NordiCHI logo recreated with physarum slime in Tölvera.

Jack Armitage will be giving a half-day tutorial on Tölvera at NordiCHI 2024, on Monday 14th October, in Uppsala, Sweden.

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Tölvera: Interactive Self-Organising Systems for HCI Research & Artistic Practice

In artificial intelligence-based human-computer interaction research, self-organising systems and artificial life offer unique opportunities for creative coding and interaction design that remain underexplored compared to the dominant paradigm of machine learning. These approaches can yield emergent, dynamic, and open-ended interactions that are difficult to achieve with traditional ML techniques, and at a fraction of the computational cost.

Tölvera, a Python-based medium for creative exploration of self-organising systems, was created to address this gap in the field of music interaction and to support artistic research. This tutorial offers an introduction to Tölvera and its myriad features for interaction across sonic, visual and other modalities.

Attendees will gain the practical experience needed to start integrating interactive self-organising systems into their own practices, whether they lie in research, art or both. Through practical demos and group discussion, attendees will also be invited to contemplate other subfields of artificial intelligence that might be more deserving of attention.

Ahead of the workshop, participants can optionally install Tölvera and try out the examples.

What to bring

• Laptop and charger: macOS with Apple Silicon has the best support, but Linux and Windows are also supported. macOS Intel is not currently supported.
• Headphones

References

• Tölvera: Composing With Basal Agencies. Jack Armitage, Victor Shepardson & Thor Magnusson. Proc. New Interfaces for Musical Expression 2024 (NIME 2024), Utrecht, Netherlands. [pdf]
• Commingling Artificial Life and Interactive Machine Learning in Diffractive Artistic Research Practice. Jack Armitage, Victor Shepardson, Miguel Crozzoli & Thor Magnusson. Proc. Conference on Artificial Life 2024 (ALIFE 2024), Copenhagen, Denmark. [pdf]
• Artificial Life in Integrated Interactive Sonification and Visualisation: Initial Experiments with a Python-Based Workflow. Jack Armitage, Miguel Crozzoli & Daniel Jones. Proc. International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD 2024), Troy, NY, USA. [pdf]
• Explainable AI in Music Performance: Case Studies from Live Coding & Sound Spatialisation. Celeste Betancur, Jack Armitage, Victor Shepardson & Nicola Privato. XAI in Action: Past, Present, and Future Applications, NeurIPS 2023 Workshop, New Orleans, USA. [pdf]
• Sardine: a Modular Python Live Coding Environment. Raphaël Maurice Forment & Jack Armitage. 7th International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC2023), Utrecht, Netherlands. [pdf]
• Agential Scores: Exploring Emergent, Self-Organising and Entangled Music Notation, Jack Armitage and Thor Magnusson, 8th International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation (TENOR) 2023, May 16 20223, Northeastern University, Cambridge, MA. [pdf]