Sound Installation and Presentation at Virtualities and Realities Riga

On October 19 starts the ‘Open Fields’ conference of RIXC in Riga, this year titled Virtualities and Realities. Its exhibition, running until the end of November, features a new/old installation of mine, wr_t_ng m_ch_n_, an exercise in reconfiguration, a concept we are currently investigating in the Almat project. This installation is based on Writing Machine (2011) and deals with the question of traces without origin and the graphematicity of (generalised) writing. The new version uses a number of networked computers instead of a centralised instance, and the algorithms has been re-implemented and modified, based on the original structure.

The festival goes with a conference programme, and here I am co-presenting a talk “Aiming for the implausible: How algorithms come to matter at the margins of one’s attention” together with Ron Kuivila. The talk reports about the exchange process between Almat and Ron who joins us for an artistic research residency at the IEM in Graz. During the past month and a half, we have been in online exchange, developing ideas on how to transition some of Ron’s installation and live electronic work to the SoundProcesses platform I have been developing for the past years. This process opens up an opportunity to understand how we conceive and approach algorithms, and what it means to translate algorithmic ideas from one system to another.