Reminder:

The Computer Arts Society present an afternoon joint meeting with the
Colour Group
http://www.city.ac.uk/colourgroup/

COLOUR IN COMPUTER ART

13:30 for 14.00 – ends 16:30
Wednesday 20 June 2007

British Computer Society
The Davidson Building
5 Southampton Street
London, WC2E 7HA

Map at: http://www.bcs.org/upload/img/londonsscolour.jpg


Mutating Colour
William Latham, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

William Latham will discuss the use of colour in his Computer
Artworks during the period 1987 to 1993 at IBM UK Laboratories & more
recently on the Mutator 2 Project from 2005 at Goldsmiths College
(University of London) using "real world" DNA data input from the
Bioinformatics Group at Imperial College. Originally trained as
artist he will explain his approach to colour from his very early
computer artworks through to the DNA automatically generated colour
schemes in his multi-coloured recent animated films.

 From 1987 to 1994 William Latham worked for IBM in their Advanced
Computer Graphics and Visualisation Division. He was co-author with
Stephen Todd of the book “Evolutionary Art and Computers”, Academic
Press. In April 07 he became a Professor in The Computing Department
at Goldsmiths College. He continues as CEO of Games Audit.

Webpage http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~latham

Colourfied: an evolutionary ecosystem of colour
Jon McCormack, Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA), Monash
University, Australia

In biology, evolutionary synthesis is a process capable of generating
unprecedented novelty, i.e. it is creative. It has been able to
create things like prokaryotes, eukaryotes, higher multicellularity
and language through a non-teleological process of replication and
selection. Colourfield is a simple experiment in machine assisted
creative discovery. It uses the metaphor of an adaptive ecosystem. A
population of colours exists in a 1-dimensional world, and the
colours are "grown" from a gene that expresses natural weights
towards neighbouring colours along with an innate "personal" colour.

Jon McCormack is an Electronic Media Artist, co-director of the
Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA) and Lecturer in the School of
Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University,
Melbourne, Australia. Impossible Nature - a book about his work was
published in 2004.

Webpage: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jonmc/

The Painting Fool - a First Look
Dr. Simon Colton, Imperial College, University of London, UK

I'm interested in the question of what it means for a piece of
software to be creative in the visual arts. In the talk, I will
outline the notion of the creative tripod, where programs have to
exhibit signs of skill, appreciation and imagination in order to be
taken seriously as creative individuals.

Dr. Simon Colton is a lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the
Department of Computing, Imperial College, London. Firstly as a
hobby, and more recently as work for Machine Creations Ltd., he has
developed various pieces of graphics software to explore the question
of computational creativity in the visual arts.

Webpage http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/

Colour, Symbol and Ambiguity
Paul Brown, University of Sussex, UK

I am not an intuitive colourist and tend to use colour in my work in
a symbolic sense to “tag” different areas of an image and
differentiate the image plane.

In this talk I will discuss two recent time-based generative works –
4^16 – and – 4^15 Studies in Perception. In the former I attempted
to find a set of four colours that would emphasise the ambiguity of a
geometry that could be interpreted as having either a horizontal/
vertical or diagonal construction. In the latter the colour (and
most of the other controls governing the work) are random. Here I
have been surprised by the consistency and quality of the colour in
contradiction to my initial expectation that the work would often
devolve into mud.

Paul Brown is an artist and writer who is based on the Sunshine Coast
in Queensland, Australia. His pioneering work in the computational
and generative art dates back to the early 1970’s. He is currently
the Chair of the Computer Arts Society and a visiting professor of
art & technology at Sussex University where he is working on a
project to evolve a robot that can draw.

Webpage: http://www.paul-brown.com


====
Paul Brown - based in the UK March-July 2007
mailto:[log in to unmask] == http://www.paul-brown.com
UK Mobile +44 (0)794 104 8228 == USA fax +1 309 216 9900
Skype paul-g-brown
====
Visiting Professor - Sussex University
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html
====