William Latham
UK, 1961
William Latham is a pioneer of evolutionary computer art.
Artwork in the Encyclopedia of New Media Art archive
Blue Worms Breaking Free of their Structural Constraints and Heading Towards Chaos
About the artwork
Blue Worms Breaking Free of their Structural Constraints and Heading Towards Chaos comes from a key phase in Latham’s practice, when his Mutator and FormGrow software, developed since the late 1980s, were combined with new real-time physics derived from recent research on proteins. The work was created with mathematician and coder Stephen Todd, Latham’s collaborator since they first worked together at IBM in the late 1980s. Its blue worms, known as Horn Forms in the FormGrow grammar, seem to search out space to move into, giving ‘the illusion of artificial life.’ True to the title, they appear to break free of their structure and head towards chaos, behaving less like computer graphics than like living entities. The work belongs to a practice that, for more than three decades, has used evolution and chance to grow forms rather than design them by hand, and it has been shown in exhibitions around the world.
Artistic career: William Latham
Artistic practice and research
William Latham (UK, 1961) is a pioneer of evolutionary computer art. At IBM in the late 1980s, working with Stephen Todd, he developed the Mutator and FormGrow software, which ‘breed’ strange organic forms much as a gardener breeds plants. He went on to work in video games and scientific visualisation, including research on proteins, and is Professor of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London.