Key dates
Call for conference talks – now open:
- Deadline for submissions: 2nd June 2025
- Notification of results: 2nd July 2025
Call for performances and other contributions:
- Opens: April 2025 (please join our mailing list for updates)
- Deadline: TBA
Conference dates:
- Part A: 12-14th September 2025 (Sheffield UK, and streamed online)
- Part B: 19-20th September 2025 (online, with potential in-person ‘watch parties’)
Background
Algorithmic Pattern aims to bring people together who value deep, human curiosity into patterns. We hope this call excites you whether you are exploring patterns in heritage crafts or contemporary algorithmic art.
Humans have always explored algorithmic patterns, as creative, culturally-embedded ways to work beyond our imaginations.
But what is an algorithmic pattern? We invite contributions that focus on one or more of the following aspects:
- Procedures for making, whether notated or passed on through oral culture. These ways of making may be arrived at through playful experimentation, and perhaps reasoned about in terms of geometry, models and representations. Simple procedures (shifting, reversing, etc) in combination can give us complex results.
- Material behaviours, in that pattern-making is always a dialogue between a human maker and their material, and a pattern notation is only complete when considered in terms of the material at play.
- Pattern-making culture is what brings meaning to the procedures and materials of pattern-making, whether through ritual, sharing, collaboration, decoration, trade, or the collective experience of making (or dancing!) together.
We look for a future informed by the past, at the point where ‘information age’ technologies are now becoming ancestral, joining a long history of pattern-making technologies in being passed from one generation to the next.
Call for conference contributions
We invite conference talk proposals in the form of a short paper or essay introducing the work that will be presented.
Accepted written proposals will be published (with DOI reference) as part of the conference proceedings, along with a recording of the talk itself.
The length of the written proposal is flexible. We suggest around 1000 words, plus references and illustrations. However, please use the number of words that best gets your work across. For example some works are best carried by illustrations, and others by extended prose. However, please do not exceed 2500 words.
Target audience
The target audience for this call is broad. We encourage contributions from both practitioners and researchers, including those without an academic or institutional affiliation.
We encourage submissions that reference related work, so that we can understand the wider context for it, but hope to see submissions with arts, crafts, theoretical, technological, scientific and mixed backgrounds.
In short, imposters welcome!
Paper submission process
Step 1:
To start the process, please fill out our online form.
Step 2:
You will then receive templates via email for writing your text in one of two forms.
- The markdown format. This is a simple system for marking up plain text with formatting, footnotes, images and so on. This is our recommended format, as it gives us more flexibility in publishing your work, but may be unfamiliar. We will provide an online collaborative editor for preparing your text in markdown.
- A template for use in word processors such as Microsoft Word.
Step 3:
Write your contribution! For inspiration, please see the proceedings and recordings of our previous Salon event, and the topics on our online forum. There are further guidelines in the templates that we will send you.
Step 4:
When your submission is complete, submit it by the deadline via our online submissions system.
All submissions that address the conference theme will then be carefully reviewed and given feedback. Authors of accepted contributions will have the opportunity to respond to reviewers’ comments in updating their contribution before it is published.
This contribution will then form part of the conference publication, available freely under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license, with archival DOI reference.
Accepted authors will present their work as part of the conference, choosing to do so either in-person in Sheffield, or on-line. This could be in the form of a conventional talk e.g. with slides, but we are open to other approaches.
Location
The conference will be in two parts. The first part will focus on activities in Sheffield, streamed online for remote audiences. The second part will be fully on-line, supporting international, live discussion of work. Contributors will be assigned to either the Sheffield-focussed or online-focussed part, based on their preference and ability to travel.
In this way we aim for the best of both worlds, in terms of in-person energy for the first part, and international connection for the second part. Those coming to Sheffield are encouraged to travel sustainably.
Performance and workshop proposals
We plan to open a further call for performances and workshops in April 2025.
Finances
There is no charge for submitting a proposal, and will be no charge for authors to attend the event.
All outcomes, live streams, recordings, publications and archives will be freely available online.
We are unfortunately not able to pay conference contributors for their time.
Contact
If anything is unclear, or you have further questions, please do not hesitate to email: alex@algorithmicpattern.org
