6 - 8pm 28 September 2006

Speaker: Paul Brown

This presentation is an idiosyncratic and non-rigorous account of my work as an artist who has been involved in the field now known as Artificial Life for over 30 years. To give the audience some context I begin with a few opinions that define my position within the visual arts (which is far from the current mainstream) and then go on to describe early influences from the 1960s and 70s that have framed my involvement in the field of computational arts. This includes some examples of my work from this period. The latter part of the essay describes my working methodology and includes examples of my more recent work and ends with some speculations about where I may go in the future.

About the Speaker

Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has been specialising in art and technology for over 30 years. In 1984 he was the founding head of the UK's National Centre for Computer Aided Art and Design and in 1994 he returned to Australia after a two-year appointment as Professor of Art and Technology at Mississippi State University to head Griffith University's Multimedia Unit. In 1996 was the founding Adjunct Professor of Communication Design at Queensland University of Technology.

From 1997-99 he was Chair of the Management Board of the Australian Network for Art Technology and is currently chair of the Computer Arts Society. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards for LEA, the e-journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (MIT Press), and the journal Digital Creativity (Routledge). From 1992 to 1999 he edited fine Art forum, one of the Internet's longest established art 'zines and he is currently moderator of the DASH (Digital ArtS Histories) and CMCA (Computational Models of Creativity in the Arts) e-lists.

His computer generated artwork has been exhibited internationally since 1967 and is currently on show in Europe, Russia, the USA and Australia.

During 2000/2001 he was a New Media Arts Fellow of the Australia Council and he spent 2000 as artist-in-residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR) at the University of Sussex in Brighton. From 2002-05 he was visiting fellow at the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he worked on the CACHe (Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc...) research project. He is currently (2005-08) a visiting professor and artist-in-residence at the School of Informatics, University of Sussex where he is working on a CCNR project to evolve robots that can exhibit creative behaviour.

Examples of his artwork and publications are available on his web site at: Paul's site