WILLIAM LATHAM
William Latham is well known as an early pioneer of generative art through his MUTATOR evolutionary art, created at IBM in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His work, which shows organic, often serpentine, forms, is produced using his "alternative evolutionary software system" (developed with Stephen Todd and team), which Latham uses to pick and breed 3D forms freed from the limits of the human imagination.
His work was widely shown in museums and touring shows in the UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan at that time.
Latham’s work is in the permanent art collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Henry Moore Institute.
Latham is focused on using evolutionary processes to create art centred on the idea of "artist as gardener," an idea that originated from his time as a Henry Moore Scholar at the Royal College of Art in the early eighties, where he created his FormSynth drawings and etchings, which were to become a blueprint for his later Mutator work.
On leaving IBM in the mid-nineties, he set up a studio in Soho and moved into working in rave music, where his organic art had built up a big following in the emerging rave and cyberculture scene. After three years, he and his team of around 70 people then moved into developing games, working with Warner Bros. and Universal Studios. In 2002, they created the hit game THE THING based on the John Carpenter movie, which used his organic style. In 2007, he moved away from entertainment and became a Professor of Computer Art at Goldsmiths, where he restarted his creative collaboration with IBM mathematician and programmer Stephen Todd. They resurrected and extended their old Mutator code and pushed the technology into VR, creating highly novel organic immersive experiences for the public. The VR work has been shown in touring exhibitions in China, Japan, Peru, Belgium, and the UK.
