Creative Simulations: George Mallen and the Early Computer Arts Society

Some books are simply amply informative about what it says on their cover; others are ostensibly about people, things, times, places, or events but actually use these to make far wider points or to promulgate theory and opinion. Rarely, you get both— a work whose parts are so rich and richly intertwined that new meanings and insights are generated for and by the reader. This book is one.Similarly, some texts having to do with the arts, design, culture, and technological media examine whole areas while others concentrate on the detail of specific moments, movements, or indeed movers. This invaluable and authoritative collection of chapters under the editorship of Catherine Mason, an art historian and author who is on the board of the British Computer Arts Society (CAS), does both, the valuable general emerging as a macrocosm from the captivating particular. (I should note here my presence in the index and that I know or have known most of the others there too. Any reviewer familiar with the context would probably have been in the same position.)The book is about Dr. George Mallen, whose work and ideas are vividly woven throughout the chapters, edited by Mason. And it is about the significant contribution of the CAS, which Mallen co-founded. Focusing too on his important work Ecogame, it contextualizes cornerstones and a human story from a tranche of British computer arts history (roughly the 1960s to the 1980s), raising many issues analogous to contemporary problems: e.g., that what creative groups, institutions, and people experience as creativity is sometimes reduced to the status of a footnote to culture-as-profit or as fodder for barrel-scraping AIs and Large Language Models.It covers so much that actually matters in the relations between computer arts, design, simulation, cybernetics, education, the politics of all that, the ways to defy the wrongthinking who would dumb us down, the fun to be had, the vital research, theorizing, art and design that was and is still to be done, the people (some of them not un-eccentric in a fine British way) and places involved. Too much history of the computer arts ignores or simplifies what the Brits were up to (as it does with events in France, Japan, Canada, ex-Yugoslavia, Poland, Germany, South America . . .). Here at least the (perhaps to some amazing) stories of the British contribution are told.And it’s more than that too, because out of these stories emerge paradigms, theories of, and approaches to the computer arts which are arguably of even greater value today. So much has been lost from the early days of computer-based arts, the human as well as technological and artistic dimensions. Mason’s book is an antidote to forgetfulness and the banalization of one of the most important periods of computer and cyber arts in general. It flings a proverbial milkshake in the face of those who would commodify, dumb down, and misrepresent a revolutionary period in art, rescuing it to be visibly vital again.Mason writes in her Preface:After a scene-setting introduction by ex-CAS chair Nick Lambert, already replete with some of the great names such as Mallen’s CAS cofounders John Lansdown and Alan Sutcliffe; the cyberneticist Stafford Beer; artist of cybernetics, interaction, and sociology Stephen Willats; the radical artist Gustav Metzger; and the archetypical “mad genius” Gordon Pask, come a series of chapters presenting the people, ideas, and times involved. These are sliced in different ways by Mason herself and Stephen Boyd-Davis of the Royal College of Art in London and include original texts from Lansdown and Mallen, with fruits of new research.They trace the development of innovative strands from the influential CAS 1969 Event One exhibition in London and the famous Cybernetic Serendipity, curated by Jasia Reichardt, portraying the pluridisciplinarity that started with them and continues today. Cybernetics, dance, interaction, poetry, and music, as well as most of the visual arts, were seen through new lenses and freshened, poked at, made vivid. This despite the uncomprehending jibes of some of the general and art press. But some critics got it. If the frequently philistine “But is it art ha ha” Tomorrow’s World (BBCtv) found such stuff soulless, the U.K. Observer called the computer-based ballet the highlight of Event One and went to some lengths to explain it to readers. (As well as balletic scoring, Lansdown produced computationally fun/serious custard pie throwing routines.)In 1969 George Mallen proposed that an interactive show using computer-controlled photographic slide projectors be based on a simulation of an economics model, using ideas coming from his experience with Gordon Pask. Involving about 25 members of the CAS, the finished artwork/educational simulation needed players (not passive viewers) to make economic, ecological, social, and developmental decisions, having consequences as well as benefits. The images were used to illustrate all aspects of these decisions and contexts. Mallen, in an enlightening interview with Mason forming Chapter 3 of the book, said,The performance aspect was important. It attempted to influence people in the ways that art influences people. This had not really been done before. It stimulated Stafford Beer’s famous attempt to do something similar for Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, only to be thwarted by the U.S.