CAS Session: Leicester Computer Art Pioneers

2^nd November 2023, 19:00
Zoom

Chaired by Sean Clark, Ernest Edmonds, Stephen Scrivener, Stephen Bell, Dave Everett and Clark trace Leicester's digital-arts history from the late 1960s to today. They discuss early university computing, practice-based PhDs, interactive works such as Small World and CubeLife, and the need to preserve lost hardware, software and oral histories.

AI Generated Summary

Video Recording

Sean Clark brings together artists connected with Leicester and Leicestershire to trace relationships between experimental practice, university research and digital art. He introduces an archive and exhibition project that links local histories with the Computer Arts Society's collections. Ernest Edmonds describes how mathematics, computing and an encounter with Stroud Cornock generate collaboration, including early interactive work and research into artistic uses of computers. Stephen Scrivener recalls moving from painting to processes involving water and light, then creating a homeostatic system at the Slade before returning to Leicester for doctoral research. Stephen Bell explains how access to graphics equipment, interdisciplinary colleagues and research support at Loughborough enables his investigation of participatory computer art and development of Small World. Dave Everitt presents work involving magic squares, heartbeat driven interaction and audiovisual performance, reflecting on the difficulty of preserving installations that depend on obsolete systems. Clark recounts his progression through computer graphics, collaborative drawing environments, virtual reality and commercial web work towards an artistic practice based on interconnected systems and colour exchange. Across these accounts, chance encounters, mentorship and institutional movement shape artistic development. The discussion highlights collaboration, reconstruction and documentation as essential to preserving both artworks and the environments that support them.

AI Generated Summary

About the Event

In 'Leicester Computer Arts History', various speakers trace the emergence of digital art in Leicester and Leicestershire from the late 1960s to the present. Chaired by Sean Clark, the discussion links the Computer Arts Society archive project, the CAS50 collection, the Micro Arts holdings and a recent Beta RX exhibition, gathering contributions from Ernest Edmonds, Stephen Scrivener, Stephen Bell, Dave Everett and Clark himself. Edmonds recounts his arrival at Leicester University in the early 1960s, his partnership with Stroud Cornock at Leicester Polytechnic, and their pioneering 1970 manifesto on interactive art, noting that the work continues with recent networked pieces such as the Art AI Festival installation. Scrivener, Bell and Clark trace their paths from painting and experimental art into computing through practice-based PhDs at the Loughborough University Human-Computer Interaction Research Unit and LUCI, gaining access to early Silicon Graphics workstations and interdisciplinary teams. Bell reflects on 'Small World' and his decade-long investigation of interactivity, while Everett recalls his heartbeat-driven 'CubeLife', the '64 Samples' event and the Emergency Art Lab. Together they stress the value of preserving lost hardware, software and oral histories, and call for further exhibitions, publications and reconstructed works to safeguard this distinctive Midlands computer-arts history.

About the Speakers

Sean Clark

CASCOM, Speaker, Exhibitors

Sean Clark (b. 1965) is an independent artist, curator, and researcher based in Leicestershire, UK. His artwork explores interaction and connectedness through the construction of audiovisual systems presented on screen, as installations, and as prints. He is the director of Interact Digital Arts, the curator of the Computer Arts Archive and Chair of the Computer Arts Society. He holds a PhD in Computational Art from De Montfort University, where he studied under computer art pioneer Ernest Edmonds, and in 2016 was co-winner of the Lumen Prize for 3D/Sculpture and the Art.CHI Digital Art Prize.

Ernest Edmonds

CASCOM, Exhibitors

Ernest Edmonds is a pioneer in Generative Art, making his first artwork using a computer in 1968. In 2017, he received lifetime achievement awards from ACM SIGGRAPH for Digital Art and from ACM SIGCHI for Computer-Human Interaction. Recent retrospectives have been shown at Microsoft Research Asia Beijing, De Montfort University Leicester and Mosman Art Gallery Sydney. He has published widely on creativity, computer-human interaction and generative art. His work was described in the book by Francesca Franco, Generative Systems Art: The Work of Ernest Edmonds, Routledge, 2017. Ernest is an Emeritus Professor of Computational Art at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Stephen Scrivener

Speaker

No biography available.

Stephen Bell

CASCOM

Stephen Bell is a pioneering British digital artist who began integrating computer programming into his creative practice in 1977 at The Slade School of Art. He gained prominence in the mid 1980s whilst Artist in Residence at the University of Kent, developing his Smallworld algorithm in which software agents imitate animal and human behaviours. Bell creates interactive CGI environments to explore emergent aesthetic consequences of tracing the dynamic social interactions of these automated entities. Holding a PhD in participatory computer art, he spent nearly three decades inspiring new generations as a Senior Lecturer at the National Centre for Computer Animation.

https://stephenbell.art

Dave Everitt

Speaker

No biography available.