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Title: doing interface ecology: the practice of metadisciplinary
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
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.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Interactive Wallpaper
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
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?
Title: Mapping Art's Escape From the Traps of Technology
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
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.
Title: Memory Rich Garments: Body-Based Displays
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
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?
Title: Threading Time Machines
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
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.”
Title: Ars Electronica: 25 Years of the Digital Avant-Garde
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2004: Synaesthesia
Writing Type: Panel / Roundtable
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Celebrating 25 years of Arg Electronica, the panel provides not just interesting historical information, but also comprehensive insight into new directions of digital art.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Audiovisual Discourse in Digital Art
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2004: Synaesthesia
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper discusses art systems that employ image and sound as equal elements. This can be called the evolution of the “audiovisual discourse” in art and technology. Recent software for manipulation of audio and visual material is briefly described, and audio/visual digital artworks, developed during an artist-in-residence-based project, are illustrated as examples of contemporary artistic projects concerned with this theme. Different artistic approaches in the use of audio/visu al systems are identified on the basis of the historical research and the second author’s work, as a technologist, in collaboration with the artists participating in the project. Finally, the role of the computer as audio/visual instrument is discussed.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Interface as Image: Image Making and Mixed Reality
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2004: Synaesthesia
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper will explore the use of the graphical user interface as art, product and inspiration, drawing on my own practice as a digital image maker and installation artist, and a theoretical investigation of digital image making in hybrid art practice. As the boundaries and reference points between physical and digitally grounded imagery become less defined, the possible duality and interplay for a com bined image space moves towards a seamless self-referencing and continuous activity. A visual feedback loop or strip, where the clues of originality become increasingly hard to differentiate and, perhaps, increasingly irrelevant, a state of “deterritorialisation.”1 Some thought will be given to examining the potential for mapping digitally ground ed imagery into both two- and three-dimensional physical space to create a mixed-reality experience and to what can happen when we extract the real-world metaphors from the digital environment and take them back into the physical world. Questions about the trans parency of the human/computer interface, and about just how trans parent we really want this to be, are also raised. What are we left with when we remove the content from the graphical user interface? What traces of human interaction (from the physical) become evident, and what are the “aid memoirs” we employ to assist us in navigation and colonization of the digital landscape?
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Researching the Future: (CAiiA-STAR and the Planetary Collegium)
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2004: Synaesthesia
Writing Type: Panel / Roundtable
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Taking the Planetary Collegium as their starting point, members of the round table address research issues as they relate to the development of practice and theory in the context of collaborative criticism and inquiry across a wide field of knowledge and experience. The Collegium network is worldwide, in terms of its meeting and conference locations. the cultural identity of its members, and its ambition to develop nodes based on and complementary to its unique procedures and methodologies.
The Collegium emerges from 10 years of experience with CAiiA-STAR in gathering doctoral and post-doctoral researches of high calibre whose work transcends orthodox subject boundaries, and whose practices are at the leading edge of their fields. We are living in a time in which old cultural and academic structures need to be replaced by research organisms fitted to our telematic, post biological society. The Collegium combines the physical, face-to-face transdisciplinary association of individuals with the nomadic, trans-cultural requirements of a networking community. The panelists, all members of the Collegium at various stages in its development, present their personal visions of the direction future research might take and the structures needed to support it.
