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Monday 26 July 2010

The Computer Arts Society presents a FREE evening of film from the 1970/80s and more recent performances that use computer-based generative systems.

Malcolm Le Grice, Mike Leggett, Ernest Edmonds and Mark Fell

Location: Birkbeck Cinema (map/directions)

Time: doors open 6.30 for 7.00 pm

Introduced by Ernest Edmonds

Programme

Part 1: Generative Film

Red+Green+Blue, Mike Leggett. 1972-76. 16mm film, 9 min.

Fragment, Ernest Edmonds. 1984-85. Computer Generated Video, excerpt, 10 min.

Digital Still Life, Malcolm Le Grice. 1984-86. Computer and video, colour, 8 min

Part 2: Generative Performance

Attack on Silence, Mark Fell. 2010

DC Release, Ernest Edmonds and Mark Fell. 2007

 

About the speaker

Ernest Edmonds was born in London and studied Mathematics and Philosophy at Leicester University. He has a PhD in logic from Nottingham University, is a Fellow of the British Comuter Society, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and a Charted Engineer. He is a practicing artist.

He lives and works in Sydney Australia. His art is in the constructivist tradition and he first used computers in his art practice in 1968. He first showed an interactive work with Stroud Cornock in 1970. He first showed a generative time-based computer work in London in 1985. He has exhibited throughout the world, from Moscow to LA.

He has over 200 refereed publications in the fields of human-computer interaction, creativity and art. Artists Bookworks (UK) has recently published his book "On New Constructs in Art". Ernest Edmonds is Professor of Computation and Creative Media at the University of Technology, Sydney where he runs a multi-disciplinary practice-based art and technology research group, the Creativity and Cognition Studios. In Sydney, he is represented by the Conny Dietzschold Gallery.

Ernest Edmonds has held the position of University Dean, has sat on many funding and conference committees and was a pioneer in the development of practice-based PhD programmes. He founded the ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference series and was part of the founding team for the ACM Intelligent User Interface conference series. He has been an invited speaker in, for example, the UK, France, the USA, Australia, Japan and Malaysia.

Director Creativity and Cognition Studios, UTS

Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Transactions

Founding Editor Knowledge-Based Systems

Visiting Professor Sussex University

Visiting Research Fellow Goldsmiths College

http://www.ernestedmonds.com/

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Past Events

Tuesday 4 May 2010

The BCS Computer Arts Society Specialist Group invite you to our May meeting at the London Knowledge Lab. This meeting is open to the public and is free.

TIME: 6.30 for 7.00pm

PLACE: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald St, London, WC1N 3QS

Nearest tubes: Holborn (Central & Piccadilly Line), Russell Square (Piccadilly Line) and Chancery Lane (Central Line).
Buses: 19, 38, 55, 243.

Link to map

Speaker: Tina Gonsalves

Title: CHAMELEON

Tina Gonsalves is currently working with world-leaders in psychology, neuroscience and emotion computing in order to research and produce emotionally interactive installations. She is currently honorary artist in resident at the Institute of Neurology at UCL in London, visiting artist at the Media Lab at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, USA and artist in resident at Nokia Research Labs, Finland as part of the Australia Council Connections Residency.

She will discuss the process of building about her latest project, CHAMELEON. The project uses facial emotion recognition software to build up an empathic relationship with the audience. The coding is built on research in social neuroscience. The project arises from cross-disciplinary research integrating emotion neuroscientist Prof Hugo Critchley, social neuroscientist Prof Chris Frith, computer scientists Prof Rosalind Picard and Dr Rana Kaliouby from the MIT Media Lab. She will also discuss her current works in development in mobile technology.

http://www.tinagonsalves.com

Tuesday 2 March, 2010

The BCS Computer Arts Society Specialist Group invite you to our March meeting at the London Knowledge Lab. This meeting is open to the public and is free.

TIME: 6.30 for 7.00pm
PLACE: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald St, London, WC1N 3QS
Nearest tubes: Holborn (Central & Piccadilly Line), Russell Square (Piccadilly Line) and Chancery Lane (Central Line).
Buses: 19, 38, 55, 243.

Link to Map

EXPERIENCE THROUGH THE EYE OF THE ROBOT

Ron Chrisley and Joel Parthemore

The SEER-3 project is an attempt to explore new ways of specifying the non-conceptual content of experience, using an off-the-shelf robotic dog from Sony. Much of experience is not conceptually structured or, at least, not easily expressible in words. Alternate means of expressing the content of that experience are needed. We will offer our own perspective on that research, and relate it briefly to our own research interests in philosophy of mind.

Most importantly for this audience, we will talk about our conclusion that the program output had independent aesthetic merit, leading us to suggest that some samples of it be submitted to the CAS-sponsored art exhibition in Shrewsbury in 2007. After presenting samples of what was exhibited we will also discuss our experiences interacting with the audience there, interacting with the exhibit.

Lastly, we will talk about the coding process as an aesthetic experience and present examples of the program output from each stage in the program's development. If possible, the talk will conclude with output of some recent work on a light-avoidance routine.

