[ISEA95] Panel: Jon McCormack — Panel Intro

Panel Statement

Panel: Artificial Life

Artificial Life has been enthusiastically adopted by artists and scientists alike, each rushing towards their own interpretation of “life-as-it-could-be”. Notions of machine intelligence, artificial consciousness and digital nature are popular speculations in the new vocabulary. There is something nihilistic, something strangely familiar/familiarly strange, something “more than us” about the creations of such techniques. Are these aesthetic chimeras essentially an example of our dexterity at image creation, rather than an expanded definition of life? The “post-human” phantoms of Artificial Life will be more than we can imagine, but will they ever be more than us?

  • Jon McCormack, Australia. One of Australia’s top computer animation artists, he studied computer science at Monash University and animation at the Swinburne Film and Television School (Melbourne). His work has been exhibited at Imagina (France), Art Futura (Spain), Siggraph ’94, Centre Georges Pompidou, London Film Festival, Tate Gallery, Museum of Modern Art (New York), National Gallery of Victoria, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He is currently a lecturer in Computer Science at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.