Colour Computation

Ernest Edmonds, Shaping Space, 2012.  Copyright the artist, reproduced with permission.
Ernest Edmonds, Shaping Space, 2012. Copyright the artist, reproduced with permission.

For over forty years Ernest Edmonds has had an interest in interactivity and his current
exhibition at Site Gallery Sheffield demonstrates a career-long conversation between drawing, painting and computer-based work. Ernest is our BCS featured artist of the month, read about Shaping Space here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/49266

Here I am enjoying Ernest’s show which continues until 2 February.CM at Site Gallery

Digital Dolly Mix

Dario Lanza, Watersun Vision number 04, C-print, unique, 120x100cm, 2012

My article for the British Computer Society this month is a selection submitted by readers of this column and members of the Computer Arts Society. The high standard and sheer variety of works produced under what might be termed computer art , never ceases to amaze me and if you are as intrigued as I am to discover what your colleagues and fellow aficionados of the computational process have produced over the course of 2012, then don’t miss it : http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/49107  See new work by Richard Colson, Anabela Costa, Dario Lanza (featured above), Fabrizio Poltronieri, Brian Reffin Smith and Andrew Welsby.

I’m on BBC Radio 4 discussing Computer Art!

Shaping Space by Ernest Edmonds

Hear me discussing the work of pioneering computer artists Manfred Mohr and Ernest Edmonds, (both of whom have shows opening in England this week), with John Wilson of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. The programme aired on Thursday 15th November 2012 at 7.15pm. Click this link to play: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ntjq7

Light Logic, Ernest Edmonds’s exhibition is at the Site Gallery, Sheffield (17 Nov – 2 Feb 2013).Also a mention on the British Computer Society website:http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/48954

A Computational Life

Manfred Mohr
Manfred Mohr, P1414_12214, 2011, computer controlled ink on canvas, 80 x 80cm. Copyright the Artist. Reproduced with permission.

This month we celebrate the work of Manfred Mohr, a pioneer in the use of algorithms and computer programs for art-making. His first ever solo London show opens 16 November at the Carroll Fletcher Gallery http://www.carrollfletcher.com/ (to 20 December), a long-overdue event celebrating forty-odd years of practice for this NYC-based, German-born painter. Read my British Computer Society column about Manfred here:http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/48716

Remembering Alan Turing

Craig Morrison and Joel Cockrill, Thank You, an artwork dedicated to Alan Turing. blinc Festival, 2012. Copyright the artists, reproduced with permission.

Alan Turing Year 2012 continues apace with a variety of events inspired by the great contribution made by the mathematician and code breaker to the history of computer science and modern biology. For this month’s BCS column, we’re featuring the work of artists/curators Craig Morrison and Joel Cockrill who have been commissioned by the Arts Council of Wales to produce a laser and light installation honouring Turing’s life and legacy. Appropriately entitled Thank You, Craig and Joel’s piece will be shown at theblinc digital arts festival in Conway, North Wales, and is a thanks on behalf of the media arts world, based on the very digital materials that Turing helped to invent. According toTuring’s biographer, Turing believed in the survival of the spirit after death. Perhaps he was right; here we are remembering him nearly sixty years after his death, his legacy surrounding us in the ever-present technology we use every day. Read the full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/48180

Also recommended is this lecture on Turing by Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew, who argues that it is no surprise that Turing’s great legacy has been overlooked: no other country other than our own great country has the ability to hide its secrets as we do. The belief that for 30 years after WWII it was necessary to keep the fact that Turing invented the world’s first computer a secret, meant that two generations of students grew up thinking that the single most important invention of the 20th & 21st centuries the computer was American.

Michael Stanley 1975 – 2012

I was incredibly saddened to learn this weekend of the sudden death of the director of Modern Art Oxford, Michael Stanley. I got to know him a couple of years ago when he took up the post at Oxford and always found him to be an enthusiastic and determined advocate for the arts, ambitious for his museum and plans for its expansion. I enjoyed more than one intellectual discussion with him about the state of arts funding and patronage in Britain today. He was a gifted curator and his exhibitions programme was carefully thought-out and scholarly; my favourites were George Shaw’s selection of Graham Sutherland and, just finished, Exercise (Djibouti) by John Gerrard, beautifully presented in the Old Power Station, an outpost of the museum. There is no doubt in my mind that Michael easily had the ability and charisma to reach the top of his profession and would have had a great deal more to contribute to contemporary art. It is a tragedy; the art world has lost one of its good guys.

An Artistic Turing Test

Patrick Tresset, Sketches by Paul (details), Biro on paper. Copyright the artist, reproduced with permission.

Alan Turing, one of the greatest minds Britain has ever produced and the centenary of whose birth we are celebrating this year, had an important influence on artists. Two examples A. Michael Noll’s Mondrian Experiment from the 1960s and the contemporary artist Patrick Tresset are described in this month’s article for the British Computer Society. Read it here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/47740  Patrick is one of the artists who features in an exhibition curated by Computer Art Society members to celebrate Turing Year 2012, at the Victoria & Albert Museum this month. His robotic drawing installation Paul can be seen here and at Neo Bankside London SE1, at the end of October.

The Body Beautiful

Core by Kurt Hentschlager
Kurt Hentschlager, still from Core, 2012. Audiovisual installation. Copyright the artist, reproduced with permission.

