Member Profile: Paul Brown
1. What do you do, and how long have you been doing it?
I’m an artist who has specialized in art, science and technology since the 1960s and in computational and generative art since the early 1970s. I am known as a pioneer of Artificial-Life – A-Life – based art although my primary interest is in procedures: Systems Art and Art Concret in contrast to the anthropomorphic interpretations normally associated with A-Life.
2. What was your first job?
I worked as a fitter’s mate in a large steelworks. The work was dangerous, sometimes clad in asbestos suits under rails of red-hot steel in the rolling mill, so it paid very well. It enabled me to save money quickly so I could later support myself and pursue my art career.
3. Where did you complete your formal education?
The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK from 1977 to 79. It was a two-year postgraduate studio program offered by the Experimental and Computing Department – or EXP – which had its own Data General Nova 2 minicomputer as well as offering access to the many other digital systems within the University of London including the Control Data Corp. computers at its Supercomputer Centre. Several of my principal mentors – Harold Cohen, Ernest Edmonds and Edward Ihnatowicz – were regular visitors and became good friends.
4. How did you first get involved with ACM SIGGRAPH?
I was working in The Netherlands where I was developing software for one of the first Graphic Design workstations that was eventually marketed as the Aesthedes. I needed to know more about b-splines and my employer paid for me to attend the workshops held by Ed Catmull and others at SIGGRAPH 1981 in Dallas Texas. That was the year that the first Art Show was held and an artist’s Birds of a Feather meeting was convened where I was astonished to discover so many other creatives who were working in the computational meta-medium.
5. What is your favorite memory of a SIGGRAPH conference?
Loren and Rachel Carpenter’s showed their Experiment aka Pong at the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre in 1991. Everyone in the audience got a paddle with reflectors either side. They were asked to hold up the paddle and rotate it so one side or the other faced the rear of the auditorium where there was a beam-split laser, camera and real-time image processing system. The audience were then invited to solve tasks displayed on the auditorium screen like play Pong or draw a circle. It was an astounding demonstration of the power of distributed AI using a very large colony of agents. Each agent can only perform a simple task and is only aware of a few other agents in their local vicinity. Nevertheless, the colony as a whole can perform complex tasks efficiently and quickly. The circle we drew converged in seconds – watching it made my hair stand on end!
6. Describe a project that you would like to share with the ACM SIGGRAPH community.
I discovered John Conway’s Game of Life in 1969 when Martin Gardiner described it in his Scientific American column Mathematical Games. It’s a cellular automaton with relatively simple rules that can nevertheless exhibit complex, life-like behavior. I was intrigued and when I was learning to program computers it was an obvious subject for a coding exercise. By the mid 1970s I had developed a process that used a variety of cellular automata agents I designed to control the behavior of tiling matrices in real-time, generative, abstract animations. I have described this process as the Geometric Sublime and it has been the focus of my art practice ever since: using a colony of agents to navigate very large permutative domains in novel ways.
7. If you could have dinner with one living or non-living person, who would it be and why?
George Spencer Brown (1923-2016) was a British School philosopher who created a boundary grammar he called Laws of Form. It consists of only two primitive marks/operators – a division and a crossing. Using the grammar Spencer Brown was able to derive the primitives of logic and was able to create a bridge between boundary, logic, mathematics and time. The work had a significant influence on many disciplines (including, for example, Maturana and Varela and their concept of Autopoiesis and computer graphics pioneer Dick Shoup who created Superpaint in 1973 at Xerox Parc). For me it became of powerful construct in my ongoing examination of surface.
8. What is something most people don’t know about you?
Much of my work in A-Life and AI has been motivated by my early experiments with psychedelics and explorations of my own consciousness in the late 1960s and early 70s. I remember waking up after a particularly profound acid trip and realizing that I had to learn more about computers and digital systems because they were the only portal I was aware of that could enable me to understand the concept of mind and cognitive processes.
9. From which single individual have you learned the most in your life? What did they teach you?
Fu Hsi was the legendary discoverer of the whole and broken lines that compose the eight trigrams of the I Ching or Book of Changes, one of the world’s oldest books. In my studies and writings, I have explored the book and believe it is a generative system – a symbolic cosmology – that first appeared almost four millennia ago. The book demonstrates an emergent system that uses permutations of the two basic principles –Yin and Yang – to build a system that describes the universe, its evolution and destiny. It can also be interrogated as an oracle – divining the current time of the consultation.
10. Is there someone in particular who has influenced your decision to work with ACM SIGGRAPH?
I first met Patric Prince when my work was included in the 1986 SIGGRAPH Art Show which she chaired. She introduced me to her partner Bob Holzman and we all became close friends. For a while my partner and I were neighbors in Altadena and we would often house-sit for them whilst they were travelling. At their parties and dinners, I met many of the SIGGRAPH community including pioneers like Jim Blinn and David Em. Later I was honored to be able to help arrange the donation of Patric’s significant archive of computer arts and memorabilia to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
11. What can you point to in your career as your proudest moment?
When I was awarded the 2023 ACM/SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Digital Arts. What else can I say!