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PAGE 67 is now available. Click on PAGE in the left-hand menu.

Cover of bookA significant recent book White Heat Cold Logic records the pioneering British computer art of the period 1960 to 1980.

Co-editors of the book are Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nick Lambert and Catherine Mason, all members of CAS.

More about the book See the book on the publisher’s site at MIT Press

CACHE archiveThe CACHe digital archiveof pioneering British computer art is now hosted at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts.


FaceBook thmbnail The Computer Arts Society now has a Facebook page.

Programme 2008

Ranulph Glanville: No Longer a Shrinking Violet?

2 December 2008 - 6:30 for 7:00

Institute of Archaeology -
Room 410 University College London
31-34 Gordon Square
London
WC1H 0PY

Nearest tubes: Euston Square, Warren Street & Russell Square

Map

The significance of cybernetics in the development of computer arts is apparent in the title of Jasia Reichart's Cybernetic Serendipity Exhibition, now celebrating its 40th anniversary (which is also the 50th of the Philips Pavilion and the 60th of Wiener's eponymous book). It featured, prominently, the work of several cyberneticians whose art is currently being very positively re-evaluated (see for instance www.paskpresent.com, and exhibition of work coming out of Gordon Pask's work and ideas). Yet 1968 is also often seen as the beginning of the very rapid decline of cybernetics to the point that, by the early 1970s, some were referring to it as dead.

However, 1968 also sees the beginning of a transformation of cybernetics that occurred through the application of cybernetic understandings to the field itself. For convenience, we can take this as initiated by Margaret Mead's paper "Cybernetics of Cybernetics". For some reason, this transformation has not received the recognition of the earlier version of cybernetics, or of other, contemporaneous developments. But it is alive, and well, if something of a shrinking violet!

In this talk, I will discuss the development of this so called second order cybernetics, and will present some of the central understandings and concepts. Many of them seem to me to be much more sympathetic to artists and the arts than those of 1968, and to bring an all together much more sophisticated world view, one that is much less mechanistic than the original.

About the speaker
Ranulph Glanville studied architecture at the AA (where he was mainly interested in electronic performance music), followed by cybernetics (his 1975 PhD was examined by Heinz von Foerster, his supervisor was Gordon Pask) and then human learning (1987 PhD examined by Gerard de Zeeuw, supervisor Laurie Thomas). In 2006 he was awarded a DSc in Cybernetics and Design. He has published extensively in cybernetics, design and learning, as well as maintaining a modest art practice. He has taught in Universities around the world. He is a professor of architecture and cybernetics in the Bartlett at UCL; of research in Innovation Design Engineering at the RCA; of Research Design at St Lucas, Brussels and Ghent; and of Design and Research at RMIT, Melbourne. He is also a regular visitor at a number of other universities. He is on the editorial board of several journals and the committee of several conferences. He has published more than 300 papers. He researches the fundamental position of cybernetics and the implications of this, relating this to the activity of design and how we might do research within design. His hobby is whichever of his interests he is not currently actually doing.

Computer Arts Society joint meeting with the MathArt Group.

Tuesday 4 November 2008

Location:
London Knowledge Lab - Institute of Education
23 - 29 Emerald St
London WC1N 3QS, UK

Tube: Holborn, Russell Square or Chancery Lane

Location map

The meeting is open to the public and is free but please note that RSVPs are essential for the afternoon session so we can pre-arrange catering.

There is no need to RSVP if you are just coming to the 6:00 talk and performance.

RSVP to paul@paul-brown.com

RULES: algorithms | structures | intuition

2:30 pm for the afternoon session (RSVP necessary)

2:30 - registration & coffee
2:45 - Alan Sutcliffe
3:30 - Paul Prudence
4:15 - Janis Jefferies
5:00 - refreshments
5:30 for 6:00 for the evening performance and talk (no RSVP)
6:00 - Live Coding performance and talk by Slub
7:30 - ends

Alan Sutcliffe: Packing Circles, Dissecting Polygons, Animated

My association with the Bridges maths-arts conferences in the last three years is outlined.

Doyle spiral circle packings are described and the problem of their construction outlined. The first animation shows the self-similarity within a packing using simple endless zooms. The second animation shows some decorative uses.

A recursive method of dissecting any polygon into mainly pentagons is described. The method is applied to single and multiple polygons. Animations in which one variable is changed
gives perhaps surprising results including some 3d effects.

Alan Sutcliffe is sometime editor of PAGE, bulletin of the CAS: "I have always known more about maths and music than about anything else, and took up computer graphics in the 1970s as a CAS member."

