Algorithmic Poetry

The 19th Web Residency Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Digital Solitude program collaborated closely with Liquid Architecture

How may sound poetically speak with algorithms? What are the limits of creativity when it comes to machine learning? Should algorithms become noisy to make room for the unexpected? These and other questions kicked off the 19th Web Residency entitled Algorithmic Poetry.

Created within the last months, the six works presented here engage critically, poetically, and playfully with sound and our everyday data-driven world. By using sound, listening, and/or recording practices the works expand the notion of algorithms and the ways in which data sets are managed and information is gathered. Echoing technological implementation, experimentation with slippages, in-betweens, negative spaces, crafting and glitching, as well as embodiment of words is the through-line of the works.

Moritz Nahold und Kenneth Constance Loe
Ghost in the Cog: A Poetic Score
A sound artist and a writer and performer challenge the concept of a straightforward algorithm by blurring the boundaries between input and output. The final website invites users to activate a poem as a score by reading and playing it with no clear set of rules, and get lost in sound and webspace.
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Bola Chinelo
Sound is the [REDACTED] of the World
A bone flute, a stone, a car horn, cicadas, and Nsibidi pictograms: Bola Chinelo created a visual and sonic animation, exploring unwanted sounds, natural algorithms, noise, and emptiness. The multilayered project takes up the idea that algorithms as subjects to
glitches, misinterpretations, or uncertainties can make room for the unexpected.
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kirby
Dispersal
This webpage composition explores how locality, environmental listening, engagement with a particular plant from Naarm (Melbourne), mapping the flow of data and information streams, and critical/creative coding are important categories in which resistance to colonial
power might take shape.
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Sherese Francis
ALTeks: NGLitcholalia. Sound as Search Engine
Artist and poet Sherese Francis has created six broadcasts that think about knowledge-making in the context of Black and Afro-diasporic poetics, languages, and sounds. Speaking in tongues, the roots of words and their constant migration, and dub music are only a few of the ideas she has been playing with in the series, where each show is a poetic essay.
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Fileona Dkhar
Of Roots and Portals: With-nessing Indigenous
Khasi artist Fileona Dkhar created a work that explores different media of correspondence and communication: The acts of writing letters, exchanging cassette tapes, tapping into oral traditions and myths, incorporating sprinklings of algorithmic imagery or fractal image generation, and prompts become tools for world-building and connecting with pasts and futures.
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Website

Shamica Ruddock and Hannan Jones
Re-Imagining In-Conversation: A New Poetics
The artist invite you to a sonic space with mutable elements, allowing the user to create soundscapes to coexist within an almost endless aural possibility and multiplicity. The website itself rejects a static position or a universal narrative, acknowledging the multiplicity in relation to identities.
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Website