Explorations in Art and Technology by Linda Candy

Explorations in Art and Technology by Linda Candy

This edition revises the original core chapters and adds 15 contributions from artists who shed new light on the progress made in the early decades of the 21^st Century.

Explorations in Art and Technology is about the creative process in action, seen through the eyes of practitioners and researchers. It brings together artists, technologists and researchers who have written about emerging correspondences between virtual and physical worlds, between human and machine processes, between abstract concepts and their physical realizations, between music and visualization and between film and painting. It is a story of new visions and new forms.

First published in 2002, this revised edition updates much of the original material and adds contributions from fifteen artists who shed new light on the progress that has been made in the early decades of the 21^st Century. The book describes how artists have conceived and made novel digitalworks from a historical perspective and how inter-disciplinary research has had a profound effect on the take up of digital technology in the wider community. It shows that a practice-based action research approach to case studies of artist residencies enabled art and technology practitioners to take a significant role in the research and explores the nature of collaboration in this context. What emerges is a compelling story of inspirational creative work in a field that is transforming traditional norms in both art and technology.

Ernest Edmonds is a pioneer computer artist and HCI innovator for whom combing creative arts practice with creative technologies has been a life-long pursuit. In 2017 he won both the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award for Practice in Human-Computer Interaction and the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. He is Chairman of the Board of ISEA International, whose main activity is the annual International Symposium on Electronic Art that began in 1988.

Ernest was born in London in 1942 and, having started at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University--DMU), he then worked at Loughborough University and the University of Technology, Sydney, before returning to DMU as Professor of Computational Art and Director of the Institute of Creative Technologies.

Ernest's art was already computer based before 1970, and his future vision was to transform user participation with interactive and distributed works. From that time he began a quest to transform user interface design to an adaptive and iterative process and by 1973 he had made HCI at Leicester Polytechnic a priority research area. From this work came some of the first published articles about interactive art (1970), iterative design methods (1974), user interface architectures (1982), and the support of creativity (1989). His books include The Separable User Interface (Academic Press), Explorations in Art and Technology (Springer), and Interacting: Art, Research and the Creative Practitioner (Libri), the last two co-authored with Linda Candy. A second revised edition Explorations is in press. In 1993, he co-founded the Creativity & Cognition conference series, a SIGCHI sponsored event since 1999. He is an Honorary Editor of Leonardo and Editor-in-Chief of Springer's Cultural Computing book series.

Over the last 50 years, Ernest has exhibited his artwork across the globe. In recent years, he has shown in Venice, Leicester, Denver, Beijing, Shanghai, and Rio de Janerio. He has previously shown in, for example, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Moscow, Riga, Rotterdam, Berlin, and Washington DC. The Victoria and Albert Museum London collects his art and archives. His work was recently described in the book by Francesca Franco, Generative Systems Art: The Work of Ernest Edmonds (Routledge, 2017).