Photo Credit: Bre Pettis

Peter Beyls

Peter Beyls (b. 1950, Kortrijk, Belgium) has treated the computer as a creative partner for fifty years — a method he calls "conceptual navigation." Trained in electronic engineering (Kortrijk, 1972), sound engineering and music history (Royal Conservatory, Brussels), and music and computer science (Ghent University, 1974–76), with a formative stint at EMS Stockholm, he made electronic compositions from 1973 and his first plotter drawings in 1974. In the 1980s, at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel — where he directed the media program from 1985 to 1990 — he pioneered cellular automata in computer music and built EWA, a "personal expert system" for drawing whose first version he wrote in 1984 and kept revising into the late 1990s. He was a professor for more than twenty-five years at LUCA Brussels and University College Ghent (KASK), took a PhD in computer science at Plymouth in 2010 with "Music As Complex Emergent Behaviour," and has lately turned to robotic painting (2021–2025). In April 2026 he came to Peekskill for a residency at the Bantam Tools Machine Arts Gallery and he's back in fall for an art show.

Artist's website (peterbeyls.net) ↗

4 physical works