Computer Arts Society
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Programme 2007
New & Recent
- 24 January 2012: Eduardo Kac on Waldemar Cordeiro
- 29 November 2011: Monomatic
- 7 September 2011: Dr. Jack Tait: The Origin of Ideas & Analogue Programmer T4 with digital overtones
News
PAGE 67 is now available. Click on PAGE in the left-hand menu.
A 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
The CACHe digital archiveof pioneering British computer art is now hosted at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts.
The Computer Arts Society now has a Facebook page.
Programme 2007
- December 3rd
Ernest Edmonds,The Nature of Interaction in Digital Art - October 2nd
Richard Brown, Interactive Art: complexity, emergence and mimetics - July 10th
Keith Armstrong, Ecology, Performance and Collaboration - Embodying Intimate Transactions - June 20th
Joint Meeting with the Colour Group: Colour in computer Art - May 1st
Art that Makes Itself - April 18th
John Sharp, How Cybernetic Serendipity changed my life/career - excursions in mathematics and computer art - April 3rd
Alan Sutcliffe, Some Awkward Questions: Techno-Arts and Artists in Academic Settings - February 6th
Some Puzzles in Depiction
Ernest Edmonds
Monday 3 December 2007 6:30 for 7:00
The Nature of Interaction in Digital Art
Computer Arts Society Public Meeting
System Simulation Ltd
Bedford Chambers
The Piazza Covent Garden
London WC2E 8HA, England
Ernest Edmonds and Stroud Cornock presented a paper about interaction in a CAS session at the Computer Graphics 1970 conference. This presentation describes Edmonds' latest Shaping Form series of interactive works shown this year in Washington DC and Sydney. These works develop over time as a result of their interaction with the world. The use of the word interaction is reviewed and alternative approaches to describing the concept explored. In particular, a systems view is taken and contrasted with an action/response model. A refined view of such interactions is proposed in which artwork and audience are said to influence one another.
Ernest Edmonds has been an invited presenter in, for example, the UK, France, the USA, Australia, Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia. He has many publications in the fields of art, creativity and interaction and has exhibited throughout the world, from Moscow to LA. He is editor-in-chief of the Leonardo journal’s Transactions. He is currently Professor of Computation and Creative Media at the University of Technology Sydney.
Richard Brown
6:30 for 7:00PM, Tuesday 2 October 2007
Interactive Art: complexity, emergence and mimetics
System Simulation Ltd
Bedford Chambers
The Piazza Covent Garden
London WC2E 8HA, England
In my talk I will show examples of three artworks, Alembic, Biotica and the Mimetic Starfish that use real-time 3D computer simulations and interactive interfaces to enable participants to engage with complex, emergent and mimetic processes. In contrast to digital media, I will also show how these processes can be realised in alternative artworks using electrochemical, electromagnetic and electrostatic systems, some of which were shown at the recent Pask inspired exhibition "Maverick Machines" in Edinburgh.
Biography:
Richard Brown has a BSc in Computers & Cybernetics and an MA in Fine Art and creates interactive artworks using multi-media technology, computer programming, electronics and interfacing. Between 1995 and 2001 Richard was a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art, where he created and exhibited three major interactive works Alembic, Biotica and the Mimetic Starfish. The research outcomes of Biotica were published as a book entitled "Biotica: Art, Emergence and Artificial-Life".
In 2001 Richard was invited as Artist in Residence at the Centre for Electronic Media Arts (CEMA), Monash University. In 2002, an award from NESTA (the National Endowment of Science Technology and the Arts) enabled Richard to work as an independent artist and researcher, between 2002 and 2003 he was based in Australia as an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victorian College of Arts, Melbourne University.
In 2004 Richard moved to Edinburgh where he participated in the EPIS entrepreneurial scheme hosted at Edinburgh University, Scotland. In 2005 he won an Ideasmart award to develop a novel interactive lighting system and is currently Research Artist in Residence in Edinburgh Informatics.
Keith Armstrong
Australian media artist
6:30 for 7:00, Tuesday 10 July 2007
Ecology, Performance and Collaboration - Embodying Intimate Transactions
The Screen on Gordon Square
Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Sq, London, WC1H 0PD
Nearest tubes - Euston Square, Warren Street, Russell Square
As part of this year's EVA Conference, Australian media artist Keith Armstrong is giving a talk for CAS
Intimate Transactions is a dual site, telematic installation currently been shown in the US. It allows two people located in separate spaces to interact simultaneously using only their bodies (predominantly their backs and feet), using two identical interfaces called 'Bodyshelves'. During a 30-minute, one-on-one session their physical actions allow them to individually and collaboratively explore immersive environments. Each participant's own way of interacting results in quite different, but interrelated animated and generative imagery, real time generated audio (seven channels), and three channels of haptic feedback (felt in the stomach and back). This experience allows each participant to begin to sense their place in a complex web of relations that connect them and everything else within the work.
