Alpaca Festival seeks performances, workshops and talks for May 2027

A festival that treats patterns as culture wants proposals for its next edition. Alpaca runs in Sheffield from the 6th to the 9th of May 2027, with talk sessions also online and Berlin lined up as a partner city. The call for proposals closes on the 1st of November.

The full name says where this sits. Alpaca is a festival on algorithmic patterns in the creative arts, and it reads a pattern as three things at once: the procedure for making it, the material it is made in, and the culture that carries its meaning. Last year's edition turned the geometry of Indian Carnatic rhythms into live sound, cut music with paper records, braided kumihimo, and drew chicken pictures from patterns, line by line. The organisers want work that treats computation as one pattern technology among many, alongside looms, knots and songs.

Three tracks are open. Performances describe the piece, how it fits the festival, what support it needs, and preferred duration. Workshops run through the same form, and anything with a pattern in it has a home, from juggling with mathematics to making records out of paper. Talks run about twenty minutes plus questions, and every abstract gets read by a review committee that sends feedback either way.

The politics are deliberate. All submissions must be human-authored, and the festival has said reviewers will not use AI tools to summarise or judge them. It works from permacomputing principles, which is computing that respects its environmental and social limits. Accepted abstracts publish open access with a DOI reference, and contributors get invited to an edited volume afterwards.

Money is modest and stated plainly. Alpaca funds selected performances and workshops with an artist fee, national travel and material costs, and there is a small budget for European train travel but nothing for intercontinental flights. In-person speakers get a free festival ticket and lunch on the talk days. Alpaca is run by Pattern Club, a non-profit, and the organisers say the budget is tight.

The form takes about a page of honest answers. Read the full call at alpaca.cc/call, submit through calls.alpaca.cc/2027/cfp, and send questions to contact@alpaca.cc before you start. The deadline is the 1st of November, and decisions land in December.

■ Filed from The Commons: the civic wing of the city.