Title: Sensational Technologies
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2004: Synaesthesia
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper is part of an ongoing study of performances that make a physical and psychological connection with the public by synthesizing various media such as sound, image, smoke, smell, etc. The research project will focus on the history of the live image and try to connect this to current practices in popular culture and art, for example live video jockey (VJ) performances and interactive-technology-based installation art. For our presentation at SIGGRAPH 2004, we will con centrate on three cases that make use of state-of-the-art technology in order to create specific bodily sensations. We will also take their temporal character into account and explore whether, and if so, how these “events” can be presented and preserved for future genera tions as part of our cultural heritage.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Synaesthesia
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2004: Synaesthesia
Writing Type: Panel / Roundtable
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This Panel discusses synesthesia, which typically involves sensory crossover among the basic senses (vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) within the normal range of sensation.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Kitchen as a Graphical User Interface
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2004: Synaesthesia
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Everyday objects can become computer interfaces by the overlay of digital information. This paper describes scenarios and implementa tions in which imagery is digitally painted on the objects and spaces of a kitchen. Five augmented physical interfaces were designed to orient and inform people in the tasks of cleaning, cooking, and accessing information: Information Table, Information Annotation ofKitchen, HeatSink, Spatial Definition, and Social Floor. Together, these interfaces augment the entire room into a single graphical user interface.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Noetic Connection: Synesthesia, Psychedelics, and Language
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2004: Synaesthesia
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The literatures that touch on synaesthesias – scientific, art-historical, literary, phenomenological, ethnographic, psychedelic – vary widely in their definitions, their interpretations, and their degree of comfo with the first-person, subjective nature of experiential reports. The signi cances given to synesthetic experiences are similarly wide ranging. This paper explores the relationships among synaesthesias, psychedelic experience, and language, highlighting Terence McKenna’s synesthetic language experiences on DMT and magic mushrooms. We describe the complexities of creating and pe orm ing with the Synestheater, a system that provides the means to weave together, in multiple mappings, two or more complex visual, aural, and linguistic systems in live pe ormance.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Thoughts on Hesse, Digital A and Visual Music
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2004: Synaesthesia
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This essay describes the influence of Hermann Hesse’s ideas on my creative work and how I create interactive music sculptures and visual music. In his book, Magister Ludi, Hesse describes a game in which art and music blend together in a way that allows for transformation of creative content into various forms of media. “Variations” is an ongoing exploration of interactive sculpture and visual music that began in 1999 and still continues. The following describes my thought process for early versions of this work, as well as for “Variations 03,” an interactive music installation that was exhibited as part of the SIGGRAPH 2003 A Gallery. My approach in creating this work was to develop a three-dimensional sound matrix that viewers could change as they interacted with the sculpture.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Is the Age of Expertise Over?
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2003: CG03: Computer Graphics 2003
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
As I read journalists’ reports about the decline in confidence in many financial institutions, the troubles in modern education, and the failure of diplomacy to solve international problems, I am faced with the question: Is the age of expertise over?
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Recovering History: Critical and Archival Histories of the Computer-Based Arts
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2003: CG03: Computer Graphics 2003
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
During the 1960s, artists first began to get involved with digital computing. By 1968, it was possible for Jasia Reichardt to curate a survey of digital work in the influential Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The show went on to tour the United States and Japan, and many young artists were inspired to get involved with computers after seeing it.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Art of Understanding: Or, A Primer on Why We Study History
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2003: CG03: Computer Graphics 2003
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Why did a substantial number of submissions to the SIGGRAPH 2003 Art Gallery demonstrate a lack of knowledge of the history of digital art? There is an art to understanding creative invention that involves information as well as experience and personal preference.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Digital Becomes Contemporary
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2003: CG03: Computer Graphics 2003
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
We are at a special and paradoxical moment in the development of digital art. Now that it is finally gaining widespread public and critical attention, digital art is also being quickly absorbed into the world of contemporary art. The next generation of artists and critics will not look at making art with a computer as something extraordinary or unusual. This phenomenon is already quite apparent in galleries in New York and abroad. While galleries like Postmasters and Bitforms specialize in new-media art, numerous other galleries in Chelsea exhibit similar work, but do not make the distinction that it is new-media art. Another growing trend in New York is for artists to display prints along with new media as an integral part of the exhibition. The return to the object is due in part to the recent widespread availability of archival printing methods. Museums are also in the process of refitting to accommodate the next wave of contemporary art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has closed for two years to update its galleries, and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam is planning a major renovation for 2004. For those of us who have followed the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery for many years, this acceptance of digital art by the contemporary art world is refreshing, but also raises many questions. Digital art has operated outside the art establishment for many years, and this has allowed it to remain relatively free.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Why Digital Prints Matter
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2003: CG03: Computer Graphics 2003
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
In the beginning(s) was the digital image.