Intimate Transactions is an investigation in creating embodied experiences that are both performative and improvisational by harnessing individual, performative languages of 'untrained' bodies as a means to engender understandings of 'ecological' relationship. It arose from a deep collaboration between media artists, performance practitioners, sound artists, hardware and software engineers, a furniture maker and a scientific ecologist. Our entire process was informed by a praxis-led approach to art making that stressed embodied connectivity and inseparability. This allowed us to understand how participants might move within the constraints of a particular interface, allowing us to shape and form the overall phrasing and sensibilities of their experiences, whilst maintaining the unique nature of their collaborative experiences. In this presentation Keith will discuss his practice-led research approach and illustrate the presentation with videos, images and sound. (www.intimatetransactions.com).
Keith Armstrong is an Australian/English interdisciplinary media artist, Australia Council New Media Arts Fellow, Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Creative Industries Research Fellow and has just finished a Visiting Professorship at Calpoly State University, California, working in collaboration with their Liberal Arts and Architecture Faculties.
His recent work Intimate Transactions, created with the Transmute Collective, received an Honorary Mention in the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica and featured in the 2005 Ars Electronica Festival in Austria. His latest interactive installation, Shifting Intimacies, was presented at the ICA London in March 2006.
Email: keith@embodiedmedia.com
Web: www.embodiedmedia.com
Joint Meeting with the Colour Group
2pm, Wednesday 20 June 2007
Colour in computer Art
British Computer Society
The Davidson Building
5 Southampton Street
London, WC2E 7HA
The meeting starts at 14.00.
Abstracts as provided by the speakers are shown below:
The Painting Fool - a First Look
Dr. Simon Colton, Imperial College, University of London, UK
I'm interested in the question of what it means for a piece of software to be creative in the visual arts. In the talk, I will outline the notion of the creative tripod, where programs have to exhibit signs of skill, appreciation and imagination in order to be taken seriously as creative individuals. Most graphics programs used for the production of art concentrate entirely on enhancing the skill base of a human user. However, software such as Cohen's AARON could be said to have a degree of imagination and software such as Machado's NEvAr have a degree of appreciation. I will describe the current state of my SEPIA software and present some paintings that have resulted from using this software. I will also give some demonstrations of The Painting Fool (which uses SEPIA, and can be seen as my alter ego) putting together artworks. I'll present the first draft of my manifesto for software as art and of a manifesto for The Painting Fool. Naturally, the usage of colour has played a very important part in the development of SEPIA. I became interested in how to transfer art from the computer screen to the canvas, and two of the images I've produced have been painted by Brian Ashworth, an artist friend of mine. While Brian was able to mix the colours required because of his artistic abilities, I was interested in whether a novice painter (like me) could be shown not only where to put the paint on the canvas, but how to mix the paints to achieve the desired colours. With my business partner, Glen Pearson, this led to us setting up the CraftByNumbers service that produces full paint by numbers kits from a photograph provided by the customer. Part of the kit includes a colour mixing guide, which tells our customers how to mix triples of Daler-Rowney acrylics using our "dip and blob method" to achieve roughly 30 colours needed for their painting. In the talk, I'll discuss this, and describe the tortuous days that Glen and I spent mixing more than 1000 combinations of Daler-Rowney paints.
Dr. Simon Colton is a lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computing, Imperial College, London. His interests are in how to use AI techniques to produce programs that exhibit creative behaviour. He has written more than 70 publications on the topic of automatic scientific discovery, with an emphasis on mathematical creativity. His work has been recognised with a best paper award at the AAAI conference in 2000, and his PhD won the BCS/CPHC distinguished dissertation award in 2001. Firstly as a hobby, and more recently as work for the Machine Creations Ltd. company, he has developed various pieces of graphics software to explore the question of computational creativity in the visual arts. This has led to a commercial endeavour (www.craftbynumbers.com) and an artistic endeavour (www.thepaintingfool.com). Pieces produced by his software were exhibited in the "Computer Generated Art" group exhibition at Imperial College in 2006.
