William Latham

It all started with Richard Dawkins evolving his biomorphs -- little stick trees and insects. Suddenly everyone was using evolutionary algorithms to explore enormous complex 'feature spaces'. William Latham evolves works of art.

This lavishly illustrated book explains the mathematical and graphical techniques used to generate the stunningly beautiful and wierd images.

Simple as the rules of FormSynth were, they seemed to have a creative power of their own. Even though Latham created and applied the rules, they produced imaginative forms he had not expected. ...he realised that the FormSynth system defined an infinte world of predetermined forms, which the artist explored to reveal only a selected few.

This CD-ROM version adds a new dimension to William Latham's art -- now you can watch the 'creatures' 'grow'. As well as hundreds of still images, there are 20 'animations'. Here you fly round the three-dimensional art form, while it unfolds, grows, shrinks, branches, and gives birth. Watched through the 3-D glasses provided, this is a truely wondrous experience.

I found the user interface a bit annoying, but the images and movies are easily found on the CD-ROM, and can be viewed directly.