It has been established that “computer art” started approximately in 1950 with Ben Laposky’s oscilloscope images, which he generated with analog electronics and then recorded onto high-speed film. This event occurred in the wake of the then-recent developments of the first electronic digital computers: a machine built by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry in 1941 and then the well known Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the first major general purpose computer, introduced in 1946. Completed in 1951, the Whirlwind Computer was the very first to be equipped with a (vector scope) video display monitor. A “bouncing ball” animation was actually produced to demo this feature.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Will There Be "Computer Art" in 2020?
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2003: CG03: Computer Graphics 2003
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
It is ironic that the more computers infiltrate our daily lives, the more they seem to disappear. Computer-driven technologies like ATMs and email are part of the subconscious landscape of modern life and require no more attention to use than, say, tuning the radio while driving the car. As the science of computer graphics continues to progress, will computer art become a more prominent feature of the art world? Or will it, like the technology it uses, merge, at least in part, with the background of other art materials and methods?
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Art Games and Breakout: New Media Meets the American Arcade
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2002: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper explores how the interactive paradigms and interface designs of arcade classics like Breakout and Pong have been incorporated into contemporary art games and offer new possibilities for political and cultural critique.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Feminist Transgressions? Object and Process in Transgenic/Genetic Works by Women
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2002: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Interest in new technologies has fostered a growing interdisciplinary exploration between artists, scientists, social scientists, and designers. Particular types of artwork have held attraction for the artist-scientist in the 20th and 21st centuries: artificial life, evolutionary art, and genetic art have been created by those with an interest in science and organic structures. Concerns inherent to these contemporary interests are centuries old; 1 the use of novel technologies to mimic or create life can be traced to the Ancient Greeks, Jewish, Chinese, and Egyptian cultures, in which stories of famous pneumatic automata and golem originated.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: From Artificial Life to Augmented Reality: "It's not about technology, it's about what technology is about"
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2002: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper examines the influence of two areas of technological research upon my art practice. For me, technologies provide inspiration in a variety of ways. It can begin with a simple instinct on first contact with a technological object, a system, or a scientific idea. Often, an extended period of play or exploration with the technology needs to take place before the artistic possibilities reveal themselves. The two main areas of technological focus in this paper are Artificial Life and Augmented Reality, with particular attention to the development of ideas and philosophical concerns underlying the art that I make. Examples of completed works and works in progress will be shown. It is my intention in doing this to examine some aspects of the artist’s role in unraveling the meanings nesting within technological and scientific endeavors.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Fun, Love, and Happiness — or The Aesthetics of Play and Empathy in Avatar Worlds
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2002: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
I was asked recently why I would be interested in theorizing on play outside of the context of games and persistent environments. The answer has to do with the processes of creativity, self expression, and authorship that arise when we consider interactivity in virtual worlds. Artmaking as play, and empathy as a foundation of collective authorship, are the central themes of this talk. But is that art? If one allows that art is an outgrowth of a set of techniques, tools, conventions, visual histories, aesthetic vocabularies, and above all an urge of creative self-expression then we would have to say yes. If, additionally, we posit that the digital medium may, perhaps, bring with it a special quality that we have not yet pinned down, despite various efforts to do so, then I would like to suggest that that special digital quality is reflected precisely in aesthetics of play, empathy, and a sense of collective identity and multiplicity of authorship.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Interface Ecosystem, The Fundamental Unit of Information Age Ecology
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2002: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The Information Age is the period of history in which products and services based on information and knowledge have principal economic value. Information artifacts are implements of use and aesthetic expressions that both reflect and create the ways in which people individually and collectively think and act. Interactive artifacts are designed to engage people in access to and development of knowledge and information. Their human computer interfaces are instances of a broader set of phenomena. Cultural, creative, technological, and everyday frames of reference, spoken languages, economic positions, programming languages, and runtime platforms converge through the lens of the interface nexus. It is necessary to abstract and extend our notion of interface and to contextualize the operation of interfaces amidst dynamic meshworks, in order to address these phenomena.
