Bérénice Gaça Courtin, a multimedia artist originally from Paris, divides her time between Geneva and Paris. After obtaining a Master’s degree in Contemporary Applied Arts from the Massana School in Barcelona and studying Visual Arts in Geneva at the HEAD School, she specialised in textile arts, audiovisual arts and performance.

For the past four years, she has been researching the history of her grandfather, Kazimierz Gaca, a Polish resistance fighter during the Second World War who worked with the ENIGMA machine.

She is interested in all forms of resistance and, through her art, weaves a fabric in which hidden codes evoke encrypted messages, drawing a parallel between the digital Jacquard loom and the ENIGMA machine, pioneers of the computer.

She directed an experimental film performance on this subject in collaboration with other artists, which was presented at the La Alternativa festival at the CCCB in Barcelona. In 2023, she created an installation for the Centre Pompidou in Metz, exhibited in the Capsule du Musée, as well as at the Octobre Numérique festival in Arles.

She is currently working on a project combining traditional techniques and new technologies, which was exhibited at Milan Design Week in April 2024 and at the Fabienne Levy Gallery in Lausanne, Switzerland, as part of a group exhibition. In 2025, she participated in a group exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Trier entitled Resistance through Textile Art.

https://www.berenicecourtin.com

Shreya Gupta is an interdisciplinary music artist, blending Indian classical and electronic music to craft immersive, rhythmically complex soundscapes.

At Alpaca, Shreya will introduce a system that listens to tabla performances, classifies each stroke using machine learning, and responds with a drum groove that follows the flow of the original rhythm. Built with real-time stroke detection, pattern prediction, and cross-instrument mapping, the system acts as a rhythm translator.

https://www.shreya-gupta.com

A member of Electric Detectives.

himHallows is the working name of Paul Hallows, an artist and multi-discipline creative practitioner based at the Engine House in Salford’s Islington Mill.

The kernel for himHallows’s obsession with patterns began with an off-season visit to
Jesolo in Italy and encountering the regimented rows of sun loungers packed onto the resort’s beaches. The never-ending, factory-like approach to sunbathing had an uncanny appearance in a holiday setting and would remain a thought slowly ticking over the next decade. The desire to communicate this repetition led to seeing patterns in all kinds of architecture and infrastructure, and an outlet formed to communicate these observations. This parasol pattern would be realised in several studies over the coming years.

The first result of this infrastructure-as-patterns exploration started with a shipping container pattern study in 2018 (based on a shipping container storage site near Trafford Park). The shipping container pattern started a body of work called infrastructure that was exhibited at the Modernist Gallery in 2019, comprising a series of mostly A1 size prints.

From this, the pattern exploration has evolved and with that the scale and construction at which the final pieces have too. This led to a series of patterns exhibited at Altogether Otherwise, Manchester as an exhibition titled SCALE, with each work created to approximately 2 x 3 meters in size.

Works have also appeared in exhibitions at Home Mcr (with Tower Crane / Redevelopment Granada prize nominated), Now Gallery, The People’s History Museum and during covid as on augmented reality experiment entitled Infrastructure AR

https://www.himhallows.co.uk

https://www.instagram.com/himhallows

Mags Tavener (they/them) is a student physicist with a particular interest in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Their research concerns field shimming and specific absorption rate monitoring at ultra-high fields. They’re also a live-coder who performs with pastagang as well as investigating the ways MRI and magnetic resonance physics can be used in and understood through art, currently with online interactive visualisations.

They can be found on the internet at https://mags.omg.lol or on the Fediverse at mags@social.mags.omg.lol where they welcome comment.

Since the first clinical scanners were built in the 1980s, all of our lives have been touched by the physics of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), yet it remains mysterious to non-specialists. In this talk I will attempt to communicate some of the incredible physics underlying MRI, as well as exploring the ways in which MRI is very much an example of an algorithmic pattern, how this informs the tools used to understand it, and some of the ways I’ve been using these to make art.