Colour laser print on paper, 'Neighbourhood Count', by Paul Brown, 1991. No. 4 in a first edition of 10, signed and dated by the artist, dedicated "For Patric" (Patric Prince).

This colour laser print depicts a kind of matrix, made up of 17 x 17 smaller matrices set on a light-blue background. Each smaller matrix is a square consisting of eight cells or "neighbours", as the artist calls them, plus a light-blue centre.

4/10 first edition

Given by the American Friends of the V&A through the generosity of Patric Prince

The print is produced by a 'C' program developed and run on a Silicon Graphics Iris workstation and output on a Canon D500 Colour Laser Printer.
Programming Assistance by Barry Trippit and Andrew Cassin. Hardware came from the Advanced Computer Graphics Centre at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

'The proposition of the piece: A cell in a square matrix is surrounded by eight neighbours. If each neighbour can take one of only two states (ie. ON or OFF) there will be 256 unique neighbourhood states in total.

This piece illustrates this proposition as a sixteen by sixteen matrix addressed by four-component indices each counting from zero to fifteen. These indices also multiplex to form the neighbourhood states. This is to say that the "address" and the "content" are identical or that the piece is self contained and self referential.

The piece also represents the finite states of a single boundary 2-D cellular automation. The self referentiality of the piece can therefore be considered to include time since all possible past and future states are also included.

Von Neumann's Theory of Self Reproducing Automata, John Horton Conway's Game of Life and The I Ching or Book of Changes have all contributed to the development of this work which is the latest in a series begun in 1976.'

(cit: statement by the artist, 26th May, 1991).

Paul Brown is a writer and a pioneer in the computer arts field. He has specialised in art, science and technology since the late 1960s and in computational and generative art since the mid 1970s. Paul was at the Slade School of Art's experimental computer art unit in the 1970s.

This print is produced by a 'C' program developed and run on a Silicon Graphics Iris workstation and output on a Canon D500 Colour Laser Printer.

E.1066-2008