Seemingly hundreds of human figures float, come together, cluster, drift in and out of focus, ever-changing, never repeated. Three-dimensional bodies, without gender or individual features, almost like clones, float in a zero gravity environment. This is Core, currently on view in a former Victorian engine shop – Enginuity near Telford. The work of Chicago-based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschlager, this is an unprecedented contemporary art show, a first for this commissioning body at a very special site, to celebrate a special year  the 2012 Olympics. Read the full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/47361

Landscape and the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. The Tempest Act 3, Scene 2

image from the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony gallery: http://www.london2012.com/photos/

I was thrilled to see Danny Boyle’s Isles of Wonder spectacle that was the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympiad use landscape to such great effect. The opening scenes representing historic rural Britain were the archetypal bucolic idyll of wildflowers, thatched cottages, milkmaids and shepherds tending animals, cricket on the green and villagers dancing round the maypole, all watched over at one end by a mound representing Glastonbury Tor capped with a giant oak tree. It called to mind J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Shire, inhabited by hobbits and Richard Adams’ Watership Down. Fluffy white clouds drifted by (apparently equipped with real water), although they weren’t really needed as a real rain shower only just finished as the show began.

Thomas Gainsborough Mr and Mrs Andrews, oil on canvas, about 1750. In the National Gallery London

Only missing were Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, the Suffolk landed gentry posing under the sheltering embrace of an old oak tree on their estate. The oak here signifies stability and continuity, and a sense of successive generations taking over the family business. The landed gentry have even been compared to the oak, holding Britain together. (see: Hagen, Rose-Marie & Hagen, Rainer (2003). What great paintings say. Taschen. pp. 296 300) An apt symbol for a country struggling in recession in the 21stCentury?

When the Industrial Revolution started, presided over by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the green turf was peeled away by villagers to reveal blackened ground, giant chimneys rose up and promptly began to smoke. The dark satanic mills were upon us as men sweated and laboured at machines in the cause of progress. (Although I didn’t see any starving orphans.)

The film sequence which started the performance proper, (entitled Green and Pleasant Land) was itself a journey from country to city, showing footage of the Thames flowing from its source in the Gloucestershire countryside through to the East End and arriving at the Stadium.

This Opening Ceremony was produced to show the world what Britain was, is and could be and it used landscape to do it to an estimated worldwide television audience of one billlion. Declaring yet again that landscape is fundamental to British identity and can act as a potent symbol both at home and abroad. When you think about it, what else could Danny Boyle have chosen as the emblematic basis on which to project H.M. The Queen, James Bond, the NHS, Mr Bean and Last Night of the Proms? (To those who object to a Britain portrayed by such cliches, I say  at least he didn’t choose Benny Hill!)

Gainsborough’s Mr & Mrs Andrews has been called the “Perfect image of rural England.” (Waldemar Januszczak Every Painting Tells a Story, by ZCZ Films for Channel 5) But the couple only make up half the picture. What Gainsborough’s painting actually shows is the land, fields cultivated using new methods. Mr Andrews is showing off not only his new wife and his land, but perhaps most importantly his utilisation of the latest techniques of agriculture. Higher economic productivity is the source of his wealth. So that ultimately this is not a picture about the past, but a glimpse into what the future holds for the countryside on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution. This will mean hardship for the majority of the rural population, not least due to the enclosures acts (deportation was the sentence for poaching) with the result being a general move off the land towards crowded urban areas where work was to be found.

Danny Boyle’s Olympic interpretation of Britain today began with idealised images of the countryside then moved through to an urban experience with a boy-meets-girl storyline told through the characters’ use of texting on their mobile phone. Throughout it used digital technology to spectacular effect in the lights and staging around the arena, featured electronic music, and even Britain’s role in the development of the Internet (Sir Tim Berners-Lee made an appearance seated at a desk in front of computer). All of this whilst the audience itself was busy Tweeting, photographing and uploading via mobile phone. It came as no surprise therefore to see the athletes parade onto the ground with their digital camcorders and phones held up high to capture that very audience in the act of filming them.

New exhibition – The Bruce Lacey Experience

BRUCE LACEY Rosa Bosom (from the Camden Arts Centre website)

Bruce Lacey created the robot Rosa Bosom, exhibited to great acclaim in Cybernetic Serendipity, along with a myriad of other robots, interactive and early computer artworks at the ICA in 1969 and I do hope that she will feature in this show at the Camden Arts Centre, opening this week (7 July – 16 September 2012). Rosa, who runs on lawnmover parts, later went on to win the ‘Alternative Miss World’ in 1985.  You can see Rosa in action (and Lacey interviewed) in the beautifully presented BBC documentary about Andrew Logan and his outrageously wacky Alternative Miss World called The British Guide to Showing Off, 2011 (the DVD was released earlier this year). If you haven’t yet seen this, then I suggest you rent it post-haste as it is a fabulous film (with collage-style graphics slightly reminiscent of Monty Python). Andrew Logan, in common with many artists who don’t fit into the standard ‘Contemporary Art’ mould, (as articulated by the dominate and inter-related network of dealer/gallery/auction houses) has tended to be underestimated by the art world, more’s the pity as his work is colourful, fun and popular. But, as Brian Eno and Grayson Perry point out in this documentary, these facts have probably worked against him. A resistance in the art world and arts education to anything that is accessible and enjoyable, means that such art tends to become translated as lightweight. This limiting thought pattern believes that Popular must equal lowest common denominator, as if nothing of quality can ever be made if a lot of people like it; it’s profoundly snobbish said Brian Eno. It occurs to me that this point could be applied in many cases to the pioneers of computer arts, too.

In the Camden show Bruce Lacey is hailed as one of Britain’s great visionary artists. And yet many people will not have heard of him. Let us hope that this hastens an art world sea-change of re-discovery and celebration of the huge and varied senior population of (non-Turner-Prize winning) artists in Britain.

Another DVD out soon The Lacey Rituals: Films by Bruce Lacey and Friends, of restored films by the BFI should also be worth seeing. Lacey also worked with Ken Russell, among others.