On 23 July we will bring colleagues from Music, Computer Science and the VIP Studio together for a single intensive day of making: treating AI as a collaborator to compose, devise and perform live music, and to build a visual environment that listens to that music and answers it as it unfolds.
Artist Workshop: Thursday 23 July, 10AM - 4PM (email Helen.Kennedy@nottingham.ac.uk to participate)
Public Performance: Thursday 23 July, 4.30 - 6.30PM (register HERE)
Where: VIP Studio, King’s Meadows Campus, University of Nottingham, NG7 2NR
The artist workshop session opens out into a free public scratch performance in the early evening, where work made during the day is shared with an invited audience who can ask questions, trace the ideas back into our research environments, and find concrete ways to work with us.
We want the day to take Nottingham and the wider East Midlands as its raw material. There is a particular seam worth mining, one that runs from the framework knitters and the lace machines straight into the question of computation itself. Nottingham lace was made by mechanisms that held pattern as structure, and it was the punched cards of the Jacquard loom that gave Babbage and Ada Lovelace their working image for the Analytical Engine, the machine Lovelace imagined might one day weave algebra the way the loom wove flowers and leaves. Lovelace lies at Hucknall a few miles to the north, which makes her something close to a local patron for a day like this, and a useful provocation. She lets us hold the harder parts of the history in view as well, the Nottinghamshire frame breakers among them, and ask what it means to collaborate with machines in a region that has always thought carefully about technology and about the people whose labour it reshapes. Teams might take up lace as algorithm, the rhythm and noise of the machine floor, Lovelace and the poetics of computation, or whatever else the day surfaces.
The shape of the day
From 10AM - 4PM the space becomes a workshop. We will bring together instruments, technologies, software, research and aspects of our regional history to collectively devise a scratch performance that weaves together elements of music, visuals and the creative deployment of AI. Refreshments run throughout, with lunch in the middle, and the afternoon tips gradually from open play toward shaping something that can be shared.
The scratch
From 4.30 - 6.30PM we share what the day has produced. A scratch is deliberately a work in progress rather than a finished piece, shown in the spirit of trying things in public. We will perform what we have devised in front of an invited audience. Time is held for questions, and for a fuller conversation about the research environments behind the work and the routes open to practitioners, partners and students who want to collaborate with us. The evening is as much about opening doors as it is about the performance.
This hackjam is delivered by University of Nottingham. It is supported by Contemporary Visual Arts Network East Midlands and Contemporary Visual Arts Network West Midlands as part of Ode to the Midlands. The programme invests in artists, organisations, and audiences across the Midlands, strengthening regional connections and expanding access to digital visual arts.
This event forms part of a wider series of workshops, generously supported by universities and partners across the East and West Midlands. All workshops are free and open to the public, offering opportunities to develop digital skills, encourage experimentation, and build confidence across the sector.
Ode to the Midlands is funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
