Computing the Future: Digital encounters in art and science when da Vinci meets Turing

Abstract

Computing the future, as life and research moves to the Internet, we are engaged increasingly in digital encounters from present to past and into the future with real people, events and documents. This paper focuses on the newly born-digital relationship between Alan Turing, father of computer science, and Leonardo da Vinci, master of Renaissance art and science – both revered as visionary geniuses, prophets of the future. Given the continued growth of digitised materials that are daily entering global consciousness, it is only relatively recently that both da Vinci’s notebooks and paintings, and Turing’s archive, are online and searchable. Thus we are able for the first time to relatively easily juxtapose and compare their work, and see that they have much in common in terms of what it means to human in science, art and the natural world, from da Vinci’s in-depth studies of the mechanisms of the human body, mind, and soul, foundational to his art, and to Turing’s discoveries in Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and morphogenesis. Considering their points of concurrence in the digital world brings into focus our global network of digital places and spaces, where science, art, and nature, including real and artificial life, become unbounded.

Contributors

Tula Giannini: https://sites.google.com/view/tgiannini/

Jonathan P Bowen: http://www.jpbowen.com

Conference

Publication date: July 2020

Publication date (Print): July 2020

Pages: 16-23

Affiliations

Professor of Information

School of Information

Pratt Institute

New York, USA

Emeritus Professor of Computing

School of Engineering

London South Bank University

London, UK

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVA2020.3

Copyright statement: © Giannini et al. Published by BCS Learning & Development Ltd. Proceedings of EVA London 2020

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of EVA London 2020

Conference acronym: EVA 2020

Conference number: 30

Conference location: London

Conference date: 6th July – 9th July 2020

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: AI and the Arts: Artificial Imagination

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVA2020.3

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing