History of AI in the Arts
Paul Brown, Ernest Edmonds, Stephen Bell and Catherine Mason

Summary

In "History of AI in the Arts," Paul Brown joins Ernest Edmonds, Stephen Bell and chair Catherine Mason to trace early AI art to 1970s Slade School and Leicester Polytechnic. They frame today's unregulated, corporate AI surge against pioneering artist-programmers who saw computers as amplifiers rather than replacements. Mason sets the scene: Malcolm Hughes, Harold Cohen and Bernard Cohen foster rule-based, systems-grounded art at the Slade, enabling students such as Stephen Scrivener, Julian Sullivan, Carol Gray and Nigel Johnson to write code, build hardware and explore cellular automata and artificial life. Edmonds recalls meeting Stroud Cornock at Leicester, the 1970 "Invention of Problems" exhibition, early networked and interactive art, a 1976 art-and-AI meeting, and a major human-computer interaction grant. Bell describes his Slade experiments with plotter drawings, an unfinished space game, later "Small World" agents using state-transition tables, and how low-level coding shaped his participatory practice. Brown recounts his own cellular-automata drawings, real-time generative pieces, the influence of Edward Ihnatowicz's cognitive interactionism, and Harold Cohen's AARON as an externalised creative agency. Together, the speakers argue that understanding this hands-on, embodied history helps artists critically engage with contemporary AI.

Generated by AI using kimi-k2.7-code (3^rd September 2026).