2026 Jasia Reichardt Lecture
William Latham, hosted by Bronac Ferran

Summary

The 2026 Jasia Reichardt Lecture is delivered by William Latham and hosted by Bronac Ferran in honour of Jasia Reichardt, the celebrated exhibition organiser of the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition. Latham surveys his decades-long practice of evolutionary and generative art, beginning with early FormSynth experiments and the Mutator software he developed with Stephen Todd at IBM Winchester, and moving through organic form grammars to recent collaborations with Google DeepMind. He explains how natural selection, mutation and cross-breeding become creative instruments, and how he uses upcoming exhibitions as hard deadlines that force the software and the team to evolve. The talk touches on abstraction and creeping figuration, the artist as gardener or selector, the psychological and sometimes macabre resonance of evolving forms, and the ethical questions raised by working inside corporate AI research. Latham suggests that artists are ultimately makers of aesthetic selections and that, given enough training data drawn from his own repertoire, even his role could be replaceable. Rather than lamenting this, he sees it as democratising creativity, while insisting that the true artwork may be the evolving software system itself, the Pandora's box that generates the endless instances.

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