Webpage www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/
Colourfied: an evolutionary ecosystem of colour
Jon McCormack, Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA), Monash University, Australia
In biology, evolutionary synthesis is a process capable of generating unprecedented novelty, i.e. it is creative. It has been able to create things like prokaryotes, eukaryotes, higher multicellularity and language through a non-teleological process of replication and selection. We would like to adapt, on a metaphoric level, the mechanisms of biological evolution in order to develop new approaches to computational creativity. In Biology, the physical processes of replication and selection take place in an environment, populated by species that interact with and modify this environment, i.e. an ecosystem. Processes from biological ecosystems serve as inspiration for computational artificial ecosystems. The aim is to structure these artificial ecosystems in such a way that they exhibit novel discovery in a creative context rather than a biological one. Colourfield is a simple experiment in machine assisted creative discovery. It uses the metaphor of an adaptive ecosystem. A population of colours exists in a 1-dimensional world, and the colours are "grown" from a gene that expresses natural weights towards neighbouring colours along with an innate "personal" colour. The colours exist in a colour ecosystem, whereby luminance and chromatic values determine the supply of resources that feed an individual colour's growth (hence, its ability to change colour). Through a series of feedback mechanisms, and via an evolutionary process, colours adapt to their environment, often forming fields of colours that are aesthetically pleasing to the observer. The project is one of a number of experiments illustrating the usefulness of the ecosystem metaphor for creative discovery in artificial systems.
Jon McCormack (Monash University, Australia) is an Electronic Media Artist, co-director of the Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA) and Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Impossible Nature - a book about his work was published by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in 2004.
Webpage: www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jonmc/
Mutating Colour
William Latham, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
William Latham will discuss the use of colour in his Computer Artworks during the period 1987 to 1993 at IBM UK Laboratories & more recently on the Mutator 2 Project from 2005 at Goldsmiths College (University of London) using "real world" DNA data input from the Bioinformatics Group at Imperial College. Originally trained as artist he will explain his approach to colour from his very early computer artworks through to the DNA automatically generated colour schemes in his multi-coloured recent animated films. Topics include:- Colour for labelling elements of structure, 3D texture & proportional colouring by banding, mutating RGB values & navigating parametric colour space, the relationship between form & colour, the importance of white, the tricky relationship between colour, lighting and material values to get the right look, the benefits of stealing colour & lighting schemes from the Masters (e.g. Rembrandt, Magritte), animating colour for emotional response or retinal pleasure, colour in art & colour in scientific visualisation. The work will be contextualised in relation to Yoichiro Kawaguchi, Karl Sims & other computer graphic artists. Using specific examples from films & images during this period, including examples of different colouring programming systems used. Excerpts from:- "A Sequence from the Evolution of Form", "Organic TV" & new 3 minute film called "The History the Species" will be shown.
From 1987 to 1994 William Latham worked for IBM in their Advanced Computer Graphics and Visualisation Division at IBM Hursley near Winchester , and his Mutation work achieved world wide recognition at SIGGRAPH and other events and a number of IBM patents were published. He was co-author with Stephen Todd of the book “Evolutionary Art and Computers” published by Academic Press that is still recognised as a key work in this area. His organic artworks and films were shown worldwide in major touring exhibitions of the UK , Germany , Japan and Australia. William was CEO & Creative Director of computer games developer Computer Artworks Ltd from 1994 to 2003, hit games produced included The THING (Playstation2, Xbox and PC) that sold in excess of one million units worldwide, and was Number 1 hit in the UK and Germany . The Thing was published by Vivendi Universal in USA and Europe, and by Konami in Japan and the Far East . (The Thing game was the sequel to the cult John Carpenter Film The THING starring Kurt Russell). In 2004, recognising the ongoing increase in games budgets and increasing new investment from financial organisations outside the games industry William founded Games Audit Ltd. Games Audit Ltd is a project management and audit operation for the games industry and offers a wide range of services. Clients include Ingenious, Add Partners, IDGVE. From 2005 to April 2007 Latham was Professor of Creative Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University and in April 07 became a Professor in The Computing Department at Goldsmiths College ( University of London ). He continues to remain CEO of Games Audit. William has an MA from The Royal College of Art and a BA from Oxford University
Webpage www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~latham
Colour, Symbol and Ambiguity
Paul Brown, University of Sussex, UK
I am not an intuitive colourist and tend to use colour in my work in a symbolic sense to “tag” different areas of an image and differentiate the image plane. In this talk I will discuss two recent time-based generative works – 4^16 – and – 4^15 Studies in Perception. In the former I attempted to find a set of four colours that would emphasise the ambiguity of a geometry that could be interpreted as having either a horizontal/vertical or diagonal construction. In the latter the colour (and most of the other controls governing the work) are random. Here I have been surprised by the consistency and quality of the colour in contradiction to my initial expectation that the work would often devolve into mud.
