William Latham Begins Collaborations with Stephen Todd

As an artist and research fellow at the IBM UK Scientific Centre, William Latham would first meet Stephen Todd, beginning a life-long collaboration that continues to this day. Their collaboration had foundations in artificial life and would profoundly impact evolutionary art, in many ways the basis for AI art as we know it today. While at IBM with Todd, they developed Mutator and FormGrow on IBM state of the art mainframe computers. Latham and Todd began working on the evolutionary art system Mutator at IBM in 1987. Lance Putnam and Peter Todd joined the Mutator work much later, on Mutator VR from 2016. Their work displayed “strange organic, often serpentine, forms, produced using [an] “alternative evolutionary software system” (developed with Stephen Todd and team), which William uses to pick and breed 3D forms freed from the limits of the human imagination.” According to Latham’s biography, “William’s work is focussed on using evolutionary processes to create art centered on the idea of 'Artist as Gardener,' an idea which originated from his time as 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.” The advancement of evolutionary art has had a profound and lasting impact on the generative art of today, as it helped spur the concept of generative art with changeable characteristics, particularly those that could evolve over time. This has specifically impacted AI art. The evolutionary work of Latham and Todd can be considered proto-machine learning art, as the evolving, breeding features of the program—drawn directly from cybernetics and its feedback loops—are the predecessors of machines processing data to perform instructionless tasks, modern machine learning. Prior to 1987, Latham developed his well-known Form Synth algorithm (1979-1986). Latham would continue at IBM until 1993. In particular, the work of Latham and Todd has influenced contemporary work in artificial life, including by Ciphrd and Sage Jenson.