With regard to life on earth, ecology investigates the web of relations between interdependent organisms and their surroundings. In the Information Age, people, activities, codes, components, and systems form the same kinds of interrelationships. Interfaces are the multidimensional border zones through which these relationships are constituted. Interface ecology investigates the dynamic interactions of media, cultures, and disciplines that flow through interfaces. The semiotic encodings of these wide-reaching systems of representation are their interactions’ building blocks. Interfaces recombine semiotic codes, forming hybrids.
The ecosystems approach brings the perspectives of diverse disciplines to bear on what interfaces are, how they work, and how they can work. Disciplines, and the media, cultural, and epistemological forms to which they apply, are free to relate in meshworks, opening inquiry. No system of representation dominates; none are considered subordinate. Rather, they are interdependent elements, connected by referential flows of interaction.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Ludology: From Representation to Simulation
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2002: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Most of the current studies of the creative potential of computer games have been done through tools designed for narrative media (literary theory, narratology, film theory). Several attempts have been made by both academics and designers to create “interactive narratives” that would allow players to experience the qualities of narrative while being able to interact with the environment, characters, and events in the “story.” Nevertheless, authors have so far failed to provide a compelling example of “interactive fiction.” Brenda Laurel, a long-time advocate of this genre, recently described it as “a hypothetical beast in the mythology of computing, an elusive unicorn we can imagine but have yet to capture.” [Laurel 2001]
In this paper I argue, following the work of such theorists as Espen Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen, that narrative is not the best paradigm for understanding not only computer games but also cybernetic art and toys, simply because they do not rely on traditional representation but on simulation.
By simulation, I mean an alternative form of describing and understanding reality that is based on the modeling of systems. My semiotic approach to simulation is close to the one developed by computer science’s simulation theory, but it differs in that its goal is not necessarily predicting behaviors. Rather, I view it as an alternative representational form that opens a new set of rhetorical possibilities that stress system behavior and user experimentation.
By comparing the similitude and differences between simulation and representation, I will provide a theoretical framework that will allow us to better comprehend the process behind the interpretation of such cybernetic systems as toys, cyberarts, traditional games, and computer games. My ultimate goal is to contribute to the understanding of the rhetorical characteristics of these simulational media.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Interactive drama has been discussed for a number of years as a new AI-based interactive experience. While there has been substantial technical progress in building believable agents and some technical progress in interactive plot,16 no work has yet been completed that combines plot and character into a full-fledged dramatic experience. The game industry has been producing plot-based interactive experiences (adventure games) since the beginning of the industry, but only a few of them (such as “The Last Express”) begin to approach the status of interactive drama. Part of the difficulty in achieving interactive drama is due to the lack of a theoretical framework guiding the exploration of the technological and design issues surrounding interactive drama. This paper proposes a theory of interactive drama based on Aristotle’s dramatic theory but modified to address the interactivity added by player agency. This theory both provides design guidance for interactive dramatic experiences that attempt to maximize player agency (answering the question “What should I build?”) and technical direction for the AI work necessary to build the system (answering the question “How should I build it?”). In addition to clarifying notions of interactive drama, the model developed in this paper also provides a general framework for analyzing player agency in any interactive experience (e.g., interactive games).
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
By the mid-1960s, Marshall McLuhan prophesied that electronic media were creating an increasingly interconnected global village. Such pronouncements popularized the idea that the era of machine-age technology was drawing to a close, ushering in a new era of information technology. Sensing this shift, art historian and curator K.G. Pontus Hulten organized a simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic exhibition on art and mechanical technology at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968. The Machine: As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age included work ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci’s 16th-century drawings of flying machines to contemporary artist-engineer collaborations that won a competition organized by Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc. (EAT).¹
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Dialogue with a Monologue: Voice Chips and the Products of Abstract Speech
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper argues that voice chips and speech recognition chips can be used as a unique analytic tool for understanding the complex techno-social interactions that define, imagine, and produce new products. Using these chips as an in situ instrument allows a focus on products in their actual context of use, capturing the multiple interpretations of new technologies, and a method to analyze their failures and successes in human machine interaction. It is the use of voice that is direct evidence of the interactive, particularized and social aspects of products that are traditionally underrepresented in the attempts to understand technological innovation, design, and deployment.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Erasing Boundaries: Intermedia Art in the Digital Age
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Panel / Roundtable
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“Intermedia” is a term coined by the Fluxus artist and theorist Dick Higgins which refers to works of art that include structural elements not usually associated with the medium being performed. Although intermedia can be “multimedia” it certainly does not have to be. In this panel we would like to make the distinction between the two terms.
