Brian Reffin Smith (born 1946) is an artist, writer, teacher and musician born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in the United Kingdom, who won the first-ever Prix Ars Electronica, the Golden Nica, in Linz, Austria, 1987. He lives in Berlin, Germany. Life Brought up in Sileby, Leicestershire, Smith attended what was then an early comprehensive school, Humphrey Perkins School, at Barrow-upon-Soar. He studied metallurgy and metal physics at Brunel University (his sculptural use of metals' internal crystal structures featured in the BBC TV's science and technology programme Tomorrow's World) and later took a master's degree in the multi-disciplinary DDR (Department of Design Research) at the Royal College of Art, where he also was appointed a Research Fellow in 1979 and was later appointed College lecturer in computer-based art and design at the RCA from 1980 to 1984. He taught in the UK and France including most London art schools and French Écoles nationales, the Open University in the UK, and the Sorbonne and Arts et Métiers ParisTech in Paris. From 1986 to 2011 he was Professeur, art et informatique, at the École nationale supérieure d'art, Bourges, France. Working with computers since the late 1960s, Smith was a pioneer of computer-based conceptual art, with the aim of trying to resist technological determinism and "state of the art" technology which might merely produce "state of the technology" art. He was a council member of IRAT, the London-based Institute for Research in Art and Technology. After showing interactive artworks at the Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983 he was invited by the French Ministry of Culture to intervene in art education, and was later appointed to a teaching post in the École nationale supérieure d'art (National Art School) in Bourges. In the UK in 1979, Smith wrote 'Jackson', one of the first digital painting programs, for the Research Machines 380Z computer, software which was distributed by the Ministry of Education and used in schools and elsewhere. He was involved on-screen and as a programme adviser in BBC TV's The Computer Programme in 1982 and the BBC published his art software for the BBC Micro. In the Portsmouth Sinfonia orchestra, composed of players who could barely play their instruments, Smith sometimes played sixth clarinet, for example on the orchestra's World Tour, which started and ended one night in Cardiff, Wales. Smith has been cited as among the most prolific letter-writers to the