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

Relationship status: married

College / University: University College London

Program: Slade School of Fine Art

Graduation: 1 May 1979

Member type: Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?: Conceptual, Digital, Drawing, Installation, Painting, Sculpture, Video

I am...: an artist and writer who has specialised in art, science & technology since the late 1960s and in computational & generative art since the mid 1970s. My international exhibition record spans four decades and includes the creation of both permanent and temporary public artworks. I have participated in shows at major venues like the TATE, Victoria & Albert and ICA in the UK; the Adelaide Festival; ARCO in Spain and the Venice Biennale. His work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, Russia and the USA.

In 1984 I was the founding head of the United Kingdom's National Centre for Computer Aided Art and Design and in 1994 I returned to Australia after a two-year appointment as Professor of Art and Technology at Mississippi State University to head Griffith University’s Multimedia Unit. In 1996 was the founding Adjunct Professor of Communication Design at Queensland University of Technology.

From 1997-99 I was Chair of the Management Board of the Australian Network for Art Technology and I am a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards for LEA, the e-journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (MIT Press), and the journal Digital Creativity (Routledge). From 1992 to 1999 I edited fineArt forum, one of the Internet's longest established art 'zines and he is currently Chair of the international Computer Arts Society (CAS) and moderator of the DASH (Digital ArtS Histories) and CAS e-lists.

In 1996 I won the Fremantle Print Award and during 2000/2001 I was a New Media Arts Fellow of the Australia Council when I spent 2000 as artist-in-residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR) at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. From 2002-05 I was a visiting fellow in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck College, University of London, where I worked on the CACHe (Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc...) project and I am currently (2005-08) visiting professor and artist-in-residence at the CCNR, University of Sussex where he is working on a project to evolve robots that can draw.

About my artwork: During my 35-year career as an artist my principal concern has been the systematic exploration of surface. Since 1974 my main tool has been the computational and generative process. I have established a significant international reputation in this field of work and was recently described by Mitchell Whitelaw as… one of the … pioneers of a-life art (Metacreation - Art and Artificial Life, MIT Press, 2004, pp.146, 148-152).

My work is based in a field of computational science called Cellular Automata or CA’s. These are simple systems that can propagate themselves over time. CA’s are part of the origins of the discipline known as Artificial Life or A-life. I have been interested in CA’s and their relationship to tiling and symmetry systems since the 1960's. Over the past 30 years I have applied these processes to time-based artworks, prints on paper and large-scale 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 "evolve". 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.

An in depth description of my working methods is contained my chapter Stepping Stones in the Mist in the book Creative Evolutionary Systems edited by Peter J. Bentley and David W. Corne, Morgan Kaufman (August 2001) and which is also on my website:

http://www.paul-brown.com/WORDS/STEPPING.HTM