SAND LINES

About the work

‘SAND LINES’ is described by Brown as a ‘kinetic painting’ and reflects his original training as a painter. Brown began experimenting with the artistic potential of computers in the early 1970s, and in 1977 completed his computer studies, joining the Slade School of Art in the postgraduate EXPerimental & Computing Department working with other pioneers of artistic computing. Brown’s work explores the computer's potential for artificial life, developing a form of generative abstraction and using cellular automata to control symmetrical tiles in a time-based environment. The kinetic qualities of ‘SAND LINES’ capture cellular automata in constant flux. The work was created by Brown in the late 1990s on an Apple Macintosh programmed in Lingo using Macromedia Director. The CD-ROM is one iteration of a decades long project experimenting with new media formats and diverse media: images taken from these constantly evolving environments were commonly exhibited as giclee prints and the work was also ‘piped neatly onto the net’, with Whitelaw noting that its technical and aesthetic “elegance” made it particularly suitable to use this “new distribution channel” (2001).

Reflecting on his work over the last six decades, Brown explains that:

a principal concern has been the systematic exploration of surface and…since 1974 my creative assistant has been Artificial Intelligence or AI in the form of computational agents and generative processes. These should not be confused with the currently fashionable Large Language Models (like Chat GDP), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs like MidJourney) or Diffusion models. 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 in a field of computational science called Cellular Automata. These are foundational elements of A-life and generative AI – communities of simple agents that can propagate themselves over time and jointly exhibit complex and emergent behaviour: the artwork. I have been investigating their relationship to tiling and symmetry systems since the 1960s and, over the past five decades, I have applied these processes to time-based works, prints on paper and large-scale public artworks. Rather than being constructed or designed, these works emerge from their own internal processes. I look forward to a future where AI processes like the ones that I create will independently make artworks without the need for human intervention. The creation of such processes remains an ongoing obsession (2024).

References