Artists

  • Alexander Reben’s work probes the inherently human nature of the artificial. Using tools such as artificial philosophy, synthetic psychology, perceptual manipulation and technological magic, he brings to light our inseparable evolutionary entanglement to invention which has unarguably shaped our way of being.

    Reben is an artist and roboticist who explores humanity through the lens of art and technology. Using “art as experiment” his work allows for the viewer to experience the future within metaphorical contexts. Reben’s artwork and research have been shown and published internationally, and he consults with major companies, guiding innovation for the social machine future. He has exhibited at venues including The Vitra Design Museum, The MAK Museum Vienna, The Design Museum Ghent, The Vienna Biennale, ARS Electronica, The Tribeca Film Festival, The Camden Film Festival, and The Boston Cyberarts Gallery. His work has been covered by, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, WIRED, and more. He has lectured at TED, SXSW, Google, UC Berkeley, SMFA, and MIT. Reben has built robots for NASA, and is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab. He is a Stochastic Labs Resident, and a recent visiting scholar in the UC Berkeley psychology department.

  • Han Yajuan is a multimedia artist. Her work focuses on the relationship between women and the virtual space in relation to agency and identity issues. Her artistic practices operate across paintings, moving images, installations, VR, and GameArt.

    Yajuan has held solo exhibitions in China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Holland, Japan, Korea, Australia, Singapore, and Spain. Her works also have been exhibited in museums, art institutions, and biennials worldwide. For example, the National Art Museum of China, the National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, Wereld Museum Rotterdam, the National Portrait Gallery Australia, Palazzo Reale Milano, Marino Marini Museum, La Centrale Électrique Brussels, Palazzo delle Arti Naples, Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, Bienal de Curitiba 2017, and Animamix Biennial 2009 and 2014. Her works have been collected by the China Academy of Art, Swiss BSI Foundation, and M+ Museum.

    Yajuan received her Bachelor of Arts from the China Academy of Art and her Master of fine arts from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. She is pursuing a PhD in Art and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

  • Andy Lomas is a computational artist, mathematician and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer generated effects. Inspired by the work of Alan Turing, D'Arcy Thompson and Ernst Haeckel, his art work explores how complex forms can be created emergently by simulating biological processes. He is currently based in London, developing his art practice as well as working as a Lecturer in Creative Computing at Goldsmiths. He has had work exhibited in numerous exhibitions, including at the Pompidou Centre, V&A, the Royal Society, SIGGRAPH, Japan Media Arts Festival, Ars Electronica Festival, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Watermans, the Science Museum and the ZKM. He also has work in the collections at the V&A, the Computer Arts Society and the D'Arcy Thompson Art Fund Collection. In 2014 his work Cellular Forms won The Lumen Prize Gold Award.

  • Entangled Others is the shared studio practice of artists Feileacan McCormick and Sofia Crespo. Their work focuses on ecology, nature, and generative arts, with an emphasis on giving the more-than-human new forms a presence and life in digital space. This involves exploring questions of relationship, biodiversity, and awareness through biology-inspired technologies. In turn, they highlight how through conscious efforts, new technology can be used to bring attention and awareness to the unseen that we are tightly interwoven with. Entanglement is a complex state one where no single entity can be said to be separate, or somehow unaffected, by any other present entangled, we cannot consider ourselves without others, act without interacting, speak without being heard.

    Sofia Crespo is an artist working with biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not completely separated objects. Crespo looks at the similarities between techniques of AI image formation, and the way that humans express themselves creatively and cognitively recognize their world. Her work brings into question the potential of AI in artistic practice and its ability to reshape our understanding of creativity.

    Feileacan McCormick is a Lisbon-based generative artist, researcher & former architect. His practice focuses on ecology, nature & generative arts, with a focus on giving the more-than-human new forms of presence & life in the digital space.

  • Flo Yuting Zhu is an independent performance maker, who seeks new forms of theatre with mixed reality technologies, moving images, urban settings, and playable experiences. Her recent works often address themes around witness, shared experience, and fragmented perception of the self to initiate alternative ways of seeing.

    She is a recent MFA graduate of Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London.

  • Daniel Berio is a researcher, programmer and artist working between computer graphics, robotics and graffiti art. He recently competed a PhD in computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he researched methods for the computer aided design and procedural generation of (synthetic) graffiti art and calligraphy. Previously, Daniel specialized in multimedia software development, especially applications involving real-time hardware accelerated rendering and vector graphics techniques. Artistically, Daniel comes from a graffiti writing background and he explores this same aesthetic in algorithmically generated forms.

