paul brown - chromos
chromos, 2000
Technical Description: Real-time computer-generated video displayed on 2 plasma screens; silent
Duration Continuous; b&w
Collection: Australian Centre for the Moving Image
Courtesy: the artist
contents: essay | artist's bio | artist's statement
Paul Brown has been working in the field of artificial life and artificial intelligence for over 30 years. As an art student in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was fascinated by theories of form and procedural art practices. Determined to explore alternatives to the romantic ideal of art as an intuitive expression of an individual's inner emotional life, he was drawn to the study of computing and the logical languages used in programming. He writes, 'The idea of complexity emerging from simplicity - or to use the older homily "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" - has been a guiding concept behind my work for longer than I can remember. I find myself equally attracted to holism and reductionism and constantly oscillate between these two extremes.'1
Research in the field of artificial life has a long and varied history, encompassing mechanical, computerised, biological and literary attempts to construct or imagine systems that generate or maintain behaviours independently of their human makers. Despite bad press as an attempt to play God, this quest continues to energise many branches of scientific, artistic and commercial endeavour.
Several of the artists in Transfigure simulate or model human behaviour, at both the biological and social levels, but unlike Drew Berry's medical visualisation or Stelarc's Prosthetic Head, chromos is not directly representational of anything other than its own underlying structure and processes. Although his works are commonly interpreted as 'life-like', Brown is concerned not to over-anthropomorphise them. His primary concerns are with the nature of creative activity and the process of making art. He writes, 'I believe that we will eventually be able to create automata that will make artworks that do not bear the signature of the creator of the system. That the system will be capable of evolving its own personal style.'2
chromos positions the viewer in a space of contemplation, on the verge of several modes of perception. The precision of the beat at which the lines switch states is hypnotic, while the dual screens imply the potential for the work to exist in endlessly multiple yet non-identical manifestations. Even if viewers are able to recognise the binary laws at work, chromos quickly outstrips their ability to keep track of or predict the individual movements. The mind soon changes gear - searching for analogies and interpretations, drifting into daydreams of chromosomes and DNA, bathroom tiles and LSD, ancient mosaics or future calligraphies, or perhaps just a more profound appreciation of the concept of complexity emerging from simplicity.
1 Brown P, Stepping Stones in the Mist, 2000
http://www.paul-brown.com/
accessed 16 August 2003
2 ibid
1947 - Born in Halifax, Yorkshire, England; resident in Australia
1988 - 2003; currently lives and works in London, England
Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has been specialising in art and technology for 30 years. He began using the internet in 1984, and, from 1992-99 he edited fineArt forum, one of the longest-established art 'zines on the internet.
In 1985 he was the founding Head of the National Centre for Computer Aided Art and Design, Middlesex Polytechnic (now University), England. After a two-year appointment as Professor of Art and Technology at Mississippi State University he returned to Australia in 1994 as a consultant in Multimedia and Network Publishing at Griffith University's Division of Information Services. In 1996 he was the founding Adjunct Professor of Communication Design at Queensland University of Technology.
From 1997-99 he was Chair of the Management Board of the Australian Network for Art and Technology, and is currently a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for both Leonardo, the journal of the International Society for Art, Science and Technology, and Digital Creativity.
Since 1967, Brown's computer-generated artwork has been exhibited internationally in Europe, USA, and Australia.
As part of an Australia Council New Media Arts Fellowship in 2000-01, he was artist-in-residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Website links
Paul Brown's website
http://www.paul-brown.com/
Fine Art Forum website
http://www.fineartforum.org/
Early in my career, under the influence of Buddhism, I rejected the concept of art as a form of personal expression because I perceived it as an indulgence or conceit. Instead my major preoccupation has been with simple systems and how they can generate unpredictable images and time-based pieces where...'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts'.
I am therefore a formalist - a product of the 20th century constructivist traditions of Kinetics, Systems Art and Conceptual Art - and my work is anchored in the interface between art, science and technology. Since 1974, I have used computer hardware and software as my primary medium. I remain committed to the idea of programming - or procedure - as the primary opportunity offered by digital media although I have also occasionally worked at the hardware level as well.
During the 1970s I was a member of a group of artists based around the Slade School of Art's Experimental and Computing Department who were working with ideas that would in the 1980s become codified as artificial life or a-life. I suppose you could say that this has become my life work.
Rather than being constructed or designed my work 'evolves'. I have always felt that Sol Lewitt's 1967 statement: 'The idea becomes a machine that makes the art' neatly describes my approach. Since the 1960s, and especially since discovering computers in 1968, I have devoted my life to making automata that make art. I look forward to a future where computational processes like the ones I build will themselves make artworks without the need for human intervention - an art of computational emergence that is different from art made by human creators. The creation of such processes is something that has always fascinated me. It has its roots in the fields of formal theories of computation, cognition, artificial intelligence, a-life, non-linear or 'chaos' theory and our growing understanding of the post-human condition.
Needless to say I believe that life is just a machine, albeit a very complex one (and probably too complex for us to ever fully comprehend). With the advent of computing machines we are discovering the opportunity of creating new forms of life - self-replicating machines - that inhabit the multi-dimensional cyber-verse which is emerging within the material universe. This territory is also now a part of 'our' world. With the help of evolutionary robotics and similar techniques we can also enable these virtual creatures to manifest in embodied form alongside organic life.
We are explorers, standing at the portals of myriad new universes. Goodness knows what (and who) we may find there!
|
