Guest of Honor: Geoff Davis
“I am honoured to be invited to this exceptional and unique event. I thank all the people I have met on this remarkable journey.”
Biography
Geoff Davis is a generative artist who founded the Micro Arts Group in 1984 with the goal of supporting artists and making computer art accessible to the public, inspired by his activity in the London experimental film and video scene.
Operating as Micro Arts, in 1984 Geoff Davis released a series of computer-generated conceptual art pieces and an early ‘AI’ story text generator. This was distributed on data cassette and Prestel TV teletext. Geoff also provided a forum for young computer artists and musicians with a print magazine, articles, and downloadable software, all pre-internet. This included the first published work by an artist using ‘paintbox’ software. Well-reviewed in the mainstream computer press at the time, the Story Generator and “Abstract Originals” generative art were exhibited at the London Film-Makers Cooperative LFMC in 1985.
Geoff’s generative and conceptual art in Micro Arts was revived in 2019 by Professor Sean Clark of the Computer Arts Archive (part of the Computer Arts Society CAS, founded in 1968 after the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition). The art has been exhibited in Berlin, Zurich, London and Leicester, along with new work. His animated art has appeared on Expanded Art, elementum, fxhash and Known Origin platforms. Geoff is now an active member of the Computer Arts Society and the EVA Conference London.
Geoff has had a long career in programming, networking and publishing, starting on Univac 1100 mainframes, Vax minis, 3D and 2D graphics, and more recently the web industry, where he was the technical director at a large Omnicom design company in the City of London. He has a Masters in Electronic Arts from the John Lansdown Centre, Middlesex University. He studied Biochemistry then Psychology at Sheffield University, and later trained as a counsellor. He has lived and worked in UK, Europe, Asia and Africa.
Geoff Davis is now an artificial intelligence researcher in the use of generated text at the University of the Arts London UAL. His latest research is on ‘Mood Bias’ in AI interactions. He was the web and technical manager at the UK’s innovation trust Nesta; developed ‘eco’ buildings; and was a founding member of the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission SDC. His fiction has been published by PEN International and others. He taught computer graphics for art and design at Sheffield Hallam University, the London Institute (now UAL) and the Inner London Education Authority, and for commercial training providers. As well as being an artist, he runs Story Software, a diverse design company, with the architect and novelist Ivy Ngeow
He is the founder and editor of the AI Creative Arts Anthology (2023, 2024 Leopard Print Publishing LPP). His music has been used on art films in the 1980s, and recently on generative art animations from Expanded Art (Anika Meier) and, with Patryk Jaworski the Polish composer, on elementum (Georg Bak). In the 1990s he released an album with a member of the electronic band The Human League. Geoff’s art is in the permanent collections of the Francisco Carolinum Museum Linz, the Herbert W. Franke Foundation, the Computer Arts Archive, and the Le Random online collection, and private collectors.
Micro Arts website
Geoff Davis site
Geoff’s Talks about AI and Art
AI Creative Writing and Art – 2024 Computer Arts Society
AI & Image and Art – 2023 Computer Arts Society
AI & Text Generation – 2023 Computer Arts Society