Paul Brown — Early systems-based plotter works

1974

Artists: Paul Brown · Year: 1974 · Medium: Plotter drawings and later digital prints based on cellular-automaton and tiling algorithms · Substrate: Early UK mainframes at University of London; later personal computers; custom algorithms in BASIC and C · Place: London, UK / later Australia · Institution: Slade School of Fine Art (later University of the Arts London) Paul Brown began working with computer-based systems at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1974, and he has continued a coherent generative practice for more than fifty years. His early work explored cellular-automaton-generated tilings — patterns produced by simple local rules that produced visually complex global structures — executed on plotter hardware at the University of London. The work is in direct dialogue with Stuttgart-school plotter practice but adds a specifically British sensibility: more interested in tiling and pattern than in statistical disorder, with attention to what patterns do across large surfaces. Brown was also institutionally central to the UK computer-art scene. He founded one of the earliest computer-art programs at the Slade, served as a consultant to the Computer Arts Society, wrote widely on the field, and — later, after moving to Australia in 1998 — continued to publish scholarly work on the history and practice of generative art. His 2008 book White Heat Cold Logic, co-edited with Charlie Gere and others, is one of the most comprehensive histories of UK computer art. Brown's own output spans five decades. His later NFT releases have included work derived from his earliest algorithms, bringing the 1970s systems into the 2020s generative-art market. He remains active. He is based in Australia. Lore Brown's Slade period in the mid-1970s overlapped with the Computer Arts Society's institutional consolidation under Alan Sutcliffe and John Lansdown. His subsequent teaching at Mississippi State and at Queensland College of Art shaped multiple generations of computer artists in the UK and Australia. His 2008 White Heat Cold Logic (MIT Press) remains the single best history of UK computer art before 2000. Sources • Brown, Paul — personal archive at paul-brown.com • Brown, Paul; Gere, Charlie; Lambert, Nicholas; Mason, Catherine (eds.) — White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960–1980 (MIT Press, 2008) • Slade School of Fine Art — computer-art program records