Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting exhibition at the Barbican looking at creative and scientific developments in AI using work by artists, scientists and researchers. I must admit I only did the free installations around the building. I didn’t have time to do the paid for exhibition section but I thought it was a nice touch to have a lot of free work particularly as it’s the school holidays and it is something that children can interact with. I began with the work shown, one of two by Universal Everything, where you stand in front of the screen and the avatar copies and learns from you movements. I must admit I felt a bit silly as a middle aged women standing waving my arms and legs around but it didn’t stop me. The results thought were a bit underwhelming. Good use was made of the long drop space in the middle of the building with a work called Totem by Chris Slater which used equations that model the behaviour of biological neurons and is therefore supposed to mirror emotions. I must admit...

Lovely small exhibition at the Science Museum looking at the life and work of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Byron and pioneer of computing. The room was dominated by a wonderful portrait of her by Margaret Carpenter, appropriate that a woman who is now seen as an icon for women scientists was painted by another woman. It’s a lovely image of an attractive fashionable young woman. There were interesting cases on her early life when her mother, who had separated from Byron when Ada was 7 months old, had introduced her to engineers, scientists and medics. Her tutor was a mathematician. In 1842 Ada translated an article by Babbage, the computer pioneer, into English adding her own notes section to it as a commentary. It was the first article to articulate the significance of an analytical engine to use numbers to abstract their use. It was lovely that a model of Babbage’s machine was to one side of the portrait. There were lots of letters by and to Ada and I loved a descr...