The wacky boffin of art takes Turner prize with dotty diagrams

Publics favourite praised for linking humour and fantasy

Keith Tyson, the artist who put the Beano into quantum physics, and who once cast a Kentucky Fried Chicken menu in lead because his computerised "Art Machine" told him to, last night won the Turner prize .

The 33-year-old former Cumbrian shipyard worker, dubbed the "mad professor" for his fondness for exploring ideas from the outer limits of cod science and his outlandish proposals for giant neon dinosaurs and the like, had been the bookies' favourite.

As the artist with the best jokes, he was also the public's first choice, judging from comments left outside the Turner prize show at Tate Britain in London. That, however, did not stop the culture minister, Kim Howells, from making his notorious contribution to the comment board, describing Tyson's work and that of the other three Turner prize finalists as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit".

"If this is the best British artists can produce," he elaborated, "then British art is lost." The minister, an art school graduate himself, did concede that Tyson could draw, even if it was "not something I'd cross the street to have a look at".

The judges, after four hours of deliberations - an unusually long time for the Turner prize - clearly disagreed. Nor did Tyson want revenge. "Everyone, including the minister, is entitled to his opinion. It's just a little sad," he said, before thanking his grandmother, Edith Birkett, who was 87 yesterday, for her "undying faith in me - not that she has any comprehension of what I do for a living".

Unlike his three rivals, Tyson's dotty diagrams for sci-fi Heath Robinson devices that might be the work of some garden shed genius, raised a smile and were occasionally touching. The New Capacitor, a large, mirrored make-up compact, had a digital counter underneath programmed to run for 76.5 years, the average human lifespan in Britain.

Other ideas from his sketchbook were plain wacky, such as his Galactic Central Pointer, "a finger that remains pointing at the centre of the Milky Way", bionic breasts, and a bust of Mrs Thatcher fashioned in Semtex. Others had a cartoonist profundity, such as The Thinker, a pillar of computers he called "a comatose god running its own universe".

His two paintings, Two Discreet Molecules of Simultaneity, a meditation on the interconnectedness of things, were arguably the most beautiful things in the Turner prize show, and took almost as long to read as his rival Fiona Banner's transcription of a porn film.

Last night, as he celebrated with his two sons, Curtis and Elvis, and wife, Xenia, Tyson was taking it in his stride: "It's not that big a deal. Life goes on." Asked if he was worried about the "albatross" some artists had complained the prize had become, he said: "The thing about Britain is it doesn't understand what it has got until it has gone missing. They will all be in tears if Damien [Hirst] goes under a bus."

Earlier he admitted enjoying the unexpected celebrity conferred on him, even if he was fearful of falling into the stereotype of being a boffinish purveyor of artistic codology. "There's enough people around calling me a mad scientist without my trying to engineer an image for myself," he said. "I'm the type of artist who would like to take the whole world and reduce it down to a single drop on the table. My work is all about navigating. There's just so much knowledge to be navigated through."

Asked to define his work, he answered: "I'm fascinated by science's dogmatic determinism, the belief that any action, however complex - a Mozart concerto, a terrorist attack - arises from hydrogen atoms bashing together after the Big Bang."

Tyson, who lives in Brighton, where he went to art college, was shortlisted for his exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, the South London Gallery, and in Zurich. The Turner judges praised the way his work embraces "the poetic, the logical, the humorous and the fantastical and draws connections between them". Until today he was best known as the inventor of the Art Machine, a computerised device which gave precise instructions for the creation of works of art.

After the hullabaloo over Kim Howells' choleric notes, and with no Madonna this year to test the Channel 4 censors during the live TV broadcast of the announcement, Tyson's victory was something of an anticlimax. Many critics felt that the £20,000 prize should have gone to Jeremy Deller, who was not even nominated, for his film recreation of the Battle of Orgreave, a key moment in the 1984 pit strike.

The prize itself has become a focus of cultural bandwagons. In the past week the winners of the Alternative Turner Prize , the Real Turner Prize , the Barbie Prize for children and the Clown of the Year Award - all either skits on the Turner or serious alternatives - have been named. On Saturday demonstrators marched into the Turner prize galleries to protest at the "pompous overintellectualising" of art and the gobbledygook used by gallery curators. Several visitors broke into polite applause.

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