Daniel Brown, screenshot from series On Growth and Form, real-time 3D, 2013. Collection of the University of Dundee, copyright the artist, reproduced with permission.
Services who have been working with theArt Fund on a £100,000 project to explore the influence of Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in the visual arts. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the Dundee Collections and the Thompson connection, this grant funding has uniquely facilitated the creation of an art work itself with an interdisciplinary concept at its heart – On Growth and Form by Daniel Brown. Read the full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/50050
Herbert W Franke, Intarsien7024Var1, 2012. Generated with a digital picture-generator named Intarsia, programmed with the software system Mathematica for the Demonstration Project of Stephen Wolfram. Copyright the artist, reproduced with permission.
This month, to compliment the previous two discussions of Manfred Mohr
and Ernest Edmonds in my monthly BCS column, we feature new work by another of the great pioneers of algorithmic art – Prof. Herbert Franke. I am especially honored to be able to share with you the first sight of one of his new graphics from the series Intarsia, a striking art work which demonstrates his interest in complex patterns and seems to pulsate with kaleidoscopic qualities. Full article here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/49847
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
