SIGGRAPH 1982: Art Show ’82


 

Chair(s):

Location:
Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

Dates:
July 26th-30th, 1982

Art Show Overview:

The SIGGRAPH ’82 Art Show celebrates the increasing access to electronic technology available to artists today and the growing aesthetic awareness in computer graphics.

Over one thousand entries for this juried exhibition arrived from all over the world. All the work was produced after January 1, 1980. The eighty-eight pieces in this show are diverse in style, medium and technique, holding as a common thread the pursuit of artistic excellence. The use of comput­ers in these works shows that style is established by the artist and not identi­fiably derivative of the hardware, as was the case five years ago.

We invite artists to participate in Sig­graph and encourage them to use it as a teaching and learning forum. Tech­nological art is the future of communi­cations and the source of new and powerful imagery.

Committee(s):

Website:


https://people.umass.edu/sig82art/

Visual Proceedings:


View PDF: [SIGGRAPH 1982: Art Show ’82] - 8.4MB

Exhibition Artworks:

Exhibition Writings and Presentations:
    Title: Art and Technology: Bridging the Gap in the Computer Age
    Author(s):
    Category: Essay
    Abstract Summary:

    Much as the majority of the art public has tried to ignore the art and technology phenomenon, it is no longer either possible or fashionable to do so. The large retrospective of video artist Nam June Paik at the Whitney Museum in New York in the Spring of 1982 was just one of numerous recent examples of the acceptance of the new technology in a traditional art environment. A lack of familiarity with the actual process by which the works are made, has caused the word “computer” in connection with art to be met with particular distrust out of the ill-founded fear that this mystifyingly complex machine might soon replace the artist in the creation of art. Yet in spite of the electronic implementation, computer-aided art is still in many ways as much a handcrafted product as conventional art forms but simply processed in a different manner. Furthermore, because most artists are as of yet unacquainted with the mechanics and potential of computers, their accomplishments on com­puter systems, which may assume various forms including color xerography, photo enlarge­ments, plotter drawings or video, to name only a few, are often the product of intense collabora­tion in a laboratory-like environment between the artist and someone technically proficient in the computer field. This practice is in antithesis to the myth of the sculptor or painter struggling preferably in solitude in a studio to realize his artistic concepts in pencil, paint, metal, stone, or other common materials.

    [View PDF]
    Title: Computers and the Visual Arts: A Retrospective View
    Author(s):
    Category: Essay
    Abstract Summary:

    “In the computer, man has created not just an inanimate tool but an intellectual and active creative partner that, when fully exploited, could be used to produce wholly new art forms and possibly new aesthetic experiences.”

    [View PDF]
    Title: Toward Autonomous Reality Communities: A Future For Computer Graphics
    Author(s):
    Category: Essay
    Abstract Summary:

    It may live in a vacuum tube (for a few more years at least), but to hear the Mercantile Masters talk you’d think computer graphics lives in a political vacuum as well. For electronics, however, the last quarter-century has been equivalent to pulling back the string on a bow – the storing of enormous technological potential. Now the string is about to be released in the universal application of that technology: the next 25 years will be the flight of the arrow, propelling us into the Electronic Age and precipitating an historically unprecedented revolution in commu­nications. And in the shadow of the Communica­tions Revolution we begin to understand the awesome cultural and political implications of that protean force we refer to so feebly today as computer graphics.

    [View PDF]