Imperial's Complexity and Networks group are hosting a day-long meeting on music, beauty perception and neuroscience this coming May (Wednesday 19th). With a focus on the neural correlates of creative and aesthetic processes, and the complex dynamics thereof, it's one not to miss for art-and-emergence junkies.

See the attached list of talks (PDF) for more info.

Written as part of Ada Lovelace Day 2009.

Jane Prophet is a UK-based artist whose practice explores contemporary technological processes while retaining distinctly classical referents. Loosely speaking, she could be described as a sculptor, though one whose investigative drive and spectrum of interests leads her through radically fresh terrain with each new project. Working with cutting-edge materials and practices — from CD-ROM and early net art in the 90s, through to recent explorations of fractal-based machine fabrication and stem cell dynamics — the process through which her work is produced is often equally as rich as the end product.

One of her most widely-known pieces is the pioneering online environment TechnoSphere (1995), an immersive, real-time 3D virtual world which was amongst the first major net-based artificial life simulations. Developed by her and a small team of programmers, this world constituted 16 km² of fractal-based terrain, populated by creatures designed and constructed by visitors to the website. The result was a stunningly complex ecosystem, in which the creatures could grow, eat, fight and mate, with digital DNA giving rise to a degree of evolutionary potential. Over the project's lifespan, more than 3m distinct creatures were created by over 100,000 visitors.

More recently, she has been working with a research group here at Goldsmiths, University of London on the ongoing Net Work (2005-), which takes simple models of stem cell behaviour and translates them into cellular automata: grid-like structures which portray the interactions of discrete cells. These behaviours are translated into a 100m² web of illumated fishing buoys and floated in a river or lake to create a simple but compelling public artwork, whose intention is to accessibly highlight processes of self-organisation to a wider audience.

(Trans)Plant (2008) is another large-scale public sculpture, duplicating the fractal structures of cow parsely (akin to Lindenmayer systems) in a dynamic installation which expands and contracts in the same manner as the familiar childhood push-button collapsible animals. This, like Net Work, is the product of an interdisciplinary team of designers, biomimeticists and engineers, which serves not just as a work in itself but as a document of a process.

Her adoption of new technologies is far from a case of techno-evangelism, however. Works such as The Internal Organs of a Cyborg (1995) pose questions about identity and the limits of humanity via bodily augmentation, and the potential that this has for fracturing our ideas of selfhood (see Lacan's "fragmented body"). Likewise, Decoy (2002) explores notions of beauty and artifice via synthetic landscape images, referencing the Arcadian dreams of English nature painters and the modern-day drive for atmospheric perfection via regeneration and landscaping.

In a 1998 interview, she discusses her ambivalent relationships with technology.

I'm really drawn to the technology because of the debates that it threw me into, I think, and the questions that I had to ask about what it meant in terms of authenticity of images, what it meant in terms of the physicality or the reality of an image or of a body of work.


But primarily, when I think about the work I make with new media technology I see very little difference between it (other than hopefully it's more mature) and the work I made when I worked in installation and performance when I was a student and the reason for that is that for me at the center of any piece is the idea, is the concept.

As one with an avid (and vested) interest in current tech trends, I'm always keen to explore the latest Vimeo images of bleeding-edge whizz-bang triple-mip-mapped developments. Arguably more crucial, however, as computational advancement continues to accelerate, is a critical engagement and reflection on the meaning and consequences of these technologies. This is perhaps why I find Jane Prophet's work so consistently compelling.

The Lovelace Connection

This piece was written as part of Ada Lovelace Day 2009, a drive to highlight the work of women in technology. I imagine that, even in the age of computational ultra-saturation, Lady Lovelace would be particularly thrilled at the work of Prophet and her peers in the sphere of media art: one of her most imaginative yet accurate foresights was the prediction that computers would not be restricted to the boundaries of logico-arithmetic computation, but could be used to generate new sound and images, reaching out into the realm of creative practice.

I was fortunate enough to catch the very tail-end of George Maciunas: The Dream Of Fluxus at the Baltic, Gateshead, a couple of weekends ago. It did a great job of putting Fluxus in its context, revealing a number of things that I had previously had no idea about — George Maciunas' colourblindness, for example, which perhaps goes some way to explain Fluxus' monochromatic aesthetic, and his key role in establishing the New York loft space co-ops which clearly leave their SoHo legacy to this day.

The other floors of this stunning building featured a Yoko Ono retrospective and an instance of Miranda July's unerringly sweet and genuine Learning To Love You More project. Both of these I was aware of previously; they also served to complement each other nicely. I hadn't heard, however, of A Spoken Word Exhibition, taking place at the same time. This group show was startling in its content and delivery: short textual pieces by the likes of Douglas Coupland, Lawrence Weiner, Yoko Ono herself and others, read on request by the gallery attendants dotted around the building.