In intermedia, the compositional process works across the boundaries between media or even fuses media. Thus intermedia implies structures that are shared by or translated from one medium to another: in this respect it is a more specifically defined term than multimedia. While it is sometimes called “synesthetic art,” intermedia does not seek to imitate the physiological phenomenon of synesthesia, but approaches it metaphorically. It extends the creation of form across sensory modalities without necessarily promoting a tight coupling of multisensory events. Synesthetic coupling is just one potential contrapuntal technique for intermedia, a kind of parallel movement. Other possibilities abound, and intermedia is just getting started as an artform.
With the advent of digital multimedia and real time interaction and performance with computers, intermedia can now achieve a precision and synchronicity of events that were not possible until the last two decades. Moreover, digital media enable compositional structures to operate at all levels of granularity and with a degree of abstraction that places all media on the same plane. One could argue that digital intermedia is the high-level process that corresponds to the low-level truism: all media is data, a single substance. Intermedia suggests that we explore that substance with all available senses.
This panel will examine the historical concept of intermedia, compositional methods and processes for creating intermedia, issues of sense perception and sensory coupling in the reception of intermedia, and the implications of digital multimedia, real time performance and interaction for the future development of intermedia. We also expect to open the discussion to the metaphoric and even magical qualities associated with synesthesia, and to the relation of multisensory stimuli to memory, but by grounding the panel in compositional practices and structures we hope to avoid some of the pitfalls of interpretation that the mystique of synesthesia often inspires.
While we cannot predict the trajectory of intermedia across the imaginary of the 21″ century, it holds out the possibility of new forms and experiences. At a time when we have begun to suspect that formal invention had collapsed along with the historical avantgarde, this may even permit us a brief moment of euphoria. We would do well to remember how, at the beginning of the 20th century, the cult of synesthesia promised a mystical revelation that did not transpire. At the beginning of the 21st century, intermedia points to a perceptual revelation that may well transpire. The instruments are in our hands and it seems we have only to learn to play them. To what end and for whom? As much as with the formal and technical issues of digital intermedia, we must also grapple with this question.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Metaphoric Networks in "Lexia to Perplexia"
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
As leading theorists and practitioners such as Marvin Minsky, Daniel Hillis and Brian Antwell Smith have been telling us, computers are much more than hardware and software.’ In their most general form, computers are environments of varying scope, from objects that sit on desktops to networks spanning the globe. Indeed, in Edward Fredkin’s interpretation, computational processes ultimately generate the fabric of the universe.’ It comes as no surprise, then, to find researchers arguing that computation is fundamentally altering the ways in which humans conceive of themselves and their relations to others. There are of course many approaches to this issue, from sociological studies to human factor analysis. Among these approaches are artistic works that tell new stories about the formation of human subjects, instantiating these stories in images as well as words. To explore this systemic shift, I will take as my tutor text Talan Memmott’s “Lexia to Perplexia.”‘ In this complexly coded work, human subjectivity is depicted as intimately entwined with computer technologies.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Notime: Identity and Collaboration
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Although communication networks offer the possibility of a distributed community that can collaborate and exchange vital information, there is little time for these collaborations and exchanges to occur. Ironically, the same technology that makes distributed community a possibility and promises to save us time prevents us from actually having time to build community. Distributed presence inevitably moves us towards group consciousness, which shifts our perception of time and even productivity. This essay uses a large collaborative networked art piece, “notime,” as an example of how the creative process shifts when working on the networks. The project attempts to rethink the idea of the avatar as a physical representation and compares it to that of energetic bodies carrying information and evolving with the time people devote to participating, onsite and online. “notime” is conceived to raise questions about our perception of time and identity as we extend our personal networks through technology.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Rethinking Agency and Immersion: Videogames as a Means of Consciousness-Raising
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Until recently, most videogame characters did not reflect our everyday life for the simple reason that most of them were trolls, aliens, and monsters. However, this has changed since the introduction of “The Sims,” the people simulator. Nevertheless, characters in this game are still flat since “The Sims” simulates life in a Disneyland-like way, avoiding ideological conflicts.
