The line up of digital artists who will be exhibiting and talking about their work at Creative Machine Oxford has been announced

Creative Machine Oxford, which takes place on Tuesday 30th May, is a prestigious showcase of the latest creative and research applications of artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality and robotics. It is being hosted in Oxford for the first time this year. The symposium has been developed by Goldsmiths, University of London, in partnership with Jesus College Oxford, and will be held in the College’s new Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub. The one-day event is generously supported by the Alan Turing Institute.

Bringing together invited speakers from the worlds of computing, AI, art, robotics, and virtual and augmented reality, the symposium will address topics such as ‘Can AI be creative?’, ‘AI and visualisation for scientific discovery’, using ‘AI for Music’ and ‘Human intelligence: The workings of the Human Brain’. Across the day there will be a range of talks by leading experts from globally-recognised organisations and institutes, including Spotify, King.com, Oxford Computational Neurosciences, MIT Technology Review, Nuffield Clinical Neurosciences, Spotify, the Victoria and Albert Museum and UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Amongst the line up of prestigious digital artists who will be exhibiting, and speaking about their work and research, are:

 

Sougwen Chung – a digital artist and researcher based in London and New York, whose work explores the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems. Chung’s groundbreaking work MEMORY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 2) is the first AI model to be collected by a major institution, in the permanent collection of the V&A.

 

Anna Ridler – a British artist and researcher who has been exhibited widely, and was listed by Artnet as one of nine pioneering artists exploring AI’s creative potential.

 

Andy Lomas – an Emmy award-winning computational artist, mathematician and supervisor of computer generated effects. Inspired by the work of Alan Turing, D’Arcy Thompson and Ernst Haeckel, his art work explores how complex forms can be created emergently by simulating biological processes.

 

Ira Greenberg – a US-based painter, 2D/3D animator, digital designer, author and Professor of Art and Computer Science at the Meadows school of Art, SMU, who has exhibited his work, consulted with industry and lectured widely throughout his career.

 

Memo Atken – a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, musician and computer scientist from Istanbul, who works with emerging technologies and computation as a medium, to create images, sounds, films, and large scale responsive installations and performances.

Also featuring are Maxim Zhestkov, Terence Broad, Lev Manovich, Entangled Others, Parashkev Nachev, William Latham, Stephen & Peter Todd (Mutator), Lance Putnam, Patrick Tresset and Siobhán Walker.

The full event programme, and artist and speaker list can be found on the CMO symposium website here.

Creative Machine Oxford will also showcase demonstrations of some of the latest creative AI technologies, and Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Jesus College Principal and Professorial Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Oxford, will host a keynote panel discussion exploring the impact and implications to society of AI in the 21^st century.

About Creative Machine

Goldsmiths’ first Creative Machine event was held in its Department of Computing in 2014 and took the form of an art exhibition that explored the intersection between human and machine creativity, asking the question ‘Could a machine replace the human artist, and if not, could the machine be an effective creative partner to the artist?’ This question has remained at the core of each Creative Machine Symposium ever since. Goldsmiths’ Professor William Latham, who is a co-organiser of Creative Machine and a pioneering computer artist and games designer, explained:

“The fundamental question of whether a computer can be more creative than a human is a current and contentious topic of debate. The Creative Machine Symposium addresses this question from a range of perspectives led by experts from across computing, the arts, sciences and neurosciences. Related themes such how human / computer creative partnerships can work and AI mechanisms for discovery in science will also be explored. Secondary topics such as how do you measure human or machine creativity? will be covered along the way”.

Professor Frederic Fol Leymarie, Goldsmiths AI Creativity Computing Scientist and co-organiser, said: “Moving the Creative Machine outside London for the first time, we are delighted to be co-hosting with Jesus College with its huge academic heritage being combined with Goldsmiths’ creative computing and art for the first time.”

Sir Nigel said, “We are delighted to be hosting Creative Machine Oxford here at Jesus College, and in our new Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub. The vision for the Digital Hub is as a conduit for research, learning and public engagement in the digital age, and a venue for events that bring global academic communities together across disciplines and in collective endeavour. This year generative AI has taken the world by storm – AI systems that generate startling new content – a theme at the heart of Creative Machine Oxford. Creative Machine is a flagship conference for academics and those working in the creative industries interested in the convergence of AI and creativity, and the College is pleased to be working in collaboration with Goldsmiths on this event.”