Peter Beyls (Belgian, b. 1950) EWA Series, plotter drawing, 1985
Ink and watercolor on paper
15 × 20 cm
Collection of Bre Pettis
PION.2018.025
Description
EWA was a knowledge-based 'personal expert system' that Beyls developed and revised across successive hardware platforms from 1984 into the late 1990s (a third version dates from 1999), encoding drawing decisions as rules for the machine during the years he directed the media program at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Per his CV he exhibited 'Recent EWA Drawings' at the St Lukas Gallery in Brussels in 1985, and EWA represented him as 'a knowledge-based system' in the computer-art retrospective at SIGGRAPH '86 in Dallas. In this sheet the plotted ink line is combined with watercolor, joining the expert system's output to traditional media.