Two generative art events in Australia:

1. The Third Iteration conference will take place 30 Nov – 2 Dec, at Monashe University near Melbourne. There will be 3 packed days of art and theory on “generative systems in the electronic arts”, with keynote speakers are Peter Bentley, Machiko Kusahara and Casey Reas. There will also be an exhibition of generative art, put together by Paul Brown.

2. The Generative Arts Practice symposium is also a 3 day affair, taking place directly after Third Iteration (5-7 Dec), but this time in Sydney. The same exhibition will be featured here, as Paul Brown is one of the co-chairs of the symposium.

Judging from the lecture titles, a lot of the papers presented will deal with the intersection between artificial life, complexity theory and art practice. This type of “hard science” approach to generative art (sometimes called “alife art”) was not represented at the Generator.x conference. It could easily be argued that it has a longer lineage than the current style of visual abstractions, with artists like Vitorino Ramos, the aforementioned Paul Brown and Karl Sims producing strong work. These two schools of work are not necessarily opposed, but rather concerned with different issues arising from similar methods.