Talk: History of AI in the Arts - Computer Arts Society

29^th March 2023, 19:00
Zoom

Paul Brown, Ernest Edmonds, Stephen Bell and chair Catherine Mason trace AI art back to the 1970s Slade School and Leicester Polytechnic. They contrast today's unregulated corporate AI with pioneering artist-programmers who treated computers as amplifiers, sharing early experiments with plotters, cellular automata, interactive systems and Harold Cohen's AARON programme.

AI Generated Summary

Video Recording

Catherine Mason frames early experiments at the Slade School of Fine Art and Leicester Polytechnic as resources for understanding contemporary AI. She traces connections between systems art, cybernetics, educational reform and artists writing their own programs, highlighting the difficulty of recording changing electronic works. Ernest Edmonds describes collaboration with Stroud Cornock, interdisciplinary exhibitions and research that treats computers as interactive media rather than simply labour saving tools. He recalls links between Leicester and the Slade, discussions of art and artificial intelligence, and the development of human computer interaction research. Stephen Bell explores his movement from systematic sculpture and plotter drawings towards interactive agents with animal like behaviour. His examples address participation, unpredictable trajectories, material irregularity and the distribution of authorship. Paul Brown recounts the influences of light shows, chance, systems thinking and experimental education on his generative practice, explaining how simple interacting elements produce emergent complexity. He discusses cellular automata, Harold Cohen's AARON and Chris Briscoe's interdependent drawing systems. The conversation examines embodiment, learning through interaction, access to underlying technology and the assumptions embedded in software tools. Speakers argue for understanding computational principles while recognising that conceptual frameworks, creative constraints and artistic decisions remain central to experimentation across different technologies.

AI Generated Summary

About the Event

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.

About the Speakers

Paul Brown

CASCOM

Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has specialised in art, science & technology since the late 1960s and computational & generative art since the early 1970s. His early work included creating large-scale lighting installations for musicians and performance groups (like Meredith Monk and The House, Musica Elettronica Viva and Pink Floyd). He has artwork in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in the UK, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, USA and many other public, corporate and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, Russia and the USA. In 2023 he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art.

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 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

Catherine Mason

CASCOM

Catherine Mason has been recovering the history of computer and digital art since 2002 when she joined an AHRC research group at Birkbeck, University of London. Her first book A Computer in the Art Room: the Origins of British Computer Arts 1950-1980 (JJG: 2008 & ebook 2021), is the first comprehensive account of the history of British computer art. Over a long career she has worked in commercial galleries and public-sector arts organisations, adult education and exhibition curation. Today her main focus is research and writing; her latest book Creative Simulations (Springer 2024), tells the story of the early history of CAS, through George Mallen, one of the founders. She is a Visiting Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellow in the School of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London.