Catherine Mason 
This month’s article for the British Computer Society looks at Ele Carpenter’s on-going Open Source Embroidery Project and explores the strong historical and metaphorical connections between computers and textiles. This fascinating work, which consists of over 1,000 hand-embroidered patches (two are seen here) is based on the common characteristics of needlework crafts and open source computer programming. Read it in full:http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/45380
Jeremy Gardiner, the featured artist for the BCS this month, has spent decades exploring the ancient history of the Devon/Doreset coastline through his practice which employs a hybrid technique combining painting, drawing, printmaking, and use of digital technologies to which we can now add 3D printing. This relief model was made using solid freeform fabrication techniques (3D printing) from a series of cross sections of the landscape, based on LiDAR data and then hand painted. Read the full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/44574
In celebration of ALAN TURNING YEAR I am organising a special trip sponsored by the Computer Arts Society to Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing. You are invited to join what I’m sure will be a fascinating day in the company of like-minded arts people.
The tour (10.30am to 5.15pm approx) costs £17.00 and includes: Morning tea/coffee & biscuits on arrival. Tour of the Bletchley campus and buildings with their guide. A sandwich lunch. A chance to view Colossus and other interesting items in the National Museum of Computing on a short visit (including Ele Carpenter’s Html Patchwork). Afternoon tea, coffee & cake.
Please make your own travel arrangements to arrive by 10.15 for a 10.30 start. There is a direct train from Euston. Bletchley train station is 300 yards from the entrance to the Park for more travel info see: http://www.bletchleypark.org/content/visit/findus.rhtm
There is a maximum of 50 spaces available on this trip, so please sign up ASAP! Contact me to register your name and contact details (email & mobile number).
This trip is being generously subsidised by the Computer Arts Society and is run as a non-profit event.
This striking new work by one of the great pioneers of computer art Charles A. Csuri, references and expands one of his original ideas Random War, a plotter drawing created in 1966. Random War (2012), is a new online version which uses gaming logics and the Internet to re-create a hypothetical war, based on our own friends, with people wounded, dead, awarded medals or missing in action, using names gleaned from our Facebook account. There is a delicious irony in using technology originally designed for defense purposes to create art that speaks to the consequences of such use. This art work is a powerful comment on the human cost of war and a stark reminder that every conflict has an after effect. Full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/44253
In our world where the digital is almost by definition associated with high speed, quick manoeuvrability and near instantaneousness, it is an inspiration to learn of John Gerrard’s deliberately slower paced work – the subject of this month’s column for the British Computer Society and premiering in March at AV Festival 12 in conjunction with Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Read it here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/43887
David Hockney, perhaps Britain’s most famous living artist, has never been one to shy away from the use of new technology. Whilst a student at the Royal College of Art he embraced acrylic paints when they were still quite new in the 1960s and has used the photocopying machine and a Polaroid camera to create collages, exploiting the unique characteristics of each of these mediums. Recently Hockney has turned to the iPad and this month’s image, from a group called The Arrival of Spring in East Yorkshire, was made on the iPad, printed out on a large scale and is currently on show at the Royal Academy, London. Read the full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/43630 See also a related post here:http://www.spiritofplacenorfolk.org/pages/aspects.html
The inspiration for this month’s BCS column comes from the great conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s statement, The idea becomes a machine that makes the art (1967). Although LeWitt’s machine was metaphorical rather than literal, nevertheless this radical concept raised questions about the notion of art process and creative behaviour and challenged the notion of what art was or could be. This month we explore the history of the use of analogue mechanical systems and machines in art through the work of Jack Tait, seen above. Read the full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/43260
A marvellous new exhibition of around 80 pen & ink drawings, watercolours and gouaches has just opened at Modern Art Oxford. These rarely seen works on paper, borrowed from private collections and mostly regional museums (no doubt where much of it has been residing in storage for many years), demonstrate Sutherland’s almost obsessive drive to paint his subject the English and Welsh landscape, over and over again each time capturing something new a subtle change in form, or light or colour. Sutherland’s post-war thorn cross & head paintings, his giant tapestry at Coventry Cathedral are well-known, but in this show we see a quieter side to him and through careful curation are able to learn about his working methods.
The exhibition has been selected and curated by George Shaw a painter whose own work centers on depictions of Tile Hill, a post-war council housing estate on the south side of Coventry where he grew up (and in my opinion, the artist who should have won the Turner Prize this year). By reconsidering Sutherland through this painter’s eyes we also understand more about where Shaw is coming from in his own work, which uses hobby Humbrol paints to talk about his sense of memory and loss within decaying suburbia a place with nothing but recent history. Shaw says, ‘It is not about place it is quite abstract. The painting is of how far away you are from there. It is a tethering so you know how far you’ve come.’ [quote from Daily Telegraph Review, 3/12/11, p.7]
All of this raises interesting and timely debates around a sense of place. According to Shaw, Sutherland was an artist as much rooted in the past as in the world before him a world forever unfinished. Shaw’s world is also unfinished (he is now nearing his 180th painting of Tile Hill). He uses his place Tile Hill as his device on which to hang timeless painterly concerns, and so doing he tells us something of the anxieties of 21st century living.
GRAHAM SUTHERLAND, AN UNFINISHED WORLD until 18 March 2012
George Shaw I Woz Ere at the Herbert Gallery until 11 March 2012
To mark a year’s worth of writing about the world of computer arts for the British Computer Society’s on-line journal and as an end of year special, for December we are celebrating with a quartet of images submitted by readers. The four images by Alan Sutcliffe, Ursula Freer, Mark Thorpe and Nigel Williams reveal a kaleidoscopic mixture of digital technique, complexity, happenstance, experimentation and dazzling colour.
Read the full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/43024
above statement by Wilfred Owen, the greatest First World War poet.
In honour of Remembrance Sunday, here is the Foresters’ House in Northern France where British poet & soldier Wilfred Owen wrote his last letter home (sheltering in the cellar) before he was killed in 1918 aged just 25. The modest farmhouse has been transformed by British artist Simon Patterson (renowned for his artwork The Great Bear, a re-working of the London Underground Map). It is certainly not a typical War memorial, rather a particularly potent example of what can happen when artists get involved with such projects. The house has become a sculpture, incorporating sound (the reading of poems & letters) and visuals (engravings of poems & text) with light.
Some (including Owen’s nephew and the W Owen Association) were initially concerned about the proposal believing that the original house would be ruined. Now, with the house transformed, they say it maintains its architectural integrity and, perhaps more importantly, has highlighted Owen’s poetry, making it more accessible. Very surprising and beautiful; moving are some of the comments from locals, heard in an excellent BBC Radio 4 documentary.