WORKSHOPS 2019

Annie Dorsen

Hand-Made Algorithms for Dancers and Others 

There's a lot of hype and nonsense around algorithms. Because we mostly think of them in the context of advanced computing, we generally know them as obscure and even sinister tools: fast, dynamic, and complex – pulling data from everywhere and correlating in all sorts of counterintuitive ways, terraforming our culture, economy, intellectual life. Black boxes of multitiered impenetrable processes.

But algorithms don't have to be so complex, nor so mysterious. In this workshop we'll be slowing them down and bringing them close. Treating them as a kind of handicraft – like pottery or wood-working.

In the spirit of the slow food movement, we'll be making nutritional, artisanal, hand-made algorithms with which to make nutritional, artisanal, hand-made performances.

We'll cover a lot of the basics: data-set construction, translating content to and from symbolic languages, combinatorial and sorting and sequential algorithms. If we're feeling fancy we could try some shortest path ideas, or even a pared-down evolutionary model. But we'll keep everything simple, the kind of stuff we can all do in our heads, or with a pen and paper. No math skills necessary.