Peter  Beyls

Peter Beyls is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in 1950 in Kortrijk, Belgium. He studied electronic engineering, music, and computer science at EMS Stockholm, the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, and the Slade School of Art at University College London. In 2010, he earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Plymouth for his research on evolutionary computing applied to real-time interactive music systems. Early in his career, he collaborated with Michel Waisvisz at STEIM in Amsterdam to develop crackle box synthesizers, and he later worked with filmmaker Hero Wouters while teaching at the Vrije Academie in The Hague. Over the years, he has taught and lectured in Belgium, Canada, China, Japan, and the United States, and held research positions at the Hybrid Computation Centre at Ghent University and the research group CITAR in Porto. 

He began writing software in the 1970s as a way to think through systems, mapping concepts of behavior, perception, and response through code. His early works included rule-based machine drawings and generative music systems shaped by improvisation. He refers to his process as navigation, a form of conceptual inquiry where programs model both internal states and external phenomena. Many of his systems are informed by biology, microbiology, physics, and artificial life, grounded in simple rules that produce complex, emergent behavior over time. This interest in autonomous behavior and evolving systems carries across formats, shaping works that operate as open-ended dialogues between code, environment, and perception. His systems range from drawing machines and distributed robotics to sound installations and generative agents. In Petri, a self-contained virtual ecosystem responds to human presence through computer vision but evolves independently, generating both image and sound using frequency modulation synthesis. FishBowl links a live environment to an algorithmic one, using sensors, flash sequences, and machine learning to condition the choreography of real fish. In WindChime, real-time wind data from 10,000 global servers animates a virtual dust field, its movement shaping sound through a nonlinear SuperCollider patch. He has used cellular automata, distributed computing, and evolutionary algorithms to develop systems that act with a kind of individuality, revealing patterns that are unpredictable, self-sustaining, and beyond his control.

Beyls’s work has been exhibited widely across Europe, Asia, and North America in both institutional settings and media art festivals. His installations and generative systems have been shown at venues including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, DAM Gallery in Berlin, as well as festivals like SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and ICMC. In 2014, a retrospective at IMAL in Brussels was accompanied by a published survey of his work, framing five decades of experimentation at the intersection of art and computation. He has contributed over seventy-five papers to the field and remains an active member of the Algorists, an international collective of artists committed to algorithmic methods. He lives and works in Ghent.