The Automatic Art exhibition at the GV Gallery in London presents 50 years of British art that is generated from strict procedures. The artists featured make their work by following rules or by writing computer programs. They range from system-based paintings and drawings to evolving computer generated images. I'm rather pleased to be having a piece of work in the show - especially given the company I am going to be in.

The exhibition runs from Friday 4 July and ends Saturday 26 July 2014. The Private View is on Thursday 3 July 2014, 6-9pm. See http://www.gvart.co.uk for more information.

I'm just back from a five-day course at Schumacher College in Devon with writer Fritjof Capra. The subject of the course was Fritjof's new book, co-authored with Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision.

The book builds on Fritjof Capra's earlier work on the importance of 'systemic thinking' and the urgent need for a global shift in perception from a mechanistic world view to a more holistic one. Written as a textbook for students, systems thinking is placed in a full historic and contemporary context. There is a particular emphasis on Maturana and Varela's theory on the self-generating nature of living things, often called the theory of "autopoiesis". Like Maturana and Varela's book The Tree of Life, Capra and Luisi show how autopoietic theory can be applied to all levels of living systems (from single-celled organisms, to multicellular life, consciousness and social systems). Unlike Maturana and Varela's book (which is still excellent) it presents the theory in a way that is easy to grasp in a single read. This is an achievement in its own right! Guest essays - including one by Animate Earth author and Schumacher College faculty member Stephan Harding - are used to provide even more context. A large section on "Sustaining the Web of Life" shows how we could use the concepts discussed to address the major environmental and social issues currently facing us. There is an extensive bibliography for those wanting ready more about any of the topics discussed.

Fritjof Capra's first book was the Tao of Physics, and if you have only read this then this new book really should go next your reading list - it easily matches the Tao of Physics's importance and will bring you up to date with almost 40 years of Capra's thinking. If you have followed Fritjof Capra's work since the Tao of Physics, then this book is on familiar territory, but its level of coherence and clarity will give you a fresh take on the systems world-view - and the practical solutions he gives will give you (at least some) confidence that our planet could have a future with us on it.

I've put a few pictures from the course on my Flickr page.

Pioneering artist Paul Brown gave a very interesting talk yesterday as part of the De Montfort University TDC Seminar Series. He discussed his 40+ year career as a digital artist and illustrated his ideas with examples of his artworks and past projects. If you would like to watch the presentation then a recording is available here on Vimeo. There are also a number of pictures here on Flickr.

If you haven't yet visited it, then you only have a day or two left to experience the "Poems, Places & Soundscapes" exhibition at Phoenix in Leicester.

The exhibition in the Cube Gallery presents spoken word poetry, sound recordings and images that explore space and soundscape. It takes the form of a number of installations with headphones - some pieces have images, others have buttons allowing you to select from a list of words. As you explore the gallery you can sit down and listen to the poetry and sounds. It was very atmospheric and evocative. The exhibition demands time to fully appreciate it and I could certainly go back and find new things to listen to. I hope I get a chance to revisit before the end of the run.

This exhibition is part of Mark Goodwin's Sound-Enhanced Poetry project, which was awarded an Arts Council England Grants for the arts in 2013.

I have been informally acquiring examples of 1990s CD-ROM artworks for a number of years now (with 50+ items now collected) and have decided to start properly documenting the collection and filling any gaps. At some point I would like to make the archive available for other people to use for research purposes. Perhaps locating it at Interact Labs at Phoenix in Leicester.

The sorts of things I have been collecting are not only classic 'artist' CD-ROMs, but also good examples of early interactive experiences and interactive content. For example, the archive currently includes titles as varied as Peter Gabriel's 'Eve', the game 'Myst', Hexstatic's early CD-i titles, 'Scrutiny in the Great Round' (pictured) and Nobuhiro Shibayama's 'Biomorph Encyclopedia'.

This is a bit of a long-term project, but I think - together will initiatives elsewhere - it will help to ensure that the innovative interactive art that was released on CD-ROM the 1990s gets properly recorded. Ironically, despite being digital, much of it will no longer play on modern computers and risks being lost over time.

If you are interested in donating any 1990s/early-2000s CD-ROMs to the collection please get in touch. These could be examples of your own work, or CD-ROMs that you may have collected yourself but perhaps are unable to run any more? You can contact me by email on seanc@cuttlefish.com.

I will acknowledge the source of all donations within the archive and on the website that will one day appear.

I went to the opening of the "A-Eye" exhibition at Goldsmiths College in London on Monday. It organised as part of the 50th Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) convention that is running all this week at Goldsmiths.

The theme of the exhibition was "art and nature inspired computation" and featured 35 artworks from a broad selection of national and international artists. The work was a mixture of prints, screen-based, multimedia and some interactive pieces.

It was opened by Californian-based British artist Harold Cohen, true pioneer who has been active in computation-based arts since the 1960s. Harold is particularly known for his work with Aaron - a computer system that he has been developing for many years. He uses Aaron to generate drawings, many of which form part of his paintings. A large such piece, entitled Another Spring (for A.C.) was on display in the exhibition.

Although I had seen Harold speak before, we had not met. This time, however, I had been introduced to him by email prior to the event and we managed to have some time together talking about his work. This provided me with some great insight into his process. I was particularly taken by his shift from seeing Aaron as an autonomous "artist" to more of a "collaborator" who helps him access creative deas than might otherwise be unavailable to him.