Paul Prudence: From Vector to Vertex - A non-deterministic Journey.

Paul Prudence is an artist and real-time visual performer (VJ) working with generative/computational systems, audio responsive visual feedback and processed video. He is also a writer, researcher and lecturer in the field of visual music and computational synaesthetic Art.

Paul will be talking about his own work in detail, beginning with early generative mathematically based works done in Flash to more recent work using the video synthesis toolkit VVVV including his sound responsive signal-feedback works.

Paul is contributor to a number of books dealing with computational design and generative art. Recent exhibitions/performance in which his work has been included are Artificial Emotion 3.0 in São Paulo, > Tomorrow Now - Engage the Code in Venice, Code in Motion in Turin and Hacktronic in Boston US.

Having recently completely a small tour of gigs in Holland, the US and France he will also be talking about his real-time software based VJ performances in the club environment.

Links
transphormetic.com
http://dataisnature.com

Janis Jefferies: Common Threads: re visiting a math/textile archive

Recognition of the relationship between mathematics, mathematical forms and textiles has been substantially documented across a variety of disciplines For example; the investigation of complex binary systems of Inca knotted forms (Wilford, 2003), to knot, braid and lace theory (Scharein 1998), the mathematical symmetry of woven pattern forms (Washburn and Crowe, 2004), and crochet
(Kenning, 2005).

For example in String, and Knot, Theory of Inca Writing - JOHN NOBLE WILFORD. (August 12, 2003) argues that In the conventional view of scholars, most khipu (or quipu, in the Hispanic spelling) were arranged as knotted strings hanging from horizontal cords in such a way as to represent numbers for bookkeeping and census purposes. The khipu were presumably textile abacuses, hardly
written documents.

Mathematicians often try to discover new facts regarding old phenomena. New phenomena are rarely discovered but they do
determine different conditions under which old ones, Artists are concerned with arranging phenomena in a manner that has not been seen before, or perhaps to increase the spectators' awareness of the phenomena. Often this involves complicating the effects rather than simplifying them. Thus, mathematicians and scientists rarefy and isolate phenomena to control them in abstract thought or in a laboratory, whereas artists embrace complexity and manipulate phenomena intuitively. The differences in method have resulted in divergent vocabularies for describing similar visual effects, and the two approaches can appear more disparate than their phenomenal commonality would suggest.

Janis Jefferies currently holds a Crafts Council Spark Plug curating award that seeks to examine the creative and dynamic
relationship between mathematics, mathematical forms and craft through an exploration of a particular maths and textile archive, called Common Threads, that is held in the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Janis Jefferies is an artist, writer and curator, Professor of Visual Arts at the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths University of London, Director of the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles and Artistic Director of Goldsmiths Digital
Studios.

Jefferies was trained as a painter and later pioneered the field of contemporary textiles within visual and material culture, internationally through exhibitions and texts. In the last five years she has been working on technological based arts, including Woven Sound (with Dr. Tim Blackwell) and has been a principal investigator on projects involving new haptics technologies and generative software systems for creating and interpreting arts objects.

She is an associate researcher with Hexagram (Institute of Media, Arts and Technologies, Montreal, Canada) on two projects,
electronic textiles and new forms of media communication in cloth.

www.doc.gold.ac.uk/staff/JJ.html

Slub
Dave Griffiths, Adrian Ward and Alex McLean

Dave, Adrian and Alex will introduce the emerging performance practice of live coding -- writing and modifying software while
it runs, in order to improvise live music and video. The history of live coding will be introduced, along with contemporary live
coding platforms and fringe developments such as programming with a game pad and controlling synthesisers with onomatopoeia.

Slub sound emerges from slub software; melodic and chordal studies, generative experiments and beat processes. Process-based sonic improvisations; live generative music using hand crafted and live coded apps, scripts and l-systems in networked synchrony. With roots in UK electronica and tech culture, slub
build their own software environments for creating music in realtime. Only custom composition and DSP software is used.
Everything you hear is formed by human minds.

Slub project their screens so that the audience are able to appreciate their live software development process, which does
not adhere to industry quality control standards. They communicate using OSC over UDP and eyebrow gestures. The output ranges from extra slow gabba, through intelligent ambient to acid blues glitch. Slub have performed widely across Europe including Sonic Acts Amsterdam, Sonar Barcelona, Club Transmediale Berlin, leplacard London and Ultrasound Huddersfield.

Alex McLean is a member of slub and PhD student in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths College. He co-organises the dorkbotlondon meetings of people doing strange things with electricity, helps run the runme.org software art repository, and is a member of the TOPLAP organisation for the proliferation of live algorithm programming.

