William Latham

I first met William Latham at the Royal College of Art in 1984, where our trajectories intersected – Latham from art and myself from computing. Latham was undertaking a Henry Moore scholarship at the RCA, and our mutual interests in art and computing resulted in some interesting collaborations. Latham’s drawing and sculptural work of that period focussed on what he called ‘the evolution of form.’ He made very large drawings that were effectively evolutionary family trees of forms, usually starting with simple shapes such as horns and cones. Some of these drawings are in the collection of the Henry Moore Institute and also in other collections round the world, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. At that time the evolutionary process lived in Latham’s fertile imagination, one that responded – like with so many thinkers in the 20th century – to our increasing awareness of the forces of evolution, as brought to popular understanding through books like ‘The Selfish Gene’ by Richard Dawkins. Latham’s first use of computers, including my own ‘Sculptor’ system, was to make visualisations of the 3D forms from his sculptures and drawings, but, after joining IBM at Winchester as a Research Fellow, he was able to use computer algorithms to programme the evolutionary process itself. The art that came out of this, either as large photographic prints, or as computer-animated films, remains a unique body of work in the history of art and computers. They have been shown round the world at galleries and screenings, and have been the subject of many newspaper and journal articles. He has had solo shows at Natural History Museum and the Connaught Brown Galleries in London, the Arnolfini in Bristol, the ‘O’ Museum in Tokyo, and in galleries and museums in the US, Germany, France and Australia.
Latham retains his fine art interests alongside his more commercial projects of the last few years. These are channelled through his company ‘Computer Artworks’ which has produced a version of his evolutionary art system for the personal computer, and also music videos, album covers, and game versions of Hollywood blockbusters, including his latest project ‘The Thing’. He now employs over 60 people, many of them with fine art backgrounds, and this commercial basis allows for the development of an experimental division at the crossover of art and Artificial Intelligence. The project to create the gameplay and imagery for the game version of Carpenter’s classic sci-fi film ‘The Thing’ parallels the involvement of surrealist artist Giger with the design in the film ‘Alien’ and its sequels. 
The questions raised by Latham’s evolutionary art have been explored by a new generation of computer scientists and artists. One of the most difficult issues in the parallel between art and life lies in the ‘selection criteria.’ A computer can take a set of rules for generating an image, each of which can be mixed in a certain proportion with the others, and produce a new ‘generation’ of image ‘offspring.’ These can breed, using the principles of biological heredity, including a certain degree of mutation, resulting in a new generation. What are hard to automate in an aesthetic environment are the criteria for successful ‘genes,’ that is the rules for image-generation, where success is the equivalent to survival in the natural world. New developments in computing are beginning to yield answers based for example on a community of artificial ‘critics’ who are programmed to appreciate the virtual images, and who tend to polarise into cliques (this research is by Rob Saunders and John Gero at the University of Sidney). These ideas may seem bizarre or even disturbing to some traditionalists, but the art-science collaborations entered into by pioneers such as Latham push at the boundaries of art. The notion that art is as much about process as it is about product was originally revolutionary but commonplace at the time of Latham’s early drawings. The work of Latham and other evolutionary artists raise new challenges that may in turn create the commonplaces of future art production and criticism.
Latham has also contributed to the broader field of computer sculpture. We now have in the UK a considerable group of artists working in this way, with a lineage going back to experiments by such sculptors as the late Robert Mallary in the US. Mallary used the computer to design pieces that were then physically constructed from contour slices in wood, stone and composites. Keith Brown from Manchester Metropolitan University co-ordinates the British group (called Fine Art Sculptors and Technology), which demonstrates a wide range of innovation in computers and sculpture. Brown has been working on new visualisation techniques for sculpture that enables a computer system to project a three-dimensional image into space with full parallax. In the practice of computer sculpture there is no doubt however that Latham has made a very significant contribution, and one which is being extended by a new generation of practitioners.