It was a charming way to access a piece of work, inevitably involving an encounter with the attendant and the side-stories that this entails (one told me of the tourists incessantly photographing her as she sang one of the pieces). I enjoyed the reading of Vito Acconci's tale of conceptual Antarctic architecture, "Halley II Research Station: First Impressions & the Beginnings of a Conceptual Approach", neurotically revising plans for a structure of light.

The first reading I requested, however, was a date-specific piece by the world's favourite tender pervert Momus. He's perhaps my most-read blogger right now, so I was naturally curious to see what he'd written. I didn't expect to be greeted by just a pair of numbers: "2015 and 2058". Years, I presumed, but couldn't make any further connections.

Later investigation revealed that this was the title of an earlier blog post of his, in which he sketches predictions for the near future of 2015. Representing the dislocated title in this way serves to further fragment pieces of this digital fabric, hurling them out into the real world of flesh and speech without an obvious referrent -- a mischievous way to induce koan-like contemplation of naked morphemes.

This whole process reminded me of three things relating to Momus that I have intended to write about but failed.

1. As a festival bestowal just before Christmas, he collated and re-released his 6 early LPs on Creation Records, all free of charge in mp3 format (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). There are some gems on their - particularly some of the nostalgic jungle-influenced sounds from Timelord.

Incidentally, there's a handful of gigs forthcoming at The Dream Machine, Dulwich, featuring other early Creation artists...

2. The below film, a narrated slideshow of boring book sleeves, is one of the funniest things he has produced. Hints of Peter Greenaway and Popper/Serafinowicz.

3. Having spotted some intriguing makeshift-looking storage solutions in a couple of photos of his apartment, I have shamelessly lifted his excellent postmodern storage solution of stacked Ikea Trissa boxes. It's the storage equivalent of lego. I hope this doesn't make me a cyberstalker.

Artist and "Hartbeat" present Tony Hart has died, aged 83. He was an inspiration to countless of the current generation of artists, young and old alike.

Goodbye, Tony Hart!

So it seems that 2009 has hit the ground running with cultural happenings in S/SE London. The Goldsmiths institution of the Thursday Club, a mostly-weekly showcase for innovative new works, kicks off with two talks on sensory interfaces by Ryan Jordan and Artemis Papageorgiou (today, 15 January, free). This is followed by the first of the monthly Electronic Music Studios concerts (16 January, free), at which I'll be performing with AtomSwarm on their 8-channel diffusion system.

Also related to Goldsmiths, though taking place further north, is a 2-day show of events and performances organised by students from Goldsmiths MFA Curating and Royal College of Art Curating Masters. Contested Ground is at Project Space 176 in Chalk Farm this Saturday/Sunday (16-17 January, free). I'll be heading down with Mike and others for the series of multi platform events on Saturday, followed by the amusingly-nomenclatured "artist disco" in the evening.

Gasworks in Vauxhall, meanwhile, is staging a radiophonic intervention by the Resonance FM Radio Orchestra on Friday (15 January, free) as part of its exhibition of South London artist-inventor Felix Thorn's amazing machines. Also features the long-awaited face off between sound theorist Nicolas Collins and SuperCollider/livecoding veteran Nick Collins, described in a mailout thus:

a live coding vs. live circuit building competition with Nick Collins (Sussex University) versus Nicolas Collins (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), vying for the annual award of the "Nic(k) Collins Cup," an exquisite ceramic vessel commissioned from Devon potter Nic Collins (no relation).

Finally, Herne Hill's 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning are hosting two further events as part of their current exhibition People, Signs and Resistance (28 Jan & 11 Feb, free). Next up is an audience with Sam The Wheels, a first-generation Jamaican migrant who arrived in London in the 1950s and has since been capturing video footage of the area which should be essential viewing for those interested in local heritage — through the Brixton Riots to their legacy.

The SpACE-Net symposium was a hive of activity across numerous fields, with a diverse range of artists, researchers and techies bringing together a spectrum of ideas surrounding space and sound. A few of the projects that I was made aware of through various encounters:

COMA "promotes participation in contemporary music for musicians of all abilities". Related to the Emotional Orchestra performance at the Tate, and now the nascent all-female Madarms group.

Louise Wilson's work at Orford Ness bears a definite resonance with the photo/sound documentary gathered by Julia and me at Teufelsberg.

Study In Keith (Quicktime mov, begins with extended silence) is the first truly compelling example of live coding that I've ever seen. Stunning. By Andrew Sorenson in his Impromptu environment, inspired by the work of Keith Jarrett.