  • Lance Putnam is interested in generative art, virtual reality, the geometric foundations of sound and graphics, and all things harmonic. He holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and both an M.A. in Electronic Music and Sound Design and Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from the Media Arts and Technology program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

    At UCSB, he was a key developer of the AlloSystem software used to create content for the AlloSphere three-story immersive display. His dissertation "The Harmonic Pattern Function: A Mathematical Model Integrating Synthesis of Sound Graphical Patterns" was selected for the Leonardo journal LABS 2016 top abstracts. His audiovisual work "S Phase" has been shown at numerous locations including the 2008 International Computer Music Conference in Belfast, and the Traiettorie Festival in Parma, Italy.

    His work "Adrift", an audiovisual composition designed for virtual environments was performed live at the 2015 Generative Arts Conference in Venice, Italy.

    From 2016-2021, he was a research associate in Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London under the Digital Creativity Labs where he investigated new approaches to generative art in virtual reality. This resulted in the development, with Prof. William Latham and Stephen Todd, of the Mutator VR and FormScape VR experiences that have been shown at numerous exhibitions around the world including Ars Electronica, Cyfest and the Venice Biennale. He is currently a lecturer in Computing at Goldsmiths College teaching creative computing and games.

    William Latham is well known for his pioneering Organic Computer Art created in the late eighties and early nineties whilst a Research Fellow at IBM in Winchester. His book “Evolutionary Art and Computers” on interactive evolutionary art covering the period at IBM co-authored Stephen Todd is cited as a leading publication in this domain.

    From 1993 for thirteen years, initially he worked in Rave Music video production, album cover design and visual stage design and then moved into computer games development leading two games development studios games published by Universal Studios, Virgin Interactive and Konami.

    In 2007 he became a Professor in Computing at Goldsmiths University of London. From 2016 his Mutator VR Art Experience developed with long term collaborator Stephen Todd, with Lance Putnam and Peter Todd has been exhibited to much acclaim at museums and galleries in Linz, Shanghai, Brussels, Kyoto, Venice, Dusseldorf, London and in St. Petersburg (linked to The Hermitage Museum) and Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

    William is an Honorary Research Fellow at The Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL and has a BA from Oxford University and an MA from The Royal College of Art.

  • Ao Lei is a creative technologist and digital artist with expertise in interactive installation, generative design, and computer graphics. Ao finished his bachelor degree in Nuclear Engineering at Tsinghua University(China) where he led an experiment team on quantum optics. He graduated from MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering, a joint program provided by RCA and Imperial.Coming from a mixed background, Ao is passionate about bridging the boundary between art and physics. He aims to provide a new way of perceiving the world from a physics-based perspective.

  • Jake Elwes (b.1993) is a media artist living and working in London. They studied at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2013-17). Searching for poetry and narrative in the success and failures of AI systems, Jake Elwes investigates the aesthetics and ethics inherent to AI. Elwes’ practice makes use of the sophistication of machine learning, while finding illuminating qualities in its limitations. Across projects that encompass moving-image installation, sound and performance, Elwes seeks to queer datasets, demystifying and subverting predominantly cisgender and straight AI systems. While it may seem like the AI is a creative collaborator, Elwes is careful to point out that the AI has neither intentionality or agency; it is a neutral agent existing within a human framework. Their current works in the Zizi Project explore AI bias by queering datasets with drag performers which simultaneously demystify and subvert AI systems.

    Jake's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; TANK Museum, Shanghai; Today Art Museum, Beijing; CyFest, Venice; Edinburgh Futures Institute, UK; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany; New Contemporaries 2017, UK; Ars Electronica, Austria; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; LABoral Centro, Spain; Nature Morte, Delhi, India; RMIT Gallery, Australia; Centre for the Future of Intelligence, UK and they have been featured on TV: ZDF aspekte (Germany) and the BBC Arts (UK).

  • Dr Libby Heaney is currently a resident at Somerset House Studios, London.

    She has a 1st class degree in physics from Imperial College London and a PhD in Quantum Information Science from the University of Leeds. She spent 5 years working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore, leading her own research and publishing 20 papers on topics like quantum entanglement and quantum biology. In 2008, Heaney won HSBC and the Institute of Physics Very Early Career Woman physicist of the year and a prestigious EPSRC postdoctoral fellowship.

    Heaney retrained as an artist at Central St Martins, graduating in 2015, and now works at the intersection of advanced technologies, science and art. She is widely recognised as a pioneer of quantum computing and art, receiving substantial international press for her artwork Ent-. Since then, Ent- has toured to four locations and was nominated for the STARTS prize, long-listed for the Lumen Prize and was a winner in the Arts & Science category of the Falling Wall Prize.