Adrian Ward is a member of slub, a very part-time software artist and technical director of a company specialising in software for interactive experiences. For eight years he ran Signwave, an eclectic software company, using it as an excuse to do whatever he felt, whenever he liked, but had to get a proper job once he got a mortgage. He is a member of TOPLAP, did Grade 4 on the trumpet, and still enjoys the occasional weird electronic noise.

Dave Griffiths is a member of slub, and has been writing programs to make noises, pictures and animations using a variety of languages for many years. He is the author of many free software projects exploring these areas, and uses much of it in performances and workshops around europe. He is part of the Openlab free software artists collective and TOPLAP. He lives in London where he makes computer games.

slub.org

Nigel Johnson - Interactive art: a practitioner’s perspective

Tuesday 7 October 2008

6:30 for 7:00 pm

London Knowledge Lab -
Institute of Education
23 - 29 Emerald St
London WC1N 3QS,
UK

Tube: Holborn, Russell Square or Chancery Lane

Map

imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/njohnson/

Nigel Johnson’s individual research and practice since 1978 has been focused within the domain of small and large scale, "real-time" interactive installations, whilst attempting to bring clarity, insight and new understanding where the art - science boundaries meet and overlap.

Recent projects include: “G-Vision”, a Scottish Enterprise funded project in collaboration with colleagues from the School of Computing in the development of a vision-based, gesture recognition software application for interactive installations and performance scenarios. Another project, “A-Life”, is a large-scale, real-time, interactive computer installation paying retrospective homage to the early work of John Conway’s “Game of Life”, incorporating elements of artificial life and gaming. It recently won a major award at the Shrewsbury International Exhibition 2007, Batteries Not Included: Mind as Machine in association with the Darwin Summer Symposium. A-Life is currently showing at the CCA (Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow) until September 13th as part of the Alt-w: New Directions in Scottish Digital Culture exhibition. Current collaborative activities include research into the latest developments in “cognitive” software, interactive installations based on RSS data and participating in the European Mobile Lab for Interactive Artists.

Nigel Johnson is a practising artist, researcher and teacher who studied Fine Art at Liverpool Polytechnic from 1976-1979 and Experimental Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London from 1979-1981. From 1983 – 1987 he was Lecturer in Fine Art (Sculpture) at Grays School of Art (The Robert Gordon University), Aberdeen. Since 1987 he has held academic positions at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee, including Senior Lecturer in Computer Imaging and was appointed Reader in Digital Arts in 2000. Since 1996 he has been running the practice-led PhD programme within the School of Media Arts and Imaging and appointed Professor and Chair of Interactive Arts in 2007. Nigel exhibits his work widely, both nationally and internationally at galleries and festivals throughout the U.K., Europe, Asia, Australasia and the United States amongst others.

Murray McKeich: Computational Creativity

Tuesday 2 September 2008

5:45 for 6:00 prompt - CAS AGM (to 6:30)
6:30 for 7:00 - Murray McKeich: Computational Creativity

Venue
System Simulation Ltd
Bedford Chambers,
The Piazza
Covent Garden
London WC2E 8HA

Directions

Due to a poor response we regret to announce that the planned joint CAS/TESLA meeting on 2 September has been cancelled.

INSTEAD we will hold the CAS AGM followed by a talk by the New Zealand artist Murray McKeich at System Simulation. The talk is a free event and is open to the public.

Murray McKeich is a New Zealander currently resident in Melbourne Australia where he is a lecturer and researcher in art at RMIT University. Following an early career in commercial art, he has since established himself as a leading practitioner of digital media in Australasian contemporary art. Working with digital photo-media, his exhibition projects include printed imagery and animation. Described as both macabre and darkly seductive, Mckeich's art weaves visions of surreal fantasy and magic from the tiny pieces of every-day debris found in urban and domestic environments. His recent practice uses generative software to autonomously breed art-works.

Murray McKeich believes that computational tools are about to become far more intimately integrated with human creativity. Artists and designers will take on the role of creative directors while their personalized software will work for them in the capacity of highly trained, trusted and autonomous studio assistants, capable of producing finished artworks without direct supervision.

McKeich demonstrates that this form of practice is possible with current off-the-shelf software and minimal programming skill. More difficult is the psychological challenge of breaking with culturally ingrained biological models of creative process and forming new ones that are natural and native to computational agency.

tinyurl.com/56o74o

Note: this will be our final meeting at System Simulation - a tradition that goes back 40 years. They will be moving to smaller offices later this year.

