*Alpaca* <https://alpaca.cc/> is a festival on *Algorithmic Patterns in the
Creative Arts*, comprised of live performances, workshops and conference talks.
We aim 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. Alpaca festival
focusses on three aspects of pattern-making:
• Procedures for making, whether notated or passed on through oral culture.
These ways of making may be arrived at through playful experimentation, or
through e.g. geometry, models and representations. Simple procedures can give
us complex and unexpected 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.
As a festival we embrace permacomputing principles
<https://permacomputing.net/>, and encourage others to consider environmental
and social issues around their engagement with technology. The focus of Alpaca
submissions should be on human creativity, and *not* on generative AI or e.g.
unsupervised generation of patterns by LLMs.
Deadline: 1st November 2026
Alpaca Festival in Sheffield UK is taking place 6th-9th May 2027
Conference talks will be held on 6th & 7th May 2027
Workshops and performances will be on 7th, 8th & 9th May 2027
*Additional dates to be added for online sessions, and activities in other
cities.*
For full details, please see: https://alpaca.cc/call/
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