Paul Brown is an artist and writer who is based on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. His pioneering work in the computational and generative art dates back to the early 1970’s. He is currently the Chair of the Computer Arts Society and a visiting professor of art & technology at Sussex University where he is working on a project to evolve a robot that can draw.
Webpage: www.paul-brown.com
Art that Makes Itself
4:45 to 5:45pm Tuesday 1 May 2007
Joint meeting with the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University.
Paul Brown
Artist and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex
Still from Infinite Permutations - V1,
Kinetic Painting,
Paul Brown, 1992
Paul Brown was working with concepts of systems, process and interaction in the 1960s when he discovered computers at the Cybernetic Serendipity show at the ICA in 1968. Since 1974 his work has involved computational processes and he is now acknowledged as a pioneer of generative and a-life art.
In this talk he explains his early influences, his work over four decades and ends with an overview of his most recent project where he is working with a multi-disciplinary team to evolve a robot that can draw.
See also:
Paul's personal site
University of Sussex project
Location:
Middlesex University
London, EN4 8HT
Cat Hill Campus: Room 137
More information about this and other Lansdown Lectures see www.cea.mdx.ac.uk
Paul Brown was born in Halifax, England in 1947 and has lived in Australia since 1988. He founded Middlesex' National Centre for Computer Aided Art and Design (NCCAAD) and Centre for Advanced Study in Computer Aided Art and Design (CASCAAD - now the Lansdown Centre) in the mid 1980s.
How Cybernetic Serendipity changed my life/career - excursions in mathematics and computer art
6:30 for 7:00, Wednesday 18 April 2007
John Sharp
Computer Arts Society - public meeting
I read chemistry at Oxford and spent some time in Industry, mainly as an analytical chemist, but soon after I left University I went to the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA which changed what I felt I wanted to do. I had been using conventional media to produce similar work based on mathematics (mostly geometry) and would have really liked to move onto computers, but it was another 10 years with the Apple II before I was able to fulfil that dream. Previously the only contact I had had with computer art was as member 142 of the Computer Arts Society.
In learning computing from that point, I changed careers mostly writing computer documentation, initially setting up the document department at Epson UK. I also taught geometry and art part time. Since the CAS in its first life folded, apart from students, my main contact with other artists working in a similar area was sporadic until I became part of the Bridges Conferences on Mathematical Connections in Art Science and Music. In 2006 I was instrumental in bringing it to London and was one of the major organisers.
Through Bridges and the Internet I have worked with many other artists and this talk is the about the wide range of work I have produced using the computer both two and three dimensional, including the paper sculpture I am most widely known for: Sliceforms and how I have worked with other mathematical artists at Bridges.
London Knowledge Lab,
23-29 Emerald St,
London,
WC1N 3QS
Some Awkward Questions: Techno-Arts and Artists in Academic Settings
6.30pm for 7pm Tuesday 3 April 2007
A Computer Arts Society open discussion led by Alan Sutcliffe
Earning money by teaching has been common and honourable for artists, compromising their time but not their art. The role of technology in the arts has brought new academic settings for artists. Art work is subject to the standards of research, and gets distorted. Some conferences and research seem based on naive notions that art is about expression, beauty, emotion and now communication. More like oblique and evocative. Academic freedom and artistic freedom are important and different.
Nick Lambert's office (formerly the CACHe office)
Birkbeck
43 Gordon Square
London
WC1H 0PD
43 is roughly in the middle of the east side of Gordon Square The snack bar will be open before the meeting
Some Puzzles in Depiction
Tuesday 6 February 2007
Is the horizon straight or curved?
Are the rules of perspective correct?
Historically, have some ratios been preferred in art and design?
What effect does the functioning of the eyes have?
Should we change what is being taught?
A discussion, open to all, led by Alan Sutcliffe
6.30pm Tuesday 6 February 2007
System Simulation Ltd
Bedford Chambers
The Piazza Covent Garden
London WC2E 8HA