Image by boredomresearch. Courtesy of [DAM]Berlin/Cologne.

INTUITION AND INGENUITY - ARTISTS' TALK

21 FEBRUARY 2012
BRIGHTON

ARTISTS BOREDOMRESEARCH AND ALEX MAY TALK ABOUT TURING'S INFLUENCE ON THEIR PRACTICE AND CO-CURATOR ANNA DUMITRIU DESCRIBES THE BACKGROUND TO THE EXHIBITION

Complementing the Intuition and Ingenuity exhibition were talks led by artists boredomresearch and Alex May, and co-curator of the exhibition Anna Dumitriu. They presented work from this fascinating exhibition inspired by Alan Turing’s life’s work.

Artists boredomresearch have a fascination with the diversity that appears in nature. Using the same computational processes scientists use to gain insight into the mechanisms by which diversity arises in biology, boredomresearch are interested in using similar techniques to create fictions of nature. In their talk, they will be speaking about their work Fragments of Lost Flight, a device which creates wing fragments generated by computational processes inspired by descriptions of Turing’s never made Turing Machine.

Alex May works with light emitting technologies, computer programming, math, power tools, and physical objects as a canvas to create hybrid collisions of images and unexpected contexts. He will discuss My Robot Companion a humanoid robot (made in collaboration with Anna Dumitriu, Dr Michael L Walters and Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn in the Adaptive Systems Group at the University of Hertfordshire), which investigates our relationship to robots and the idea of the uncanny valley. The piece strongly links to the famous ‘Turing Test’ for machine intelligence in an embodied sense.

Anna Dumitriu Co- curator of this landmark touring exhibition (produced in collaboration with Sue Gollifer and Nick Lambert) to celebrate the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth describes the process of curating the exhibition, the ideas which inspired it and the background of the other works in the show.

This an official Alan Turing Centenary event.

Date: 21 February 2012

Time: 6.30pm doors and bar, 7pm talk

Booking: This is a free event, please register your place here: http://www.eventsbot.com/events/eb573688779

Venue: Lighthouse, 28 Kensington Street, Brighton BN1 4AJ

Intuition and Ingenuity exhibition: http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/programme/intuition-and-ingenuity

Intuition and Ingenuity is part of Brighton Science Festival

It is a touring show for Alan Turing Year: http://www.turingcentenary.eu