Brian Reffin Smith

He studied metallurgy and metal physics at Brunel University (his sculptural use of metals' internal crystal structures featured in the BBC TV's science and technology programme Tomorrow's World) and later took a master's degree in the multi-disciplinary DDR (Department of Design Research) at the Royal College of Art, where he also was appointed a Research Fellow in 1979 and was later appointed College lecturer in computer-based art and design at the RCA from 1980 to 1984.

After showing interactive artworks at the Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983 he was invited by the French Ministry of Culture to intervene in art education, and was later appointed to a teaching post in the École nationale supérieure d'art (National Art School) in Bourges.

In the UK in 1979, Smith wrote 'Jackson', one of the first digital painting programs, for the Research Machines 380Z computer, software which was distributed by the Ministry of Education and used in schools and elsewhere.

He regularly shows artworks and makes performances in the context of 'Pataphysics, often 'zombifying' the audience by wrapping their heads in lengths of bandage or toilet paper.

[9] Smith claims to have become a Philosophical Zombie, and hence to have a deeper insight into problems of existence, artificial intelligence and art, after a botched heart operation in a Paris hospital when, instead of the more usual latex balloon being used to inflate a blocked artery during angioplasty, the team had recourse to a pufferfish (or fugu) which swells rapidly when a harmless voltage is applied to its tail.

The sadness of computer art is that it does not know its past’ and ‘What would be pretentious or nonsensical if one said it oneself does not become more worthy when spoken by a computer-generated avatar’.