    Heaney has exhibited widely in galleries and institutions in the UK and internationally, solo exhibitions at arebyte Gallery, London (2022); Light Art Space, Berlin (2022); Holden Gallery, Manchester (2021); Emmanuel Church, Loughborough (2021) as part of Radar, Loughborough University’s contemporary art programme; Goethe Institute, London (2019) and at Non-Space Gallery, Aarhus (2017) as part of their EU Capital of Culture programming. Group shows include Zabludowicz Collection, London (2022); Re:publica Festival, Berlin (2022); Mimosa House, London (2022); HMKV, Dortmund (2022); RMIT Gallery, Melbourne (2021); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2022); Art-AI Festival, Leicester (2021); MUTEK, Montreal (2021); Etopia Center for Art & Technology, Zaragoza (2021); Science Gallery, Dublin (2021, 2019, 2018, 2017); arebyte Gallery, London (online 2020); LUX with Hervisions (online 2020); TateModern, London (2019, 2016); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2019); V&A, London (2018); CCCB, Barcelona (2019); Barbican, London (2019); Somerset House, London (2019, online 2020); Sheffield DocFest (2018); CogX, London (2018); Sónar+D, Barcelona with the British Council (2017); Ars Electronica, Linz (2017) and Fundación Telefónica, Lima with the British Council (2017).

  • Max is a visual artist and programmer specialising in game art and interactive installations. His recent work in simulations utilise humour and incongruity to create bizarre fictional worlds.

    While recent AI art is heavily driven by complex and highly intelligent learning algorithms, Max takes a different approach, incorporating primitive game AIs within a chaotic system to create surprising and emergent moments.

  • Memo Akten is a multi-disciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, musician and computer scientist from Istanbul, Turkey. He works with emerging technologies and computation as a medium, to create images, sounds, films, large-scale responsive installations and performances. Fascinated by trying to understand the nature of nature and the human condition, he draws from fields such as biological and artificial intelligence, computational creativity, consciousness, neuroscience, physics, biology, ecology, philosophy, ritual and religion. He has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and expressive human-machine interaction from Goldsmiths University of London, and is Assistant Professor of Computational / New Media Art at University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Akten is a frequent keynote speaker on topics involving art, science, technology and culture. As part of his PhD, he specializes in expressive human-machine interaction and creative explorations of Artificial Intelligence, and in this field he is considered one of the world’s leading pioneers.

  • Nye Thompson (UK) is an artist turned software designer turned artist. She is known for her experimental software architectures exploring network-embedded power dynamics and machinic visions of the world. Thompson has exhibited around the UK, and internationally, including Tate Modern, The Barbican, The Lowry, The V&A, ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica and The Louvre. hompson and UBERMORGEN were recipients of the Lumen Prize Gold Award 2021 for the short film UNINVITED. She has been called "the new Big Brother" (Vogue) and "a contemporary Jacques Cousteau" (Bob & Roberta Smith). Her work is included in the V&A Museum National Collection.

    UBERMORGEN (AT/CH/US) is an artist duo founded in 1995. Autistic actionist lizvlx and pragmatic visionary Hans Bernhard are net.art pioneers and media hackers widely recognized for their high-risk research into data & matter, conceptual art, and polarising social experiments. They reached a global audience of 500 million while challenging the FBI, CIA, and NSA during the US presidential election. They have worked with pixels, software and AI. In 2021, Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN started working on UNINVITED, a short film and NFTs on CCTV, AI and horror. Other latest projects include biennial.ai - The Next Biennial will be curated by a Machine (commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial & the Whitney Museum of American Art) and the NFT series Cerebelle.

  • Terence Broad is an artist and researcher based in Newcastle Upon Tyne (UK). He has a research-led practice exploring new methodologies for computational image making. Since 2015 he has been making art using machine learning, engaging with themes of replication, simulation and representation. His research explores new methods that allow for the manipulation of ‘black-box’ AI models, and other strategies for uncovering the latent aesthetic possibilities of generative AI systems. His practice is a process of humanising technology and giving rise to the possibility for a subjective machine.Broad’s work has been exhibited internationally, at venues such as: The Whitney Museum of American Art (2016), The Barbican (2017), Ars Electronica (2017), and The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (2018). He has been awarded an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica (2017) and has won the ICCV Grand Prize for Computer Vision Art (2019).

  • Mathematician and Senior Programmer: Stephen’s background was mainly at IBM, working at the UK Scientific Centre in Peterlee (relational database research) (1971-1979) and Winchester (1981-1993). Stephen’s work at IBM UKSC in Winchester began with molecular graphics and other applications of scientific visualization. This led to collaboration with William Latham on Computer Art and creation of the form synthesis program (FormGrow) and associated subjective user interface (Mutator) a collaboration that ran through the late 80s and early 90s.

