Algorithms and allegories.

Much of contemporary art practice is both produced and can be read with the notion of the algorithmic as its predominate trope. Similarly one can read older art practices as working under the aegis of allegory. Of course these registers and metaphors can be used to parse a distribution of artistic and cultural production across time in multiple directions. We often think of the algorithmic as that which concerns procedure, and don't see it as its own meaning. In this text I am interested in exploring the algorithmic as a gesture, individual and particular, something that can reveal an interiority of a work. In this way it is perhaps akin to the allergoric, where the work proper, comprised on the surface, simultaneously holds beneath and within it something else. The algorithmic as an author/composer's signature, might be thought of as that secret storehouse of invention. With the advent of contemporary art and sound work turns its attention to sequencing, loops, replication, modulation, mutation, generative systems, database and interface as instruction sets or grammars, both as ways to conceptualize and to produce work. The paper looks at a wide range of stratagems in works of sound, architecture, visual arts, and film to illustrate a correspondence between the allegoric and the algorithmic. Its aim is to encourage both practitioners and theorists to engage these two notions, the allegoric and the algorithmic, as a way to consider and produce work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]