The Art of Interaction

Ernest Edmonds is a pioneer computer artist and HCI innovator for whom combing creative arts practice with creative technologies has been a life-long pursuit. In 2017 he won both the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award for Practice in Human-Computer Interaction and the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. He is Chairman of the Board of ISEA International, whose main activity is the annual International Symposium on Electronic Art that began in 1988. Ernest was born in London in 1942 and, having started at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University-DMU), he then worked at Loughborough University and the University of Technology, Sydney, before returning to DMU as Professor of Computational Art and Director of the Institute of Creative Technologies. Ernest's art was already computer based before 1970, and his future vision was to transform user participation with interactive and distributed works. From that time he began a quest to transform user interface design to an adaptive and iterative process and by 1973 he had made HCI at Leicester Polytechnic a priority research area. From this work came some of the first published articles about interactive art (1970), iterative design methods (1974), user interface architectures (1982), and the support of creativity (1989). His books include The Separable User Interface (Academic Press), Explorations in Art and Technology (Springer), and Interacting: Art, Research and the Creative Practitioner (Libri), the last two co-authored with Linda Candy. A second revised edition Explorations is in press. In 1993, he co-founded the Creativity & Cognition conference series, a SIGCHI sponsored event since 1999. He is an Honorary Editor of Leonardo and Editor-in-Chief of Springer's Cultural Computing book series. Over the last 50 years, Ernest has exhibited his artwork across the globe. In recent years, he has shown in Venice, Leicester, Denver, Beijing, Shanghai, and Rio de Janerio. He has previously shown in, for example, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Moscow, Riga, Rotterdam, Berlin, and Washington DC. The Victoria and Albert Museum London collects his art and archives. His work was recently described in the book by Francesca Franco, Generative Systems Art: The Work of Ernest Edmonds (Routledge, 2017).