Encouraged by authors like Brenda Laurel and Janet Murray, videogame designers have been taking for granted that a high level of agency and immersion are desirable effects. However, I will show that alternative, non-Aristotelian techniques could be used to develop character-driven videogames that enhance critical thinking about ideological issues and social conflicts while keeping the experience enjoyable. I will do this by borrowing some concepts from Bertolt Brecht’s and Augusto Baal’s ideas on non-Aristotelian theater and applying them to videogame design. In this paper, I propose that a modified version of “The Sims” would allow players to create behavioral rules for their characters that reflect their personal opinions. Like in Baal’s Forum Theater, this game would foster critical discussion about social and personal problems.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Schizophrenia and Narrative in Artificial Agents
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
In recent years, computer graphics has turned to AI techniques in order to simplify the problem of modeling moving objects for rendering. By modeling the minds of graphically represented creatures, their movements can be directed automatically through AI algorithms and need not be directly controlled by the designer. But what kind of baggage do these AI algorithms bring with them? Here I will argue that predominant AI approaches to modeling agents result in behavior that is fragmented, depersonalized, lifeless, and incomprehensible. Drawing inspiration from narrative psychology and anti-psychiatry, I will argue that agent behavior should be narratively understandable and present an agent architecture that structures behavior to be comprehensible as narrative.
The approach I take in this essay is a hybrid of critical theory and AI agent technology. It is one example of a critical technical practice: a cultural critique of AI practice instantiated in a technical innovation. In the final section of this paper, I will describe the theoretical and practical foundations of the critical technical practice pursued here, which I term socially situated AI.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Pixel/The Line: Approaches to Interactive Text
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Panel / Roundtable
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The Web is a major topic at SIGGRAPH 2001, as it has been for several years. But there has not yet been a substantial discussion at a SIGGRAPH conference of the Web’s primary and foundational media: text. This panel brings together five experts who span a range of approaches to responsive text through computer graphics and interactive techniques. The presentations are both theoretical and applied, demonstrating techniques ranging from direct manipulation through artificial intelligence, and drawing on the insights of various fields, from visual art through literature.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Pleasures of Immersion and Engagement: Schemas, Scripts, and the Fifth Business
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Presently, designers of interactive narratives and video games have only a slender understanding of the aesthetic experiences their audiences and users seek. Using schema theory, this study articulates the two varieties of aesthetic pleasures that users of interactive works enjoy: immersion and engagement. It uses schema theory to define the characteristics of immersion and engagement in both conventional and new media. After examining how readers’ experiences of these two different aesthetics may be enhanced or diminished by interface design, options for navigation, and other features, the essay concludes by looking beyond immersion and engagement to “flow,” a state in which readers are both immersed and engaged.
It must be granted that there is some value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment… This is so, however, only under two conditions. First, there must be no danger of losing basic form or orientation, of never coming out. The surprise must occur in an overall framework; the confusions must be small regions in a visible whole. Furthermore, the labyrinth or mystery must in itself have some form that can be explored and in time apprehended. Complete chaos without hint of connection is never pleasurable. – Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City⁵⁷
Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were nonetheless essential to bring about the recognition or the denouement, were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business. – Robertson Davies, The Fifth Business: The Deptford Trilogy²²
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Thick & Thin: "Direct Manipulation" & The Spatial Regimes of Human-Computer Interaction
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Consider a design trajectory, figured on one end by the screens of early command-line computer interfaces and Coleco Vision’s “Donkey Kong” (1981), and on the other, by the more complex and finely rendered spaces depicted in “Tomb Raider III: The Adventures of Lara Croft” (1999) and Apple’s newly-released Mac OS X.
