Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has specialised in art, science & technology since the late 1960s and computational & generative art since the early 1970s. His early work included creating large-scale lighting works for musicians and performance groups (like Meredith Monk and The House, Musica Elettronica Viva, Pink Floyd, etc…). He has since established an international exhibition record and has created both permanent and temporary public artworks.
He has artwork in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in the UK, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, USA and many other public, corporate and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, Russia and the USA.
During 2000/2001 he was a New Media Arts Fellow of the Australia Council when he began 22 years as an artist-in-residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. In 2023 he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art.
My principal concern is the systematic exploration of surface and, since 1974 my main creative tool has been the computational and generative process. I have established an international reputation in this field of work and am recognised as one of the pioneers of Artificial Life or A-Life art.
My work is based on a field of computational science called Cellular Automata or CAs – part of the origins of A-life and generative AI. These are simple computational agents that can propagate themselves over time and I have been investigating their relationship to tiling and symmetry systems since the 1960s. Over the past five decades, I have applied these processes to time-based artworks, prints on paper and large-scale public artworks.
Rather than being constructed or designed, these works emerge. I look forward to a future where AI processes like the ones I create will autonomously make artworks without human intervention. The creation of such processes remains an ongoing obsession.
Two-Page Résumé and Full CV
Paul Brown at Wikipedia
Paul Brown at the Computer Arts Society
Paul Brown at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Catalogue: Process, Chance and Serendipity: Art That Makes Itself, National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC, USA, 2018
Studio International Review, Chance and Serendipity: Art That Makes Itself, National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC, USA, 2018
Studio International Review, Codigos Primordiais – Primary Codes, Oi Futuro Flamengo Gallery, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2015
Catalogue: Art That Makes Itself, Watermans, London UK, 2015
Catalogue: Retrospective 1966-2022, Computer Arts Society Gallery, London, 2023
Catalogue: Geometries of the Sublime, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 2011
Links to awards
V&A Pattern: Digital Pioneers by Honor Beddard and Doug Dodds
Links to books
Links to reviews
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