There are a couple of prints of my work in the CAS: Leicester Computer Art Pioneers exhibition at Phoenix Leicester from November 2nd 2023 to January 30th 2024. The curator, Sean Clark, invited me to submit two pieces – one from the period when I was living in Leicester while I was working at the Loughborough University of Technology Computer-Human Interface Research Centre (LUTCHI) and studying for a PhD, and one recent piece. He would take the files I sent to him and produce prints for the show.

For the first piece I chose to combine two images that had been generated using the version of Smallworld that I was using on a Silicon Graphics IRIS workstation that I had borrowed from the centre to use in the shared house I lived in on Humberstone Road. When working on what came to be Prospero and Caliban I seem to remember listening to a radio broadcast of The Tempest. When searching online to find a record of the BBC broadcasting however I couldn’t find a reference to it, so perhaps my memory is playing tricks.

Nevertheless for the second piece I decided to make an image using my current iteration of the behavioural image generation programs that have followed from Smallworld, running on an iMac, to use a similar technique to the one I had been experimenting with when making the Prospero image, i.e. placing the source to illuminate the generated shape in the centre of the composition so that trails in front of the light source would be rendered in silhouette. The result is Miranda. The video below shows a recording of my exploration of the generated shape including the frame that I selected for the print.

The works exploit the perceptual phenomenon referred to as pareidolia, where people think that they can see something that does not actually exist. I have often sought out these phenomena, after learning of the advice of Leonardo da Vinci when I was at school.