future narratives.

How to find ways to extend the algorithm and redefine machine relationships while producing new sound-text patterns? Ghost in the Cog: A Poetic Score by Moritz Nahold and Kenneth Constance Loe  experiments with analogue and digital feedback loops, algorithms, and intermedial/intertextual translation modes. While reworking/generating new sound and poetry, Nahold and Loe are particularly interested in the »slippages and inflections of meaning and on medium-specificity in human-AI translation.«

Soil Seed Bank by kirby  sonically maps the lively activities performed by adventive plants in the inner West of Naarm, and therefore contemplates on varieties and plants which were not initially local. kirby will create »an algorithmic browser composition combining audio and creative code to listen with the presence of colonizing plants.«