Research artist in residence

We are pleased to announce the arrival of the School's first ever Research Artist in Residence, Richard Brown.

Richard's mission is to work with researchers in the School: to develop new interactive art pieces, based on aspects of our research; to develop an artistic policy for the new building; and to help raise funds to commission further work from a variety of artists.

Richard will spend the first months of his residency visiting each of the existing Informatics sites in turn and getting to know who's who and what's what. To start with, he will be located in Appleton Tower, in Room 3.13.

Richard has a BSc in Computers & Cybernetics and an MA in Fine Art and creates interactive artworks using multi-media technology, computer programming, electronics and interfacing. Between 1995 and 2001, Richard was a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art, where he created and exhibited three major interactive works Alembic, Biotica and the Mimetic Starfis and published the book 'Biotica: Art, Emergence and Artificial-Life'. For more detail check out http://www.mimetics.com.

And to get a further flavour of the kind of artistic work Richard is involved with, check out the following.

Richard is involved in an event in Nottingham 1-4th December http://www.radiator-festival.org
*"This three day international symposium aims to bring into focus artistic practices of live performance that make use of digital technology in the form of lens based, networked or locative media."*

He is also involved in another relevant event in Sussex, 9-10th Dec http://www.brighton.ac.uk/architecture/findingfluidform
"A two-day symposium exploring the dynamics of situated behaviour, development and learning inviting practitioners working with live systems that merge interface design, intelligent environments, performance and physical output, as well as biologists, artificial life researchers and cognitive scientists."

Richard and Jon Oberlander have just won a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation which will enable Richard to work on re-creating Pask's Ear, an analogue computer. Visit the programme web page.

Richard's email addresses are rb@mimetics.com and v1rbrown@inf.ed.ac.uk .