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
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.
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.
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 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.
Kelly Richardson’s new work premiering at Whitley Bay (from 3 August), asks questions about our future in space exploration. Featured here is a still from Mariner 9, a 12 meter-long panoramic digital video installation of an imagined Mars centuries into the future, littered with the detritus of long-forgotten expeditions, evidence of mankind’s once optimistic future reduced to scrap. This detail shows the NASA space rover Curiosity due to land on Mars in early August, in an (imagined) semi-defunct state. This art work has been acquired by the Laing Art Gallery, another fine example of important national insitutions engaging with and actively collecting art with a strong digital element (see also the John Gerrard recently acquired by mima).
Kelly is our BCS selected artist this month. See the full image and read more here:http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/46091
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