SIGGRAPH 2020: Think Beyond

• Akira Nakayasu

Animated robotic sculptures are works of art that combine plant and animal motifs with robotics to give their audience a sense of the objects being alive through their lifelike movements, such as stirring leaves or squirming tentacles.

• Kit Devine

This work provokes and broadens debate about heritage at individual, institutional, academic, and societal levels. It foregrounds the assumptions that underlie heritage visualizations, and it offers a novel interpretation model for museum settings that engages with different audiences and encourages debate as to the nature and uses of heritage.

• John Desnoyers Stewart
• Ekaterina R. Stepanova
• Bernhard E. Riecke
• Patrick Pennefather

“Body RemiXer” is a mixed reality installation that connects immersants using a virtual reality headset, Kinect, and projections. It explores the potential of immersive technology to create co-present experiences that foster intercorporeality between immersants. Observations during public exhibitions revealed “Body RemiXer’s” capacity to disrupt social norms and stimulate new connections.

• Alex John Bundy
• Sölen Kiratli
• Hannah E. Wolfe

“Cacophonic Choir,” an interactive art installation, addresses the ways that sexual assault survivors’ experiences are distorted by digital and mass media and its effect. The installation is composed of distributed agents in space that individually respond by becoming visually bright, semantically coherent, and sonically clear, revealing original testimonies of survivors.

• Everardo Reyes
• Lev Manovich

Cultural Analytics (C.A.) is an approach for analyzing media and digital culture using data methods and visual computing techniques. This paper explores the aesthetic value of C.A. by approaching cultural visualizations as digital artworks. Through a series of projects, authors discuss their experience in art exhibitions, workshops, and seminars.

• Fan Xiang
• Shunshan Zhu
• Zhigang Wang
• Kevin Maher
• Yi Liu
• Yilin Zhu
• Kaixi Chen
• Zhiqiang Liang

“Enhanced Family Tree” reimagines the possibilities of family trees with an evolving series of exhibits. Their new approach may reveal questionable relationships in genealogical records. Moreover, the authors’ use of an organic metaphor of a “tree” can be further extended, resulting in organic forms that stimulate the imagination.

• Yi-Chin Lee
• Daniel Cardoso Llach

“Hybrid Embroidery” is a framework for interactive fabrication that leverages the potential of computation to broaden the possibilities of the craft of embroidery. “Hybrid Embroidery” is set out to offer an example of how computational methods may enrich craft and refining technical interactions to support expressiveness and open-ended practice.

• Marco Liang
• Shuang Zhao
• Michael T. Goodrich

We have provided an inverse-rendering analysis that provides plausible optical explanations for the fine illumination effects in the Salvator Mundi. Our analysis supports Kemp’s main argument for authenticating the painting as Leonardo’s based on its optical accuracy and Leonardo’s study of optics.

• Seonghoon Ban
• Kyung Hoon Hyun

We introduce an installation art project using the active volumetric filmmaking technology to investigate its possibilities in art practice. To do that, we developed a system to film volumetric video in real time, thereby allowing its users to capture large environments and objects without fixed placement or preinstallation of cameras.

• Liron Efrat

This paper analyzes AR installations to demonstrate different strategies for producing a relational sense of place and time. By exposing actual environments as constructed (and, therefore, as virtual) landscapes, AR art exposes our situatedness and becomes a strong tool for activism that encourages us to think beyond familiar reality.

• Angus Graeme Forbes
• Richard Grillotti
• Andy DiLallo

“Resonant Waves” is a multisensory, immersive, interactive cymatic art installation/experience. This project reveals the natural phenomenon of sound and vibration as it forms intricate visual geometric patterns in water that are generated in real time through user interaction, while also exploring the effects on our physical, mental, and emotional systems.

• Sevinc Eroglu
• Patric Schmitz
• Carlos Aguilera Martinez
• Jana Rusch
• Leif Kobbelt
• Torsten W Kuhlen

An authoring environment for artistic creation in VR enables the effortless conversion of 2D images into 3D objects. Artistic elements are extracted and relief sculpting is performed by mixing height maps generated from the input image. The tool is showcased in an analog-virtual workflow in collaboration with a traditional painter.

• Avital Meshi
• Angus Graeme Forbes

The “Classification Cube” art installation invites participants to become familiar with a machine learning classification system which estimates their age, gender, emotion, and actions. Rapidly changing results encourage participants to actively perform their behavior to the system and alter the way it “sees” them.

• Eddie Wong

“The Unknown Person” uses mythotechnesis as a fictioning method to re-live a brutal incident in the artist’s family history under colonial rule. Employing machine learning processes and facial recognition techniques, the artist interrogates surveillance and social control systems to explore the fiction of the self, data, and liminal spaces.

• Aaron Hertzmann

We describe artwork based on GANs with the concept of visual indeterminacy, connecting them to art history and to the science of perception of art. GANs seem predisposed to producing indeterminate images; we hypothesize about why this is and where to go next.