University of Hertfordshire Colloquium

Alex May gave a Computer Science Research Colloquium at the University of Hertfordshire on 13 April 2016, presenting under the title Artistic Explorations with Code: Robotics, Video Mapping and Interaction. Speaking at the College Lane Campus in Hatfield, he used the talk to connect recent exhibitions, software development, and long-running collaborative research into a single account of how code functions within his artistic practice.

The colloquium brought together several strands of that work. May discussed recent presentations of HARR1 from My Robot Companion, the Antisocial Swarm Robots, and the international video-mapping installations he had been creating with Painting With Light. He also introduced Fugio, the open-source visual programming platform he had been developing as a way to support experimentation across robotics, computer vision, audio, video, and virtual reality, while also addressing the long-term preservation of digital art projects.

That combination makes the talk a useful snapshot of May’s practice at this point. Rather than separating artworks from tools, the colloquium framed exhibition work, software design, and research collaboration as parts of the same process, showing how technical systems can become both the medium of the work and the subject through which its wider cultural questions are explored.