Preface: Turing Arts Symposium 2012

The Turing Arts symposium has grown connections between Turing's digital computing machines and the arts. The symposium opens up a discussion about mimicry, competition and random elements of machines introduced by Turing and the crossover with man/machine ideas in science fiction films, Surrealism, digital music, drama and art. Turing's thought that machines might learn and compete with humans at select tasks has provided creative triggers for artistic motifs, pushing mimicry much further than 'machines mimicking machines'. In science fiction films genetically engineered 'replicants' (distinctly digital creatures) compete in chess and for life itself. Likewise, contemporary music software competes with humans as it turns voice into song and aims to sound better than humans. Turing's ideas for learning machines also raised questions of how 'critical' a machine might become, alongside contemplation of random elements. The latter is also seen in Surrealism within fantasy man-machine concepts, alongside the interplay of meaningful and meaningless random events. Generative art produces similar outputs. Turing's life was situated between automata of the machine age and the digital age, which he created himself via mathematical abstractions and a substitution system of symbols in 1936. Turing missed the space age of the late 1950s but his digital applications soon extended beyond the planet. Science fiction films from the 1960s then planted seeds for extending Turing's digital ideas of machine consciousness to outer space, including artificial dialogue and synthetic emotions in outer space, taking the potential of machine intelligence to new levels of mimicry of human behaviour. Science fiction films also picked up on Turing's 'screwdriver intervention' for motherboards prone to programming errors, but failed in some stories to create genetic fitness tests for machines with expiry dates. The ebb and flow between Turing's ideas and the arts, and back into scientific research are profound. The conversation across these zones has only just begun in this year of Turing's 100th birthday celebration.