Over the past month or so, we ran a pilot Sheffield Pattern Club Winter School. We had 24 applications, from which we had to reluctant select around half participants. This was really difficult, it would have been great to include everyone! Thanks to financial funding support, the winter school was free to participants, with the session leaders (see below) and organiser (Ray Morrison) paid for their work.
The school ran as a course with four main sessions. We will share more details soon, including a short film, but here’s a glimpse of what went on:
Live coding music with Strudel (lead by Lucy Cheesman)
This focussed on live coding musical patterns in the free Strudel live coding environment, with Alex McLean joining to relate the topic in traditional South Indian geometric rhythms. Lucy also covered approaches to listening and feedback in group sessions.
Flamenco dance and robot movement (lead by Rosamaria Cisneros)
Exploring notation of human movement, and then transferring that knowledge to the construction of simple handmade robots (using servo motors, glue guns, lollypop sticks and other craft materials), with their movements patterned with strudel via a microcontroller.
Video by Jessica Stanley
Modular unit origami and light patterns (lead by Seiko Kinoshita)
Folding origami units and contructing them into solid geometric forms, then augmenting them with LED light strips, again patterned with strudel via the microcontroller.
Video by Seiko Kinoshita
Analogue video synthesis and Hydra live coding of visuals (lead by Antonio Roberts)
A hands-on demo of ‘old school’ modular video synthesisers, bringing that knowledge to use of the Hydra live coding environment which is inspired by them. Alex also showed how to integrate Hydra and Strudel together to create audiovisual patterns.
Photo by Jessica Stanley
Participants
The course was really brought to life by the participants, who came from a range of different backgrounds and practices. Namely:
- Susanne Palzer
- Dr Caterina McEvoy
- Sam Clews (soundcloud)
- Nikola Nenov (mastodon / youtube / bluesky / insta)
- Helen Swift
- Katie McDonald
- Jan Hopkins
- Jessica Stanley
- Mir Jansen
- Nikita Noronha
- Jess Ghost
- Kate O’Brien
- Maddy Rose-Key
Also joined by visitors:
- James Walker from the awesome London Pattern Club
- Tincuta Heinzel
What’s next?
The participants already took the initiative to collective apply for an open call to take their work in patterns further. We’re also planning follow-on sessions and a final sharing event/celebration. Further ahead, we hope to run a new iteration of the course again, perhaps around the same time in 2026. We will also do more ‘open’ one-off sessions soon, perhaps going back to the previous format of a monthly club.
Want to run your own pattern club sessions/course?
Soon we will share more detailed reflections, together with worksheets etc under a free/open source/creative commons license, to support those wishing to run similar sessions. If you’d like to get in touch about starting your own pattern club, please drop us a line!
Acknowledgements
The winter school was coordinated by Ray Morrison in collaboration with Alex McLean and Lucy Cheesman. It was made possible thanks to financial support from the ‘flexible creative fund’ from UK Research and Innovation, and ran by Sheffield Pattern Club as part of FLF project Algorithmic Pattern (MR/V025260/1) hosted by Then Try This.
