SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time

• Stephanie Owens

If there is any metaphor that has come to act as a signpost of current developments in the realm of digital art and design, it is the blur. We have seen the blur as a building, the blur as the theme at conferences, and the blur as a means to describe the totality of the overlapping processes and intentions that all converge in what can be called interactive experiences. For shorthand, we call this convergence new media. Given the various aims and contexts from which the larger category of art objects arrives, the blur seems to best approximate a still undistinguished body of work and its cultural momentum.

• Alain Lioret

This paper focuses on art created by new techniques such as cellular machines, L-Systems, genetic algorithms, neural networks … We propose here several methods of implementation combining the rules of construction of cellular machines and L-Systems with genetic, neuronal networks, couplings, translation of codes. These methods result in the morphogenesis of bodies, as well their structure (shape) and their functional aspect (neuronal networks with driving, sensory neurons, balance, etc.). It’s a part of what we can call “a new kind of art”, and we can see here how Beings Paintings emerge.

• Jean M. Ippolito

A number of pioneering artists began experimenting with the computer as a visual arts medium in the late 60s and early 70s when most fine-arts circles refused to recognize art made by computers as a viable product of human creativity. This was the era of computer punch cards, when the visual results of algorithmic input were nothing more than line drawings. Many of the forward-looking artists who were experimenting with this technology were not taken seriously by the established art venues, and were, in fact, often ostracized by their peers. More recently, the work of computer artists has begun to appear in general textbooks on the history of art, but each book fealures one or two completely different artists. The books are inconsistent in their documentation of this fairly new medium. There are a number of journals that have had special issues devoted to this topic, including the Art Journal, and there are also whole journals dedicated to the field, such as Leonardo. There are, however, very few books that do justice to the movement, and few that include artists of Japan. In other words, there is a great deal of activity in the field, but the documentation is neither thorough nor consistent.

• Andruid Kerne

The interface can be modeled as a an ecosystem: connected, dynamic, and characterized by relationships. The model is predicated on a process of working with the interface as a border zone between heterogeneous systems of representation. This paper uses sensation, embodiment, and semiotics to initiate this process, by addressing the range of systems of representation that are involved in its own production. This presence of the theorist is found to create a self-referential metastructure. As an alternative to the beneficial but ad hoc assemblages of multi-, inter, and trans-disciplinary approaches, the ecosystems approach establishes that meshing of systems of representation is an inherent property of interface phenomena. The meshing process causes elements from the involved representational systems to recombine, forming hybrids. Recombinant information is a structural formula for creating new knowledge, which can be invoked for that purpose, intentionally. Theorists are part of the environment that they theorize about. The products of theorizing are information artifacts that are also part of the environment. They themselves function as interfaces. The term “metadisciplinary” is developed to describe the inherent and self-referential nature of this structure. The structure of metadisciplinarity connects theory and practice. This stands in direct contrast with studies approaches, such as performance studies, which is separate from theater practice.

• Muriel Waldvogel
• Jeffrey Huang

Interactive Wallpaper represents a new category of digital art. Deeply embedded into our built surroundings, interactive wallpapers exhibit
the following characteristics, blurring the boundaries between decorative art and useful science:
1 . They operate in everyday life
2. They are open
3. They are spatial.
4. They are alive.
Interactive wallpapers combine these primitives into powerful “immaterial” building blocks for creation of future spaces, buildings, cities. In this paper, we present a series of interactive wallpaper prototypes in order to explore how the tectonic and psychological effect of our surroundings can be augmented, subverted, and estranged by animating wallpapers and introducing an interactive, possibly darker dimension into architecture. What happens when traditionally static and innocent wallpapers become alive, get a sense of memory, spatiality, connectivity and randomness, and become part of our everyday lives?

• Jon Ippolito

The 2005 SIGGRAPH jury was more than a chance to survey the digital art scene with a roomful of passionate but collegial comrades. It was also an opportunity to reflect on the role, for better or worse, that technology is playing in the production and exhibition of digital
artwork. More than any of my fellow jurors, I think I was particularly conscious of the stereotype that many artists, critics, and curators attach to exhibitions of art with a technological focus. According to this perception, the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery is less art exhibition than display showroom, where technicians show off the latest Maya or Illustrator special effect rather than pushing the boundaries of art.

• Joanna Maria Berzowska
• Paul Yarin

This paper describes conceptual and technical prototypes of reactive body-worn artifacts that display their history of use and communicate
physical (or embodied) memory. This work concentrates on garments that reflect more subtle, playful, or poetic aspects of our identity and
history. The pieces described here are part of a larger research project called Memory Rich Clothing. A variety of input and output methodologies are explored to sense and display traces of physical memory, raising the question: What exactly do we want to remember?

• Dominique Nahas

Threading Time, the title of the SIGGRAPH 2005 Art Gallery, invokes a vision in which the essence of lived reality, time, is measured and used through instrumentalization technology. The very subject of much of the technologically-based new media arts is time itself its uncovering, its displacement, its loss, and its reiteration. The urgency for visual artists to explore the experience of time is pervasive. Indeed, what could be more contemporary than an exploration of the lived moment as a network of relations and responses that too often
go unnoticed? The construction and imaging of visual languages through which time is not only expressed but enunciated and parsed by visual poets, have always and will always fascinate audiences. This instrumentalization is evoked and invoked through our language and the way we move, and through the very social relations between people. SIGGRAPH is both an actor in this play and an instigator; it serves as a barometer (giving us a sense of the pressures we face) and a thermometer, indicating the temperature of the body social and political.”