Created whilst Latham was Artist in Residence at IBM UK Scientific Centre in the late 80s and early nineties, it shows a mutated organic FormGrow / Mutator form (ZAPX6RED-13) carved out of a single block of synthetic marble with pinkish, white and reddish bands. This form is Raytraced with “head-on” lighting and cast shadows gives the illusion that it is real. It belongs to a series of works described by Latham as “Ghosts of Sculptures” – pseudo-photographs of organic sculptures that never existed in the real world. These works celebrate the creative potential of Fractal geometry and Perlin Noise and uses a clean 3D Renaissance perspective aesthetic with a single central vanishing point. The rendering and lighting and in photo-realist style is reminiscent of Dutch still life painting.

Latham’s work during this period builds on his early FormSynth evolutionary ideas and presents the idea of “artist as Gardener” with the artist working in partnership with the computer picking, marrying and breeding forms using a genetic system to evolve extraordinary organic forms. This work is a direct result of Latham’s early collaboration with mathematician and programmer Stephen Todd, a collaboration which has continued to this day. Stephen was the creator of ESME (Extensible Solid Model Editor) at IBM, a programming language which allowed William to explore the procedural generation of complex forms in his evolutionary system, which came to be known as FormGrow and then Mutator.

Up to this point, ’s solitary evolved Mutator forms from 1987 to 1990 had floated in a black void, which was described by the artist as “floating free from gravity in the “Infinity of Computer Space”. This piece showed a creative shift towards filling the whole picture and also using brighter and richer colours, which continued after William left IBM and produced his Rave Period images and later again would be present in his immersive Mutator VR works from 2016 onwards. Referencing Magritte’s Listening Room (1952), William’s image has a similarly claustrophobic feel and, as well as recalling Magritte’s trapped forms in closed rooms, also calls to mind the bold wood-grained texture employed by Magritte, for example, in his painting The Restless Sleeper. These Mutator and FormGrow images are deliberately unsettling and timeless, presenting a strange world of synthetically natural forms. The works also look to reconcile Systems Art with Surrealism. This surrealist influence on Mutator was also strengthened by William’s friendship at that time with the painter Matta whom he met in Monte Carlo and visited in his studios in Paris and London. This Surrealist influence persisted in William’s later works and can be seen in particular in his new Computer Gothic B+W Infinity Drawings from 2022 onwards.

William Latham (b. 1961) is an artist whose pioneering work in computer-generated algorithmic art transformed the boundaries of digital creativity. While a Research Fellow at IBM in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Latham collaborated with mathematician and programmer Stephen Todd to develop the Mutator Evolutionary Art software, a landmark in the ‘artificial life’ branch of AI. Applying evolutionary processes to artmaking originated from Latham’s time as Henry Moore Scholar at the Royal College of Art in the early 1980s, during which he created his FormSynth drawings and etchings. From the mid-1990s Latham pursued projects in the Rave Music scene and developed video game projects, before in 2007 becoming Professor in Computer Art at Goldsmiths University, London. Here he restarted his collaboration with Stephen Todd, and together they resurrected and extended their old Mutator code and pushed the technology into VR, creating immersive experiences which have toured internationally. Most recently Latham has been developing a series of Infinity Mirror monochrome prints which could be described as ‘computer gothic’. Latham’s work is in the permanent collections of The Pompidou Centre, Paris; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Gulbenkian Foundation, London, and The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. Latham is the curator of the Creative Machine series of group exhibitions, with the most recent iteration opening at Taikang Museum Beijing in November 2024.