Founders/Directors

William Latham

William Latham is well known for his pioneering Mutator Art created in the late eighties and early nineties with Stephen Todd whilst a Research Fellow at IBM in Winchester. His computer art exhibitions “The Conquest of Form” and “The Empire of Form” toured the UK, Japan, Germany and Australia from 1989 for 3 years.

In 1993 he opened a small studio in Soho, London and moved into Rave Music working with bands such as the Shamen and then moved into computer games development, where he was active for ten years as MD and Creative Director of a 70 person console and games studio developing games published by Vivendi Universal, Microsoft and Warner Bros, hit games produced at that time included Evolva and The Thing. In 2003 he founded Games Audit Ltd which performs operational and technical due diligence in the games sector for investors, insurers and banks (clients include Allianz and Malta Enterprise). In 2007 he became a Professor of Computer Art at Goldsmiths (University of London). He is co-founder of the MSc Games Programming Course, with new research projects in Protein Docking Games with Imperial College. He is a PI on the DC Labs EPSCRC Post Doctorial Training Centre and a PI on the IGGI In 2014 he co-founded SoftV Ltd which is developing serious games for tablet with UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the NHS for stroke patients. He is a co- Director with Prof Frederic Leymarie of London Geometry Ltd.

His original Mutator PC software from 1990 with collaborator Stephen Todd was shown at The Barbican Digital Revolutions show in 2014 and he continues to exhibit his computer art. His recent Mutator 1 + 2 one person exhibition has toured to Brighton, Brussels, Dundee and Edinburgh (funded by The Arts Council England) in 2014 and 2015. In 2016 working with Stephen Todd and Lance Putnam, they got Mutator working fully in VR on HTC Vive.

<william.latham@londongeometry.com>

Frederic Fol Leymarie

Professor of Computing Frederic Fol Leymarie is co-director of the Post-Graduate program MSc Computer Games Programming (CGP) at Goldsmiths College, which he founded with William Latham in 2008 (previously referred to as the MSc CGE). He is a Co-Director of  London Geometry Ltd, clients include JWT (advertising), Oxford University Weatherall Institute (molecular biotech).
He received his B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering, with honors in aeronautics, from the University of Montreal, his M.Eng. from McGill University in Computer Vision and Biomedical imagery, and his Ph.D. from Brown University (in 3D shape representation and computational geometry).
His current research interests incorporate ideas from computer vision, together with the physics of waves and shocks and their modelling in modern mathematics via singularity theory. Frederic is also working on perceptual models grounded in geometry, based in part on Gestalt theory.
Frederic has initiated several “shape-based” projects mixing the Arts,

Humanities, Social Sciences, and Computing, including CyberCity and CyberMonument (late 1990’s), Digital sculpting (with the Mid-Ocean Studio, 2002-5), and Digital archaeology (co-founder of the SHAPE lab. at Brown University, established in 1999). More recent and on-going projects include:
ProGen: An interactive platform for designing cities in games. (joint work with computer games studio Rebellion Inc., with UCL/CS, and with British Evolutionary Art pioneer William Latham, and his collaborators Stephen Todd and Peter Todd) http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/progen/
FoldSynth: An interactive platform for the study of proteins and other molecular strands (joint work with Imperial College/Bioinformatics, and with Latham, Todd & Todd. This has lead more recently to establish the gamification project: BioBlox supported in part by the BBSRC.

AIkon & AutoGraff: Crossing of Visual Art, Computing, Perception & Robotics. AIkon is a collaboration of Fol Leymarie with French artist Patrick Tresset. The project has received the support of the Leverhulme Trust, has been exhibited internationally, reported in international media and has produced significant scientific papers. While AIkon has been focused on portraiture, the next project of Fol Leymarie in this space is about graffiti street art and calligraphy, in collaboration with Italian artist Daniel Berio, project AutoGraff.

<ffl@londongeometry.com>

Team members

Stephen Todd

Maths and Software Engineering

Mathematician and Senior Programmer, visiting professor at Goldsmiths. Ex IBM researcher, he has written over 80 patents. He has collaborated with Latham on various 3D graphics projects since the late 1980’s.

Stephen joined forces with Latham and Fol Leymarie, first by working on the Mutator 2 project, which married the earlier Mutator and FormGrow concepts with input from the analysis of DNA, resulting in a film for Siggraph in 2007. He then worked on other applications of the Mutator interface, especially for interaction with industry standard packages, like Revit in architecture and Poser in character creation. This involved two projects in preparation of game assets, especially houses (QuickHouse) and Progen (urban maps, with UCL and Rebellion Dev. Ltd.). The collaboration has expanded also into biological visualization (FoldSynth, CSynth and BioBlox projects) with Imperial College, Oxford University, the Crick Insititute and York University.

Richard Leinfellner

Games Production and Software Engineering

Richard Leinfellner is co-founder of 80’s games company Palace Software, where he was responsible for a number of hit games  for Commodore 64 and Amiga. Richard has held executive level production roles at a number of major developers including 11 years as Executive Producer and Vice President at Electronic Arts. During his career he has managed teams of upto 150  people and shipped a significant number of critically acclaimed and commercially successful games including Cauldron, Barbarian, Dark Omen, Populous 3, Theme Park World, F1 and Battleforge.

Prior to his move to London, Richard was the CEO of Babel Media, with office in the UK, India and Canada and a staff of 350 providing outsourced services for the interactive entertainment industry.

Whilst focusing mainly on games production and business in his spare time Richard is still a keen programmer with a focus on the IOT for which he design Bluetooth Low Energy devices and firmware. He also has been teaching to postgraduate level students with a focus on the business of making games, practical games design techniques, programming (C++, C#, low level Microcontrollers) as well as the Unity3D and Unreal Engine 4 development platforms.

He holds a BA from the Open University and is Visiting Professor for Digital Entertainment and Business at the University of Abertay.

Lance Putnam

Maths and Software Engineering

Lance received his PhD in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara where I worked under the AlloSphere Research Facility, the IGERT Interactive Digital Multimedia Program, and transLab. He was previously assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology at Aalborg University (2012-16).

Peter Todd

Maths and Software Engineering

Programmer and artist, holds an MSc in Computing Art from Goldsmiths. His work focuses on creative interactive platforms and interfaces, mixing audio and visual media. In recent years with LG he has contributed to CSynth (project with Oxford University).

Peter has been working extensively with artist William Latham, implementing generative sound and associated code infrastructure, as well as aspects of the user interface and graphics, for his recent “Mutator 1+2” installations. He has an ongoing involvement with the science/art project FoldSynth, previously in collaboration with Imperial College and with a new collaboration emerging with Oxford biomedical research group.
He also works on personal interactive art and gaming related projects. Peter graduated from Goldsmiths MSc Arts Computing.