-backed coup by General Pinochet.George Mallen went on via his own company System Simulation Ltd, with much activity involving art, cybernetics, and interaction, the qualitative as well as the quantitative, with people such as Willats and a host of heroes of cybernetic approaches to art and design, to later join the Royal College of Art’s Dept. of Design Research (DDR), where he founded the post-graduate art university’s Computing Activities Unit. The chapter titled “Design as an Interesting Phenomenon: George Mallen and the Royal College of Art” (written by Stephen Boyd Davis, current professor of Design Research at the RCA) is fascinating in that, amongst many details illuminating the state of the (computer) art in the 1970s and 1980s, we see the development of techniques and (especially) ideas for computer arts in full flow. We also see how the politics of philistine incomprehension, allied to a taste for the numerical (and therefore superficial) description of art and design, would play havoc with some of the most creative departments at the RCA, motors then (and now) of theory and practice for computation in creativity—and creativity in computation, cybernetics, simulation, and interactivity. Theory was as a red rag to a bull for the Margaret Thatcher–appointed Rector Jocelyn Stevens. There seemed to be a feeling among this latter and a few baleful supporters that anything (and there was much) that they found incomprehensible had, by definition, no place in what is now frequently declared the best arts university in the world. They were described by various highly placed colleagues as bullies, nerds, and so on. Mallen himself said that Stevens “almost annihilated any intellectual activity in the College.” The next, equally unsympathetic Rector, Lord Esher, found himself able to write of the (entirely postgraduate) students that he was dispirited by “those lank-haired girls in their colourless, waistless clothing, and the alienation from RCA values.” A later Rector brought with him as Dean of Studies George Stiny, “a real geek who went for Design Research like a pit bull” according to Christopher Frayling, a later Rector. And so it continued, and some of the most creative departments of the RCA were closed down, including (of course) the DDR. Numbers, quantitative computing, and a superficial perception of art and design ruled.And yet . . . that the above chapter was written by the RCA’s current Professor of, again, Design Research is telling. The real values of the RCA, of inquiry, creativity, theory, and practice, triumphed over the dumbing down. The paintings by Hockney, Bacon, and others on the Senior Common Room walls, and generations of students, can breathe again, unthreatened for now by those who might assert, in fields as diverse as aesthetics and election politics, that size and numbers count so very bigly and that the qualitative is for losers.Lest this book be thought of as solely a significant slice of the 70 years or so of computer art history (which would anyway be justification enough), it is also a practical, timely lesson for today. We face apparent attempts to hasten the approach of the “creative singularity” (when artificial intelligence, general or specific, will be as good as us, and then better than us, at creative stuff) by those who would have us slouch dumbly backwards down the road to meet it halfway, staggering under the combined weight of the goalposts we are dragging with us and our would-be mentors’ self-deception. We are supposed to accept that nonchalantly imbecilic products of AI barrelscraping, presented as art, literature and so on, are all that really matters at the moment. The text under consideration here would, if digested by sentient beings, act as a powerful antidote to that propaganda.George Mallen quietly, heroically, and creatively helped formulate, guide and change ideas in cybernetic and computer-based arts, design, simulation, research, and education. The CAS and RCA go from strength to strength. These ideas were not quashed, but reemerged. They are still, like so much of the sometimes fugitive history of the computer arts, relevant, innovative, and vital. This book is a testament not only to him and to the Computer Arts Society he helped create, and to the many who took part in the fascinating adventures outlined in Catherine Mason’s book, but also to the necessity of ideas like his and people like him in the field as a whole.

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