About

The present

It is only since 2010 that I have been able to focus on my creative work. In retrospect, it is clear that my work often has a time-based dimension and, typically, chance contributes, as does the viewers' interactions with the work. My instinct is to work in representational, abstract and experimental modes. To avoid artificial constraints, I work in any manner that presents itself and maintains my commitment, working in a variety of media depending upon what seems appropriate to the idea. My work is underpinned by an interest in series and repetition, change and order, experimentalism, playfulness (including the absurd) and participation.

1969-72

In 1969 I commenced a fine art degree (then called a Diploma in Art and Design, DipAD) at Leicester Polytechnic as a representational painter but for various reasons (that I explain in Scrivener, 2009a) I began working experimentally, producing a body of work exploring the image making potential of natural phenomena.

1972-74

Post Diploma, in 1972, I entered the first cohort of the newly created Experimental Department, led by Malcolm Hughes, at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. While there I began writing computer programmes that modelled homeostatic systems, i.e., systems that model natural organisms that seek to maintain a stable relation with an environment following disturbance in organism/environment equilibrium, like a pond that settles flat at its surface after a pebble has been thrown into it. In this way, I continued an experimental practice established at Leicester.

1974- 1992

In 1974, I returned to Leicester Polytechnic to commence a PhD in Computer Science. I expected that my practice as an artist would be central to it but I soon discovered that I was engaged in two practices, i.e., research and art, running on separate and divergent tracks with the former the focus of my doctoral thesis.

I committed myself to implementing an innovative approach to computer graphic system design (cf., Scrivener, 1981) and later immersed myself in computing research in an era of rich and exciting debate around themes such as human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, image and speech recognition and adaptive systems, inter alia.

During this period, whilst ongoing, my creative practice operated in the background.

1992-present

The nineteen nineties saw radical change in the UK Higher Education system. In 1992, polytechnics became universities and the academic art world found itself embedded in the university system. It was at this point, 1992, that I returned as an educator and researcher to the academic art world: to the University of Derby, Coventry University, Central St Martins and finally Chelsea College of Arts, in each case with specific responsibility for developing research culture and doctoral programmes.

I soon discovered that my past experience as researcher and researcher supervisor did not serve me well with art and design doctoral students. I ought not to have been surprised as I too, whilst undertaking my PhD, had been unable to unify making art and acquiring new knowledge. What was irreconcilable for me personally in the past remained irreconcilable for my students then and I began a still ongoing theoretical inquiry aimed at understanding this dilemma, which has led to a series of publications exploring the idea of artistic knowledge production (cf. Scrivener 2000, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2013; Scrivener and Zheng 2012).