Creative Simulations

This book is centred on the practitioner-led Computer Arts Society founded in 1969 and formed to address creative computation in all the arts – performance, poetry, text, sound, sculpture and graphics. The objectives and achievements of the Computer Arts Society are presented as realised through their members and exhibitions to the mid-1970s. The Society’s co-founder is Dr George Mallen, a pioneer of cybernetic systems and cultural applications of computing. Creative Simulations contains new research including Mallen’s early work with cybernetician Gordon Pask, whose concepts of interdisciplinarity were influential on the ground-breaking Ecogame (1970). Led by Mallen, Ecogame was a collaborative Computer Arts Society project, an early embodiment of computer technology into art and the first multi-media interactive gaming system in the UK. Pask’s influence in Mallen’s subsequent role at the Royal College of Art where he instigated the first computer lab facilities for artists, is examined. A recently discovered lecture given by Mallen is transcribed, along with reproduction of historic texts by Stephen Willats and John Lansdown (two of his colleagues), which add context to this history of interdisciplinary artistic innovation in the digital realm. Illustrations include art works, ephemera, exhibition posters and installations, preparatory drawings, computing equipment and associated flow charts and diagrams, many appearing here in print for the first time.