Hybrid: CAS Annual Jasia Reichardt Lecture 2026: William Latham

William Latham

Bronaċ Ferran

William Latham will cover the history of his work. He will start with his early work as a student in the 1980s at the Royal College of Art, where he developed his FormSynth hand-drawn evolutionary systems through to his later Mutator and FormGrow software developed at the IBM UK Scientific Centre in Winchester from 1987 to ’93, where he began his long-term collaboration with mathematician Stephen Todd.

Together, they produced many of the images for which he is best known today, using Mutator to create strange organic forms from an alternative evolution. He went on to work in VR, creating immersive organic worlds influenced by his ten years working in Rave Music and Games. His most recent work in collaboration with Google DeepMind, entitled 'Evolution and Foundation AI', uses AI to drive and steer the evolutionary process replacing the human selector with the computer.

He will share insights and anecdotes from the journey so far and the people who have influenced him, and address the challenges of harnessing evolutionary and AI processes for his creative goals.

William Latham is a pioneering UK digital artist well known for his evolutionary art created at IBM in the late eighties. After twelve years as a Creative Director in Rave Music and Computer Games, he became a Professor at Goldsmiths (University of London). His art is in the Centre Pompidou, the Henry Moore Institute, the V&A Museum and many other collections. His VR and generative work have been shown widely internationally, in recent years particularly in Germany and China.

Currently, William and his long-standing collaborator, Stephen Todd are working with Google DeepMind to use AI to drive and steer the evolution of their organic art. This work was shown for the first time in the Evolution and Foundational AI exhibition in London in late 2025, sponsored by Google DeepMind. William is a co-founder with Prof Frederic Fol Leymarie of The Creative Machine Exhibition, now touring China. https://www.evolutionandfoundation.com/

Dr Bronaċ Ferran is a London-based curator and writer. In 2012 she curated the first bringing together of William Latham’s print and digital works in an exhibition entitled Poetry, Language, Code, at Cambridge School of Art. She has written exhibition catalogue essays recently for several leading institutions internationally, including CAS, LACMA, the Mayor Gallery, MAC-USP in São Paulo, TATE and Victoria Miro. She is also a contributor to Right Click Save and Studio International magazine.

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