William Latham

William Latham was a student at Oxford University and the Royal College of Art. Trained as an artist with skills in painting, sculpture and printmaking he became fascinated by Evolution and the potential that computers offered the artist. His work at IBM is known throughout the world, and has been featured in numerous newspapers, magazines (including Mondo 2000, New Scientist and Scientific American), and TV programmes (Beyond 2000, Tomorrow's World, Horizon), in addition to citations in many computer graphics textbooks. Latham's bizarre style of organic imagery has been exhibited in the UK, Japan, Germany and Hong Kong with much critical acclaim. He is co-author of "Evolutionary Art and Computers" with Stephen Todd (Academic Press, 1992), which related work resulted in a number of patents.

From 1988 to 1994 he worked as an independent with IBM Research in the UK developing evolutionary techniques and software that have become known around the world in computer circles. The MUTATOR code developed with Todd can be used for evolving designs of buildings or shampoo bottles or be used for financial planning when linked to a spreadsheet package.

His video installation "ORGANIC TELEVISION" was shown at The Royal Festival Hall in London in 1994. Merchandising includes posters, postcards and VHS Video "ORGANIC TELEVISION" (ambient soundtrack by French composer, Michel Redolfi). In 1995 William showed multimedia software at the international show of Modern Art "ARS 95" in Helsinki, Finland and created a giant inflatable pink pumpkin with televisions for the exhibition at "European Computer Art" in Hong Kong. In 1993 growing dissatisfied with the art and research worlds he started to think about producing more popular art forms for the world mass market. In 1993 he met Mark Atkinson they founded Computer Artworks and the rest is history.

More recently, after leading Computer Artworks for 10 years (with successes such as the hit game The Thing), he founded Games Audit Ltd. (in 2003), and joined Goldsmiths College in early 2007 as a Professor of Computing, where, together with Prof. Frederic Fol Leymarie, he is again leading research in genetics and arts (with the Mutators Research Group or MRG, which includes Stephen Todd, his old collaborator from IBM days) and initiating a post-graduate program in Computer Games and Entertainment (to begin in 2008).