Paul Brown was inspired to work with computers after visiting the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity in 1968 and specialized in generative art in the late 1970s. He has participated in major shows and since 2015 has continued developing his artistic practice in collaboration with his son Daniel Brown.
Website of Paul Brown:
www.paul-brown.com
London (UK), 1947
Paul Brown graduated from the Manchester College of Art & Design in 1968, obtained a BA in Fine Art from the Faculty of Art & Design, Liverpool Polytechnic, in 1977, and an HDFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, in 1979. Inspired to work with computers after visiting the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA in 1968, he specialized in computational and generative art during this formative years, exhibiting his artworks in several galleries in the UK, and participating in a group exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1980. He also created large-scale lighting works for musicians and performance groups, such as Meredith Monk and Pink Floyd. In 1984 he was the founding head of the United Kingdom’s National Centre for Computer Aided Art and Design, and in 1994 he returned to Australia after a two-year appointment as Professor of Art and Technology at Mississippi State University to head Griffith University’s Multimedia Unit. In 1996 he was the founding Adjunct Professor of Communication Design at Queensland University of Technology. From 1992 to 1999 he edited fineArt forum, one of the Internet’s longest established art ‘zines and from 1997-99 he was Chair of the Management Board of the Australian Network for Art Technology-ANAT. In 2005 he was elected Chair of the Computer Arts Society (CAS) and served in this position again from 2008-10 and is moderator of the DASH (Digital ArtS Histories) and CAS e-lists. From 2002-05 he was a visiting fellow in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he worked on the CACHe (Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc…) project and since 2005 he has been a visiting professor and artist-in-residence at the CCNR, Dept.of Informatics at the University of Sussex. From 2010 to 2012 he was a Synapse artist-in-residence at the Centre for Intelligent System Research, Deakin University in Geelong, Australia.
He has participated in shows at major international venues like the TATE, Victoria & Albert and ICA in the UK; the Adelaide Festival; ARCO in Spain, the Substation in Singapore and several editions of ACM SIGGRAPH. His work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, Russia and the USA. He has written extensively about generative art and the history of computer and is the author of Electronic and Network Publishing: A Creators Guide to the Electronic Frontier (Eurographics, 1995) and co-editor of White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Arts 1960 –1980: An historical and critical analysis (MIT Press, 2009).
Currently he continues to exhibit his work in collaboration with his son Daniel Brown as the artists duo Brown & Son, Purveyors of digital images since 1968. They had their first show, Art That Makes Itself, at the Watermans Arts Centre in Brentford, West London in 2015.