Lara Croft runs, jumps, tumbles, and blasts away at her opponents in visual fields that are more subtle and perspectivally sophisticated than those inhabited by Mario and “Donkey Kong.” The responses of the screen images to the user’s keyboard, gamepad, or joystick have been enormously enhanced, in both quickness and variety. But the fundamental spatial tropology – the tropology of space: abstract space, empty space, space that doesn’t get in the way of players or their agents on the other side of the glass – remains consistent, from the earliest to the most recent examples of both desktop computing interfaces and computer gaming. The conceptual and psychological commonplace that grounds play in the domains inhabited by Mario and Lara, and the principles of “direct manipulation” in the graphical user interface, is the assumption of a permeable field of agency, essentially free of substance or resistance, or marked only by the sorts of resistance that a more efficient game pad, a faster processor, or a more “intuitive” visual metaphor, may eliminate.
In this paper, I propose that the “thin” spaces typical of the modern GUI and videogaming appear self-evident or “intuitive” to users and designers because they draw upon conventions of spatial thought that strategically foreclose traits of actual embodied encounters of human-computer interaction. It is desirable, I argue, to reconceive the forms of space commonly presupposed by the contemporary discourses of the GUI – to grasp these spaces materially, not as empty domains, open to the user’s purposive manipulations of objects sited within them, but rather as persistently impermeable, resistant – “thick” – spaces, in which objects are only imperfectly manipulated and incompletely detachable from the lived moment of the interaction.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Towards Computer Game Studies
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Part 1: Narratology and Ludology
It is relatively stress-free to write about computer games as nothing too much has been said yet, and almost anything goes. The situation is pretty much the same in what comes to writing about games and gaming in general. The sad fact with alarming cumulative consequences is that they are under-theorized; there are Huizinga, Caillois and Ehrmann of course, and libraries full of board game studies, in addition to game theory and bits and pieces of philosophy-most notably those of Wittgenstein’s – but they won’t get us very far with computer games. So if there already is or soon will be a legitimate field for computer game studies, this field is also very open to intrusions and colonization from the already organized scholarly tribes. Resisting and beating them is the goal of our first survival game in this paper, as what these emerging studies need is independence, or at least relative independence.
Title: What Does a Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like?
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Introduction
The new electronic spaces that I am interested in have the following characteristics in common:
• They are large. Many server sites now support interchanges between hundreds and thousands of people. Usenet newsgroups and large listservs are the most common such sites. I call these usually text-based, usually asynchronous interchanges very large-scale conversations.
• They are network-based. More specifically, they support network-based communities. The boundaries of these spaces and the communities they support are not geographic boundaries. Communities of artists, writers, and scientists are examples of pre-Internet, network-based communities (communities based upon a social network and some shared interests or needs). Network-based communities are of a different kind than geographically based communities like neighborhoods, cities, and nations. Network-based communities (for example, the scientific community) have continued to grow with the help of new network technologies, but contemporary technologies have also engendered a variety of new communities (for example, the open source community).
• They are public. As more and more people gain access to the Internet from their homes or schools rather than from their workplaces, the Internet increasingly becomes a space for public discussion and exchange. Very large-scale conversations are a common event within the confines of large industry (for example, the huge number of communications among thousands of people required to design and build an airplane or coordinate production of a film). However, these have a distinctly different character than the very large-scale conversations in which people are participating as individuals rather than as employees. The Internet is engendering the production of new public spaces that may offer the means to reinvigorate public discourse.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Digital Ontologies: The Ideality of Form in/and Code Storage - or - Can Graphesis Challenge Mathesis?