    From 1993 Stephen worked finally at IBM Hursley on the MQSeries (1993-2007) where he was responsible for the concepts and initial design of MQSeries Message Broker (now IBM Integration Bus). He has authored over 80 patents whilst he was at IBM.

    In 2009 Stephen became a Visiting Professor, at Goldsmiths and restarted his long term collaboration with William Latham on the Mutator Project which had lain dormant for over 12 years, which they would then take into VR a few years later. Stephen also worked with Prof Frederic Fol Leymarie taking the Mutator VR technology and approach into a range of scientific visualisation domains including DNA and RNA visualisatuon and The Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine on the FoldSynth and CSynth projects, in addition to the Protein Docking Project with Imperial Collage and the visualisation of 3D Viruses in VR working with the York University Biology Group. He is co-author with William Latham of the 1992 book Evolutionary Art and Computing published by The Academic Press.

    Peter Todd is an interdisciplinary practitioner, working mostly through the medium of code to produce interactive real-time graphics and sound. He has a lifelong interest in games, which he sees as maturing into a defining art form of the present era. Peter has been working extensively with artist William Latham, implementing generative sound and associated code infrastructure, as well as aspects of the user interface and graphics, for his recent “Mutator 1+2” installations. He has an ongoing involvement with the science/art project FoldSynth, previously in collaboration with Imperial College. He has carried our contract software development work for The Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (Under Prof Steve Taylor) for the past three years on a range of molecular visualisation projects.

    He also works on personal interactive art and gaming related projects. Peter graduated from Goldsmiths MSc Arts Computing. He has taught on the Goldsmiths Arts Computing Degree courses.

    William Latham is well known for his pioneering Organic Computer Art created in the late eighties and early nineties whilst a Research Fellow at IBM in Winchester. His book “Evolutionary Art and Computers” on interactive evolutionary art covering the period at IBM is cited as a leading publication in this domain.

    From 1993 for thirteen years, initially he worked in Rave Music video production, album cover design and visual stage design and then moved into computer games development leading two development studios games published by Universal Studios, Virgin Interactive and Konami.

    In 2007 he became a Professor in Computing at Goldsmiths University of London. From 2016 his Mutator VR Art Experience developed with long term collaborator Stephen Todd, with Lance Putnam and Peter Todd has been exhibited to much acclaim at museums and galleries in Linz, Shanghai, Brussels, Kyoto, Venice, Dusseldorf, London and in St. Petersburg (linked to The Hermitage Museum) and Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

    William is an Honorary Research Fellow at The Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL and has a BA from Oxford University and an MA from The Royal College of Art.

  • Bobby Zhaocheng Xiong (1998 b.China) is a multimedia artist doing his MFA at CompArts, Goldsmiths. His works grow from his identity and passion for metaphysics, religion and the universe, expressed through installation, performance and graphics, reflecting the speculative contemporary social reality and thought on humanity. The chaos of home geography and learning background makes his works varied in themes but rationalistic in forms because of his emotional estrangement. He is an alumnus of Donghua University and the RCA and has works shown in the exhibitions HOME | AWAY and CONNECTED: LOST & FOUND in London.

  • After completing his PhD in Computer Science at Goldsmiths, Pierre-Francois Gerard founded Metaxu Studio, an architectural design practice focused on the creation and production of online immersive experiences and virtual worlds.

    More recently, with his co-founder and CEO Simon Purkis CEng (10 years entrepreneur in gaming business and artist partnerships), they’ve started Kinetic Art Labs, a VR design studio bringing together cutting-edge kinetic modelling, contemporary art and room-scale interactions.

Creative Machine Symposium Exhibition :
An Interrogation of AI Creativity 

AI art is a journey of artistic expression and technological exploration combined. Artists working with artificial intelligence (AI) are simultaneously pushing the boundaries of AI creativity and interrogating the technologies of AI itself.  

The new generation of AI art is created by deep learning methods such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to generate images through the input of data and implementation of training sets, through which AI systems can feasibly transcend human capacity in terms of scale and productivity, such as Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model which can be trained on millions of images in a short period of time to produce an aesthetically pleasing artefact, despite the cost of the bypassing of human context and critical positioning through the AI generative process. Traditionally an artwork is created within a wider socio-political, cultural, or theoretical context, and the artist’s situation, critical engagement or emotional response contribute to the meaning, and ultimately public reading of the final work itself. AI art is often cast as reductive as it is constrained to omit these dimensions when relying solely on algorithms and data to produce images. 

