AI artwork showcased in London and Beijing

Tate Modern and Beijing’s Taikang Art Museum will showcase the work of Professors William Latham and Frederic Fol Leymarie.

The interaction and boundaries between human and machine creativity and art have been the focus of Professor Latham and Professor Fol Leymarie's work and its outputs will be on display for the public to experience. Professor Latham is the curator and Professor Fol Leymarie is academic chair of a new exhibition of digital art opening in Beijing, and Professor Latham’s work is showcased at London’s Tate Modern as part of a Tate Late event linked to their new exhibition, Electric Dreams.

In Beijing, the Creative Machine exhibition at Taikang Art Museum explores the impact of new technologies on art. Examining the history of computational art, the exhibition looks at works from the 1950s to the 1990s, as well as displaying contemporary works at the cutting edge of technology-driven creative processes, ultimately posing the question – can a machine be creative? Alongside Professor William Latham (joint curator) and Professor Frederic Fol Leymarie (academic chair), there is involvement from former Goldsmiths students Memo Atken, Yajuan Han and Patrick Tresset, who are showing major art exhibits and installations.

A decade since its first showing at Goldsmiths in 2014, the latest Beijing exhibition cements computational art’s place firmly in discussions around creativity and technological advances. Before the Beijing show the last Creative Machine exhibition was held at the University of Oxford in 2023.

In London, Tate Modern will feature the first ever UK showing of Latham’s Human Mutator. Viewers’ movements are captured and used to generate 3D organic forms. The work brings together the actions of the human viewer with those of the machine, forming a piece that mutates in response to movement, and through this process reflects on the key question of how we interact with computers to create.

Participants will also enter computer generated worlds through Mutator VR’s Vortex, created in collaboration with composer and researcher, Dr Lance Putnam. As the forms and images of the vortex are shaped by the participants themselves, each entry into Vortex is unique, demonstrating the collaboration between computer generated forms and human creativity. These and other exhibits on display reflect Professor Latham's pioneering role in computational art as well as his trailblazing work in the space.

At the Tate Lates event, Professor Fol Leymarie and Professor Michael Newman will give a talk on Robotics and Drawing. Professor Frederic Fol Leymarie is currently leading a research project in collaboration with Konstanz University in Germany - Embodied agents in contemporary visual art (EACVA): how robotics and artificial intelligence could influence creativity. The project addresses themes such as how embodying image generation systems into a robot or machine impacts the way creativity and authorship are perceived, and how this affects perceptions of the resulting product, as well as to what extent robotic systems could act as extensions of artists’ own body capacities. Earlier this year, the Artists in Residence programme was kickstarted with a two-day workshop held at Goldsmiths and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Professor Latham was one of the first UK artists to create computer art in the 1980s, and since this time debate and curiosity around digital art and especially artificial intelligence (AI) has continued to grow.