Anna Valentina Murch

Thursday 12 June 2008 - 5:30 for 6:00

Recent Large-Scale Public Artwork

Garwood Lecture Theatre, South Wing, University College London Gower Street, London, Post Code Nearest tubes - Euston Square, Warren Street, Euston

Map / Public Transport

Instructions for finding:
Once you enter the main gate of UCL in Gower Street, you will face the Portico in the UCL quadrangle courtyard. Please take the right hand side diagonal and walk to the right corner of the building. You will see the brass tablet indicating South Wing. Enter the second entrance door at the South Wing, and you will find the Garwood Lecture Theatre on the first floor. There will be signs from the entrance that will help you to find the exact location easily.

Or you can ask the porters at the Main Gate for directions.

Anna Valentina Murch is an artist who works primarily with the medium of light and whose work focuses on creating places that lead the viewer on a sensory and psychological journey that measures time and provokes memory. Since 1980, her work has been involved with designing and building large public art projects, sometimes working collaboratively with architects, engineers and other artists. These large-scale public works incorporate ambient elements such as light, water and sound, to create experiential places. This has allowed her to take her personal creative investigations to another level by widening the focus to explore the definition of place and venues for community interaction.

Anna Valentina Murch received her MA in Environmental Media, Sculpture from the Royal College of Art and a Graduate Diploma from the Architectural Association in London, England. Through the Computer Arts Society she exhibited an installation at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973. In the late 1970's she moved to San Francisco and developed many works in galleries and museums. Her recent permanent Public Art installations include: St. Louis Metro System, and the Muni Metro Extension, San Francisco California, Queens Civic Court House, New York, Arroyo Suite, Century City, Los Angles, Waterscape, Civic Center plaza in San Jose, California, Water Scores, for the Performing Arts Center plaza in Miami, Florida. She is currently a Professor of Art at Mills College, Oakland, California.

avmurch@earthlink.net

annavalentinamurch.com

David Plans Casal

Tuesday 3 June 2008 - 6:30 for 7:00 pm

MPEG7 and genetic co-evolution: Sound Improvisation Strategies

Room G22,
History of Art Film and Visual Media
Birkbeck College,
43 Gordon Square,
London WC1H 0PD

Nearest tubes - Euston Square, Warren Street & Russell Square

Map of the location

Musical improvisation is driven mainly by the unconscious mind, engaging the dialogic imagination to reference the entire cultural heritage of an improviser in a single flash. This workshop will introduce a case study of evolutionary computation techniques, in particular genetic co-evolution, as applied to the frequency domain using MPEG7 techniques, in order to create an artificial agent that mediates between an improviser and her unconscious mind, to probe and unblock improvisatory action in live music performance or practice.

David Plans Casal is a musician and researcher, and digital technologist at Brunel University. His research focuses on artificial intelligence and music. He has given concerts at IRCAM (Igor Stravinsky Hall), the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, and several London venues. His research proposes that musical improvisation is driven mainly by the unconscious mind, engaging the dialogic imagination to reference the entire cultural heritage of an improviser in a single flash. He uses evolutionary computation techniques, in particular genetic co-evolution, as applied to the frequency domain using MPEG7 techniques, in order to create an artificial agent that mediates between an improviser and her unconscious mind, to probe and unblock improvisatory action in live music performance or practice.

Nick Lambert, Doug Dodds, Jeremy Gardiner, Lanfranco Aceti and Honor Beddard

Tuesday 6 May 2008 18:30 for 19:00

‘Parallel Evolution: the Patric Prince Collection and the emergence of SIGGRAPH as a North American computer arts venue’

System Simulation Ltd
Bedford Chambers, The Piazza Covent Garden
London WC2E 8HA, England

Finding the location

The Computer Arts Society continues its 40th Anniversary celebrations with a presentation about the emergence of the SIGGRAPH Art Show. CAS Meetings are open to the public and are free.

The Computer Arts and Technocultures Project, a joint venture between Birkbeck and the Victoria & Albert Museum, recently received AHRC funding to research and digitise the Patric Prince Collection of computer art. Birkbeck had already collaborated with CAS and SSL through the CACHe Project and this resulted in CAS’s collection of computer art being donated to the V&A.

Computer Art and Technocultures is studying the wider area of international computer art as it emerged in parallel with the developing computer graphics industry, especially in conjunction with SIGGRAPH during the 1980s. The interchange between new technologies and artistic practice, and also the opportunities afforded by an art show attached to a major conference, ensured that SIGGRAPH became one of the principal nodes for computer art. Patric Prince was closely connected with the art show and chaired it in 1986.