The Cognitive Scientist Margret Boden categorizes three types of AI creativity: combinational, exploratory, and transformational, which referred to analogical ideas, novel ideas from a predefined conceptual system and unexpected ideas from a transformational new structure, respectively. 

Boden believes the present models of AI creativity largely focus on exploratory. The reason that AI creativity has not yet reached the transformational stage is perhaps due to the limits of the current technology, such as the difficulty of automating evaluation. (1)

However, the scope of Human-Machine collaboration moves beyond these categorisations to critically examine AI art from the perspective of creative agency.  Even if the AI system itself could evaluate the new construction of a system, and hence demonstrate its transformational creativity when human subjectivity is partially moved away in favour of the AI system itself, two questions emerge: Is the AI intelligent enough to embody artistic creative vision and desire to express? Where do artists position their agency when collaborating with the logics of the machine language?

This reflection on the creative agency debate, may fundamentally change our perception of the way in which art is defined, produced, consumed, and distributed. Cultural policy scholar Hye-Kyung Lee maintains that AI art democratises artistic practice  from an economic and technological perspective thanks to the convenience and democratization of AI technologies, but at the same time dehumanizes our understanding of AI creativity when, as she puts it, “AI dissociates creativity from human agency”. (2) This democratisation of access and popular use of AI technologies in the production of images and artworks forms the backdrop for the related debate around how artists can now define their work amongst a growing plethora of AI produced creative content which circulates throughout the digital commons.

This exhibition presents artworks of twelve artists and collectives including Andy Lomas, Anna Ridler, Ao Lei, Entangled Others Studio, Daniel Berio, Jake Elwes, Libby Heaney, Memo Akten, Nye Thompson & Ubermorgen (2020) , Terence Broad, Yajuan Han, Lance Putnam and Team Mutator: William Latham, Stephen Todd and Peter Todd, who explore these tensions in current AI creativity milieu from different perspectives.

Na An , Lead Curator. 

1. Margaret Boden: Artificial Intelligence Volume 103, Issue1-2, August 1998, Pages 347-356
2. Hye-Kyung Lee: Media, culture & society, 2022, Vol.44 (3), p.601-612

LGO1
12:00 — 12:15 / Memo Atken & Libby Heany
15:45 — 15:55 / Jake Elwes
17:05 — 17:20 / Yajuan Han & Nye Thompson

19:00 / Full reel continues throughout night.

Atrium Space
1. Anna Ridler, Mosaic virus
2. Terence Broad,  (un)stable equilibrium
3. Entangled Others, Sediment Nodes
4. Alexandra Reben AI, text based GTP3 paintings
5. Andy Lomas Sensitivity and Stimulation
6. Daniel Berio, Graffitizer 2
7. Mutator team (William Latham, Stephen Todd & Peter Todd). MutatorKinect Physics. 2020-2022
8. Ao Lei, Radium 镭
9. Flo Yuting Zhu, I wont pack lightly for my trip to Mars
10. Max Jala p.AI.N 2022

* throughout day and night

LG02
18:45 / Harmonic Infinity (Lance Putnam and William Latham) to show through out the night and during lunch break.

Exhibition Screenings

Meet the Curators

  • Lead Curator

    Na An is a PhD student in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths College,University of London, researching curatorial theory for computational art. She completed an MA in Culture,Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins, UAL , and MA in Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She has involved curating an archive exhibition for Four Corners/Camerawork; and an online immersive exhibition as part of the Logan Symposium 2020 hosted by The Center For Investigative Journalism (CIJ).

  • AI Competition Lead

    Rachel Falconer is a digital art curator, researcher, writer and educator operating at the critical intersections of contemporary art practice, feminist technoscience, emergent technologies, civic data infrastructures and networked culture.

    She is Head of Digital Arts Computing BSc and a Lecturer in the Department of Computing. Drawing on her sustained interest in networked art practice and alternative curatorial strategies to inform her systems-based practice, Rachel has conceived and delivered multi-scale interdisciplinary public programming, alternative exhibition models and innovative public research platforms spanning a diversity of critical modes of engagement with technology. She has curated and conceived exhibitions and artist residencies which engage with radical logics and politics of distributed audiences and exhibition modelling, and is dedicated to the critical investigation of the complex relationship between network apparatus and the materiality of technological/social behaviours.

  • Associate Curator

    Isabella Blue Paterson is currently studying for her BSc in Digital Arts Computing at Goldsmiths, whilst also following her passion for curating by involving herself in exhibition planning and organising.

    Her Instagram- @Isabellablueart