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Technical Keynote Lecture

Prof. Margaret Boden (University of Sussex)

Can Evolutionary Art Provide Radical Novelty?

Abstract

Scepticism about computer art is often rooted in claims that computers cannot create anything new. Even evolutionary art is attacked on these grounds. Critics say that everything the computer produces, although unforeseeable, must lie within the computational potential of the original program - including the GAs. No mutations can happen except via those GAs. Therefore, they say, no radically new artworks can be generated. This is true for isolated, 'locked-in' evo-art systems, but if there is some link to the outside world (whether physical or virtual), then radical novelties may occur.

Margaret A. Boden OBE FBA ScD is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex. She holds degrees in medical sciences, philosophy, and psychology (including a Cambridge ScD and a Harvard PhD), and three honorary Doctorates. Her writing has been translated into 20 foreign languages, and she has lectured around the world.

Her latest books are "The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms" (2nd edn., expanded; Routledge 2004); "Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science" (2 vols., O.U.P. 2006): and "Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise" (O.U.P. 2010). A volume on computer art, co-authored with Ernest Edmonds, is in preparation (for Leonardo/MIT Press).

She has two children and four grandchildren, and lives in Brighton.