We will consider how her collection connects with the art show (especially the retrospective on computer art she put together in 1986), how new artists and technologies were represented, and whether the situation of computer art has changed since the area was discussed in a special SIGGRAPH in 1989.

The members of the Computer Arts and Technocultures team will each examine different aspects of the project, with presenters including Nick Lambert, Doug Dodds, Jeremy Gardiner, Lanfranco Aceti and Honor Beddard.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Tuesday 1 April 2008 6:30 for 7:00

Still Digital after all These Years:
How the Computer Transformed Painters into Geeks

System Simulation Ltd
Bedford Chambers, The Piazza Covent Garden
London WC2E 8HA, England

Finding the location

Art on the edge once meant Painting.  Not clean, representational, neat painting, but messy, expressive, abstract painting. Then the computer came along.  Touted as a procedural machine, no one expected intuitive, non-procedural painters to turn to pixels.  Why were so many expressionist painters drawn to the computer in the buggy days of mid-1980s, and how did it transform their visual language and output?  What are they doing now? As one of the artists who made the leap, Rubin will discuss her own leaps, give an overview of the work of other artists, and look at how the computer continues to change concepts of imagery as it becomes a more available medium in previously less technologically advanced countries.

Cynthia Beth Rubin is a digital artist working in 2D and 3D imagery, interactivity, and animated images.  Trained as a painter, she turned to digital art in 1984, creating works drawn from cultural memories and nature. Rubin’s work has been shown in diverse venues including the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Pandamonium Festival in London, the Lavall Gallery in Novosibirsk, the DeLeon White Gallery in Toronto, and numerous editions of international conferences such as ISEA, ArCade and SIGGRAPH.  Her works can be found in several books and journals, including Art in the Digital Age by Bruce Wands, The Computer in the Visual Arts, by Anne Morgan Spalter, and Painting the Digital River, by James Faure Walker. Rubin's studio is in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

Sue Gollifer

Tuesday 4 March 2008 6:30 for 7:00

Beyond the Screen

System Simulation Ltd
Bedford Chambers, The Piazza Covent Garden
London WC2E 8HA, England

Finding the location

Sue Gollifer will talk about her artwork, which has developed in the last thirty years according to a rigorous programme of formal experiment, through which sets of relationships evolved between shapes, colours and tones.  Her talk will also make reference to a number of digital art exhibitions which she has curated since 1995: ArCade1 1-V, GAMUT I & II and the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery’04 Synaethesia. What lessons if any can be drawn/learnt from any of these exhibitions, particularly ArCade, who’s original intention and objective was to demonstrate how using new technology could be used in fine art practices to create, on the one hand, a new media and on the other a hybrid link between both old and new technology, creating a convergence of ideas, disciplines and practices

Sue Gollifer is the Course Leader for an MA in Digital Media Arts and in Printmaking and Professional Practice, at the University of Brighton. She has been a professional artist/printmaker for over 30 years. Her primary research is into 'the impact of new technology within the practice of Fine Art’. She has been the curator of a number of Digital Art Exhibitions including ArCade, the UK Open International Exhibition of Digital Fine Art Prints (1995 – 2007) and the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery’04. She serves on a number of National and International Committees and is the Assistant Editor of Digital Creativity, a Journal published by Taylor Francis/Routledge.

Alan Sutcliffe

Tuesday 19 February 2008 6:30 for 7:00

Recent Graphics and Animations using some Maths

6:60 for 7:00; System Simulation Ltd
Bedford Chambers, The Piazza Covent Garden
London WC2E 8HA, England

Finding the location

A simple method to generate irregular but smooth curves will be described, together with shading to give 3-d forms. The method uses the repeated addition of differences of differences of differences in one co-ordinate for unit change in the other co-ordinate. Drawing in the XOR mode gives unexpected benefits in this context. The anatomy of the XOR operator applied to grey-scales and colours will be illustrated. This is an extended version of the talk given at the Bridges Conference at Donostia in July 2007, updated with some more recent animations based on these and other mathematical methods.

In 1967 Alan Sutcliffe wrote a program, to compose electronic music, which ran on an ICL 1900 computer. The music was realised, from a paper tape of the score, in the electronic music studio of Peter Zinovieff. When this won second prize in the International Computer Music Competition at IFIP 68 in Edinburgh he was prompted to propose the formation of a Computer Arts Society that he chaired until 1979.  During 2007 he has exhibited in Bremen, Graz, Donostia and Karlsruhe. An early graphic, thought lost, turned up in the CAS Collection during its hand-over to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Alan now edits PAGE – the bulletin of the CAS.