Brian Reffin Smith, though born in Sudbury, Suffolk in 1946, lived from the age of 6 months in Sileby, Leicestershire, where his father worked in (and was equally-paid President of) a cooperative shoe factory and later taught leather technology part-time at Leicester College of Technology. Smith went to what was then Humphrey Perkins Comprehensive School, and at 18 left Leicestershire to go to Brunel University, and then the Royal College of Art, London, where he studied and later taught.

His parents spent their lives in Sileby and Kibworth Beauchamp. He was awarded the very first Prix Ars Electronica, the “Oscars” of digital arts, in 1987. In Berlin, where he now lives, he consumes Walkers crisps in a bar that imports them from the UK. He returns not infrequently to Leicester for computer art and Indian food.

As well as computer-based conceptual art, Smith gives lecture/performances, often involving Zombie theory and/or the absurdist but rigorously useful science of imaginary solutions, Pataphysics, which might start very academically but end with 100 scientists, artists or philosophers having their heads wrapped in toilet paper, a “Zombification”.

Artworks

More Information

• www.brian-reffin-smith.com (Personal Website)