Algorithmic Dimension: A Digital Arts Masterclass with Ernest Edmonds, Frieder Nake and Roman Verostko
Monday 19th November 2012
Phoenix, Leicester
Starting at 6:30pm, FREE, but booking is advised as places are limited.
Book by calling the Phoenix Box Office on 0116 242 2800
http://phoenix.org.uk/index.php?cms_id=677
http://www.facebook.com/events/299070836873766
Four pioneers in the world of digital arts will lead a Masterclass in this free event for artists, students and anyone interested in learning more about the history and practice of this field.
Algorithmic Dimension offers an excellent opportunity to take part in lectures and discussions with leading figures in the digital arts.
Focussing on the relationship between computer programming, art and creativity, each speaker will explore the role of programming in their work, looking at how their practice has kept pace with the rapid advance of technology in recent decades.
Chaired by Dr Francesca Franco and organised by De Montfort University in partnership with Phoenix. Free, but booking is advised as places are limited. Contact the box office to reserve your place.
The talks will be preceded at 6pm by the opening of Genetic Moo and Sean Clark's new exhibition Symbiotic in the DMU Cube.
About the Speakers:
Ernest Edmonds
Ernest Edmonds' art explores colour, time and interaction in the context of colour field painting and systems art. His work extends the Constructivist tradition into the digital age in a powerful and enduring investigation of mathematical and computational systems. Born in London in 1942, he began painting at an early age and continued to do so throughout his formal education in mathematics, philosophy and logic. Throughout his life, he has made artworks with reflected as well as transmitted light, both painting and writing code to make interactive generative works. He has exhibited computer-based and systems art around the world since 1970 and showed the first computer-generated video at Exhibiting Space in 1985. Recent exhibitions have included "Speculative Data and the Creative Imaginary", National Academy of Sciences Gallery, Washington DC, 2007; "Cities Tango" Dietzschold Gallery Sydney and ISEA, Belfast; Urbanscreen, Federation Square Melbourne; "New Acquisitions", Victoria and Albert Museum; "Light Logic", Site Gallery, Sheffield.
Edmonds has been a significant figure internationally across the disciplines of art, computing and logic, both as practitioner and researcher, for over 40 years and remains highly active. He has vigorously extended the concept of art as visual research by developing a new approach to art practice that integrates research as a formal activity. As well as creating new art forms and publishing widely, he continues to contribute to art research through the positions of Professor of Computation and Creative Media at the University of Technology, Sydney and Professor of Computational Art at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He is Editor-in-Chief of Transactions in the leading MIT Press art and science journal, Leonardo.
Weblinks
http://www.ernestedmonds.com/
http://www.dam.org/artists/phase-one/ernest-edmonds
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/name/edmonds-ernest/54848/
Frieder Nake
Frieder Nake belongs to the founding fathers of computer art. He produced his first computer artworks in 1963. He first exhibited his drawings at Galerie Wendelin Niedlich in Stuttgart in November 1965. His early work was influenced by Max Bense's Information Aesthetics. Nake is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bremen, Germany. Since 2005, he has also been teaching at the University of the Arts, Bremen. His teaching and research activities are in computer graphics, digital media, computer art, design of interactive systems, computational semiotics, and general theory of computing. Nake was represented at all important international exhibitions on computer art. He has published in all the areas mentioned above, with a preference for computer generated images.
Weblinks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieder_Nake
http://www.dam.org/artists/phase-one/frieder-nake
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/nake/biography/
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/name/nake-frieder/35858/
Roman Verostko
Roman Verostko was born in the USA in 1929, Roman is best known for his richly coloured algorithmic pen and brush drawings. As a Bush fellow at MIT in 1970 he set out to "humanize our experience of emerging technologies". Although schooled primarily as a painter, he experimented with other media and, in the late 1960's, created a series of electronically synchronized audio-visual programs presented as the "Psalms in Sound & Image". In 1970 he took a course in Fortran at the Control Data Institute and, by 1982, with his own studio PC, he exhibited his first fully algorist work, "The Magic Hand of Chance". From this experience he developed his own master drawing program to guide both ink pens and brushes with multi-pen drawing machines. His last show at the DAM in Berlin, "Algorithmic Poetry", celebrates nature via visual forms generated with brushes and ink pens driven with his algorithms. In 2008 he merged past and present by transforming his 1970's drawings into a stunning array of digital images for an Upsidedown Book and Mural for the Fred Rogers Center, Latrobe, PA, USA.
Distinctions: 2009 SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement; Artec '95, Recommendatory Prize, Nagoya, Japan; Golden Plotter Award, Germany, 1994; Professor Emeritus, MCAD, 1994; Prix Ars Electronica, Honorable Mention, 1993; Director, ISEA 1993; Bush Fellow, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, 1970; Outstanding Educators of America, 1971, 1974.
Weblinks
http://www.verostko.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Verostko
http://www.dam.org/artists/phase-one/roman-verostko
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/name/verostko-roman/46133/
About the Chair:
Dr Francesca Franco
Francesca Franco is a researcher specialised in history of art and technology. She is Research Fellow at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Leicester, where she is studying the Ernest Edmonds Archive of computational art material held at the Victoria & Albert Museum. In 2009-10 she was Research Fellow on the AHRC funded project Computer Art and Technocultures (CAT) at Birkbeck, University of London, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She holds a PhD in History of Art from Birkbeck (thesis title: "Ars Ex Machina - The Missing History of New Media Art at the Venice Biennale, 1966-86). Her most recent publications include "The First Computer Art Show at the 1970 Venice Biennale. An Experiment or Product of the Bourgeois Culture?" MIT (forthcoming); "Exploring Intersections: Ernest Edmonds and his time-based generative art", Digital Creativity Journal, (forthcoming); "Shifts in the Curatorial Model of the Venice Biennale, 1895-1974", in Manifesta Journal 11, Amsterdam, 2011. She has been sitting on the editorial board of Computers and the History of Art (CHArt) since 2005.
Weblinks