I completely agree with this. I have seen quite a bit of artwork "created" by computer, and even met people who claim that their computer systems are making some sort of creative decisions in the production of such work. While I agree that the computer's role in the creation or realisation of an artwork can certainly go beyond that of simply being a tool (like, maybe, a camera or a brush), at present (and maybe forever) art made for humans needs to involve humans. I don't think computers can make art for humans that has any meaning beyond simple aesthetics. Basically, I don't think computers can be artists. However, the computer as collaborator is a much nicer aspiration. It's also one that Harold - with 40 years of experience with Aaron - is pretty well-placed to argue he has achieved.

The A-Eye exhibition at Goldsmiths runs until the end of Thursday, so if you are in the area I'd recommend a visit. There is plenty of other interesting work to see and I may write a bit more about it here. I have uploaded pictures of some more of the pieces to my Flickr page.

The Oculus Rift Head Mounted Display is making the news a lot these days, and rightfully so - we have one in the office and it's an impressive bit of kit. The device allows you to enter a computer generated 'world' by putting on a headset and viewing it in 3D.

However, 'Virtual Reality' of this quality (and it's still not perfect) has been a long time coming. It first entered the public consciousness in the early 1990s and I - like many other people - dreamt of having my own Virtual Reality system to play with. A professional system cost many tens of thousands of pounds to buy, so I went down the 'homebrew' VR route. This typically involved using off-the-shelf PCs and home-made input devices and displays, or adapted video game hardware.

The system I built featured the classic combination of a PC running the REND386 3D software, a Nintendo Power Glove as an input device and a pair of Sega 3D 'shutter' glasses as a way of viewing the computer screen in 3D.

In a recent conversation someone expressed interest in how this system worked and it got me thinking that maybe I should dig out the old hardware and try to rebuild the system. As something of a hoarder, I mean archiver, I still had much of the old kit filed away and after finding a suitable PC of the era on eBay I'm now in the position to start putting the system back together.

I'm probably a few months away having something to show, but when it's complete I'll install it at Interact Labs at Phoenix for people to have a play with. Watch this space for details, and get ready to enter the blocky world that was 1990s homebrew Virtual Reality.

Update 6/5/14: The re-build is almost complete!

The new exhibition at in the Cube Gallery at Phoenix is an interesting one. It contains work by a number of artists and deals with the subjects of environment, place and time.

The first piece you notice when you enter the gallery is the Subterranean soundscape produced by Semiconductor. This takes seismic data from earthquakes, volcanos and glaciers and makes it audible. It instantly places you in a primal world of grinding rocks and cracking ice.

Next, Benedikt Gross and Bertrand Clerc present Metrography - an apparently distorted map of London based on the underground map. Reminding us that all maps are actually distortions of some sort (Gregory Bateson commented extensively on the relationship between the map and territory, as did and Alfred Korzybski).

Perhaps my favourite piece in the exhibition is the long-running Mesocosm animation by Marina Zurkow of a seated figure (in the style of one of Lucian Freud's paintings of Leigh Bowery) in a Nothumberland landscape. Each day in the landscape is represented by 24 minutes in the gallery. The entire animation lasts for 146 hours, but has a generative element so that no two cycles are the same.

Locally-based artist Eric Rosoman's piece GPS Ducks is an interesting response to the story of the accidental release of nearly 29,000 rubber ducks from a container ship in 1992. This became a really important event in the study of ocean currents since ducks have now turned up all over the world. Eric has released a more modest number of ducks in to the local river system, but this time equipped with solar powered GPS trackers so that we can watch their journeys.

Finally, Charles Danby and Rob Smith's work The Quarry explores the site of the photographer/landscape artist Robert Smithson's artwork Chalk Mirror Displacement. It presents material from the quarry used to create the work as well as a collection of triangulated photographs. I actually need to go back and have another look at this piece since I didn't realise that there were QR codes with the photographs! Scanning these apparently plays video works.

The exhibition is one that deserves time being spent at it and is very rewarding if you allow yourself to take it all in. If runs at Phoenix until 28th February 2014.

See my pictures from the exhibition here.

DMU Masters student Alice Tuppen has just finished a short run of her "Point. Forty" exhibition in the Cube Gallery at Phoenix in Leicester. The installation featured four tables on which were placed objects that when picked up would trigger the playback of videos. Each table contained objects from one of the 40-year-old female participants and the videos explored personal the thoughts and recollections of each participant.

The first thing you noticed about the piece was how completely it transformed the Phoenix Cube Gallery. I have seen many artworks in the space, and exhibited in there myself, and and can honestly say that I have never experienced such a change in the feel of the gallery. This was in part down to the props and objects used, but also the lighting and the engaging nature of the video material.

One measure of the success of a piece of work like this is how long people engage for. Again, the work excelled at this, with some people remaining in the space for up to an hour - going from table to table in order to explore each participant's objects and videos.

While the piece only had a short run, I'm sure that we will see more such work from Alice in the future. You can see my pictures from the show here on Flickr. You can find Alice's web site at http://www.artact.co.uk.

Leicester Hackspace, a venue for makers of digital, electronic, mechanical and creative projects, will open in Makers Yard on 1st March 2014. Like other Hackspaces across the country, we hope to build a community of practical and creative people and provide them with a place to pursue their projects, share techniques and concepts and learn new skills.

We have a space in Makers Yard with access to bike repair equipment, computers, a laser cutter, 3D printers, power tools and many other resources. This space will be open to members 24 hours a day, but we will also be running a number of special courses and events, in programming, arduino, electronics, soldering, laser cutting, and more, which will be open to members of the public.

If you have an existing interest in such projects, or wish to learn more, we hope you'll join! Find our membership form and more details about costs and joining, at www.leicesterhackspace.org.uk, or join the Leicester Hackspace Google Group to learn more!