Kinetic Painting: real-time software application. Additional Credits: Copyright © Paul Brown 2012, all rights reserved. Acknowledgements: Made using Processing™ processing.org

Artist’s Synopsis

Dragon continues my interest in artworks that use simple systems to construct themselves and it is a product my ongoing concern with the systematic creation and exploration of surface. Since 1974 my main tool has been the computational and generative process and I have established a significant international reputation in this area of work.

My work is based in a field of computational science called Cellular Automata (CAs). These are simple systems that can propagate themselves over time and display complex behaviour. CAs are part of the origins of the discipline known as Artificial Life or A-life. I have been interested in CAs and their relationship to tiling and symmetry systems since the 1960s. Over the past 40 years I have applied these processes to time-based artworks, prints on paper, and large-scale, site-specific public artworks.

In my artwork I attempt to create venues that encourage the participant to engage both visually and physically with the work. Because my work emerges (in the computational sense) from game-like processes I include elements of play in order to capture and sustain the participant’s attention.

Rather than being constructed or designed, these works “emerge” from their own internal rules. I look forward to a future where computational processes like the ones that I build will themselves make artworks without the need for human intervention. The creation of such processes is something that has always fascinated me.

Artist’s Biography

Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has specialised in art, science & technology since the late 1960s and in computational & generative art since the mid 1970s. He has gained a reputation as an international pioneer in the field of artificial life and art. His early work involved creating large scale lighting works to accompany musicians and performance groups (Meredith Monk and the House, Music Electronica Viva, Pink Floyd, etc.) and he has an international exhibition record that includes the creation of both permanent and temporary public artworks dating from the late 1960s. His work has been exhibited at major venues like the TATE, Victoria & Albert and ICA in the UK; the Adelaide Festival; ARCO in Spain; the Substation in Singapore; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb and the Venice Biennale. His work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, Russia and the USA.

From 2000-01 he was a New Media Arts Fellow of the Australia Council for the Arts and he is currently an honorary visiting professor of art and technology at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics and School of Engineering/Informatics, University of Sussex, UK and Synapse Artist-in-Residence at the Centre for Intelligent Systems Research, Deakin University.

His most recent book – White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960-1980 – which he co-edited with Charlie Gere, Nick Lambert and Catherine Mason was published by MIT Press, Leonardo Imprint.

Related RiAus Exhibitions: