6:30 for 7:00 Tuesday 19 February 2008

Speaker: Alan Sutcliffe

System Simulation Ltd
Bedford Chambers
The Piazza Covent Garden
London
WC2E 8HA

A simple method to generate irregular but smooth curves will be described, together with shading to give 3-d forms. The method uses the repeated addition of differences of differences of differences in one co-ordinate for unit change in the other co-ordinate. Drawing in the XOR mode gives unexpected benefits in this context. The anatomy of the XOR operator applied to grey-scales and colours will be illustrated. This is an extended version of the talk given at the Bridges Conference at Donostia in July 2007, updated with some more recent animations based on these and other mathematical methods.

In 1967 Alan Sutcliffe wrote a program, to compose electronic music, which ran on an ICL 1900 computer. The music was realised, from a paper tape of the score, in the electronic music studio of Peter Zinovieff. When this won second prize in the International Computer Music Competition at IFIP 68 in Edinburgh he was prompted to propose the formation of a Computer Arts Society that he chaired until 1979. During 2007 he has exhibited in Bremen, Graz, Donostia and Karlsruhe. An early graphic, thought lost, turned up in the CAS Collection during its hand-over to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Alan now edits PAGE – the bulletin of the CAS.