Ron Chrisley is the Director of COGS, the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, where he holds a Readership in Philosophy in the Department of Informatics. He has held various research positions in Artificial Intelligence, including a Leverhulme Research Fellowship at the University of Birmingham and a Fulbright Fellowship at the Helsinki University of Technology. He was awarded his doctorate by the University of Oxford in 1997.

Joel Parthemore is writing up his doctoral thesis on the intersection between enactive philosophy and theories of concepts. The former stresses the continuity between an agent and that agent's environment; the latter concerns the ways our thoughts are systematically and productively structured. He is a student in the School of Informatics at the University of Sussex and is spending the current year at the University of Lund in Sweden as a guest of Peter Gärdenfors, whose work on ‘conceptual spaces’ he is basing much of his own thesis on. In his spare time, he is interested in ways of bridging the art/science divide and in the occasional aesthetically pleasing products his work has quite unexpectedly produced.

3 - 5 February 2010

The BCS Computer Arts Society SG is pleased to announce a special
three-day event to launch our Spring 2010 programme. It begins on
3 February with a one-day symposium at the BCS including a free
public talk that evening by keynote speaker Brian Reffin Smith
and continues with a two-day conference at the Victoria & Albert
Museum. Note that the Kinetica Art Fair will also be on in
London from 4-7 February: http://www.kinetica-artfair.com/

3 February - Ideas Before Their Time – 9-6pm at BCS London HQ
followed by a CAS talk by Brian Reffin Smith at 7:00
4-5 February - Decoding the Digital - a 2 day conference at the V&A

The symposium and conference both need to be booked in advance.
The CAS evening talk is open to the public and free but an RSVP
is necessary.

Wednesday 3 February 9:00 - 6:00 & 7:00 - 8:30 pm

Ideas Before Their Time
Connecting the past and the present in Computer Art

BCS London HQ, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton
Street, London, WC2E 7HA

map jpeg file 128KB

In conjunction with the Computer Arts Society, the CAT Project
(Computer Art & Technocultures) is presenting a symposium at the
British Computer Society in Covent Garden.

Many intriguing concepts have emerged in Computer Art over the
past 50 years. Some have been brought to light in the archives
examined by the CAT and CACHe Projects. Speakers from all areas
of Computer Art, including practitioners, curators and
historians, will discuss the past, present and future of this
area.

Go to http://www.technocultures.org.uk/symposium.html to view the
programme and book a place.

6:00 Drinks Reception

6:30 for 7:00 - Public Talk
BCS London HQ - as above
Free but RSVP necessary to paul_brown@mac.com

Speaker: Brian Reffin Smith

Title: Post Computer Art — Ontological Undecidability and the Cat
with Paint on its Paws.

It is argued that an active re-visiting of computer based
artworks from the last 60 or so years is essential to any
progress of today’s work towards an activity that pushes at the
frontiers of contemporary art.

We need to open up the history, works, techniques and discourses
of computer based art to enable a revolution to occur – that of
rendering the art problematic and ‘difficult’: then new solutions
will emerge. It is suggested that whilst conceptual art was busy
doing just this, computer based art was rushing madly in the
opposite direction, trying in a reformist manner to make things
easier, simpler.

Derrida, ‘Pataphysics, Schrödinger’s cat and the living dead may
well be brought into play.

Brian Reffin Smith is a writer, artist, performer and teacher. He
was a pioneer of computer-based conceptual art, with the aim of
trying to resist technological determinism and ‘state of the art’
technology, which might merely produce ‘state of the technology’
art. He is a French civil servant, having been invited to work
for their Ministry of Culture.

Smith, who won the first-ever Prix Ars Electronica, the Golden
Nike, in Linz in 1987, is a Regent of the College of
'Pataphysics, Paris, holding the Chair of Catachemistry and
Speculative Metallurgy. He is Professeur, École Nationale
Supérieure d'Art, Bourges, France.

Areas of work, research, teaching and performance include the
idea of the philosophical Zombie in art and elsewhere, and the
détournement or ‘hijacking’ of systems, mechanisms, programs etc.
to make art.

He became a Zombie, after a short illness, in 1999.

http://www.zombiepataphysics.blogspot.com

Thursday 4 & Friday 5 February
10.00-17.30 each day
Decoding the Digital

Hochhauser Auditorium, Sackler Centre, Victoria & Albert Museum

A rare opportunity to hear a dialogue between contemporary
digital practice and historical collections within the world of
digital and computer generated art and design. Speakers include
artist Frieder Nake and writer Edward Shanken, with theorists
Charlie Gere and Beryl Graham. There will be an in-conversation
between Paul Brown and his son Daniel Brown. Other contributors
include the collector Michael Spalter, the writer and artist Anne
Morgan Spalter, plus Louise Shannon (V&A) and Shane Walter
(Director, onedotzero), co-curators of the V&A exhibition Decode,
and Douglas Dodds, one of the curators of the V&A display Digital
Pioneers.

£50, £40 concessions, £10 students for two days
£25, £20 concessions, £5 students for one day

Further details and bookings:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/courses/conferences/index.html#decoding

In collaboration with Birkbeck College, with support from the
Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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Further Past Events

You can access past events here:

• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004