Ernest Edmonds

Ernest Edmonds is an artist-researcher who pioneered the field of computational art from the late 1960s. He was a student at Leicester University and a Professor at Leicester Polytechnic, as it was, Loughborough University and more recently at De Montfort University, where he is Emeritus Professor. He is an honory Patron at Phoenix in Leicester.

In 2017 he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. Edmonds’ skills are trans-disciplinary and in 2017 he also won the SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award for the Practice of Computer Human Interaction. His recent exhibitions include retrospectives at Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, and De Montfort University, Leicester.

He recently exhibited in the Generative Generations show at the Gazelli Art House in Mayfair London. He has published widely on human-computer interaction, creativity and computer-based art. His most recent books are From Fingers to Digits: An Artificial Aesthetic (MIT Press, 2019), written with Margaret Boden, and art: notes and works (Boco Publishing, 2022). His work was described in the book by Francesca Franco, Generative Systems Art: The Work of Ernest Edmonds ( Routledge, 2017).

His recent exhibitions include retrospectives at Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, De Montfort University, Leicester and Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney.

Nineteen (1968-1969) was the first artwork that he made with the help of a computer program. The Fortran program calculated the arrangement of the twenty parts following a specification in a set of rules. Datapack (1970) was an interactive computer artwork created in collaboration with Stroud Cornock. The interactive installation Shaping Space (2012) is shown in an image from the Site Gallery in Sheffield. Beijing (2022) shows six examples from a set of paintings using digital print and acrylic paint on canvas. They were composed using mathematics and software to manipulate form and colour.