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2000: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The attempt to understand the connections that link human thought to its representation through the act of formgiving (in language, image, or signs) is central to Western philosophy and aesthetics. In every generation, some version of this question has been posed: If it were possible to understand the logic of human thought, would there be a perfect representation of it in some unambiguous, diagrammatic symbol set of entities and dynamic relations among them? Informed by classical metaphysics and philosophy, this question also has a life not only in contemporary struggles that are carried on in the varied and very different domains of visual art, information design, and computer graphics, but also in cognitive science, with its legacy of symbolic logic, artificial intelligence debates, and a disposition towards the intersection of speculative and specifiable apprehensions of what constitutes thought.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Expressive AI
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2000: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has produced a rich set of technical practices and interpretive conventions for building machines whose behavior can be narrated as intelligent activity. Artists have begun to incorporate AI practices into cultural production – into the production of artifacts and experiences that function as art within the cultural field. In this paper, I describe my own practice of AI-based cultural production: expressive AI. I will attempt to provide a preliminary understanding of this practice by both situating expressive AI with respect to other discourses on AI and by working inductively from my own Al-based art work. I will first provide a brief description of three of my AI-based art pieces. These will serve as concrete examples to ground the rest of the discussion. I will then describe the expressive AI practice by first situating it with respect to the GOFAl/interactionist AI debate, then by describing the central organizing metaphors of authorial and interpretive affordance, and finally by providing a preliminary set of desiderata for expressive AI practice.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The SF of Technoscience: The Politics of Simulation & A Challenge for New Media Art
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2000: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“In fact, science fiction … is no longer anywhere, and it is everywhere, in the circulation of models, here and now, in the very principle of the surrounding simulation.”
— JEAN BAUDRILLARD
“Biology is becoming an information science … and it will take increasingly powerful computers and software to gather, store, analyze, model and distribute that information.”
— BEN ROSEN
Chairman, Compaq Computer Corporation
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
— RICHARD FEYNMAN
One of the significant characteristics of the last decade, and the new millennium, is the way in which advancements in biotechnology and medicine have come to the attention of the public, through the media, as one of the primary areas in which the future is being vigorously imagined. What distinguishes biotechnology from other sciences is the way in which it is increasingly fusing genetic code with computer code, encapsulated in what Incyte Pharmaceuticals calls “point-and-click biology.”
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Hypermedia, Eternal Life, and the Impermanence Agent
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1999: technOasis
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
We look to media as memory, and a place to memorialize, when we have lost.
Hypermedia pioneers envisioned the ultimate media within the ultimate archive, with each element in continual (versioned) flux and constant new additions – dynamism without loss.
Instead we have the Web, where “Not Found” is a daily message. Projects such as the Internet Archive and Afterlife dream of fixing this uncomfortable impermanence. Marketers, instead, promise agents that will make the Web comfortable through filtering (hiding the impermanence and overwhelming profusion that its dynamism engenders).
The Impermanence Agent operates differently. It begins by telling my stories – my grandmother’s stories – and as users browse, the images and texts they pull from the Web are interwoven with her stories. In time, the original stories are lost. New stories, collaboratively created, have taken their place.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: INTERACTIVITY AND RITUAL: Body Dialogues with Artificial Systems
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1999: technOasis
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Digital technologies provide dialogues with artificial systems, allowing acquisition and communication of biological signals with electronic databases. As interfaces and computers capture, manage, and transform signals, they generate new forms of life. In my latest interactive installations, bodies repeat behaviours, simulating a sort of ritual or ceremony with responses in real time. Stored data managed by neural networks offer states of unpredictability, and the adaptive capacity system determines the emergence of a “living environment” in self-regeneration. The variables place us within elliptical zones and build up present times in which the actions of the amalgamated body with complex systems enable exchanges in cyberspace. In a psychic and physical exploration of the environment, mixing natural/artificial, analogic/digital, real/virtual, we experience consciousness propagations and think, dream, and understand our human condition enhanced by technologies.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Virtual Imaginations Require Real Bodies
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1999: technOasis
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Virtual reality (VR) works of art conjure up ideas such as virtual sex, virtual frontiers, and to some, disembodiment. Those who uphold the notion of disembodiment claim that works of art that embrace VR technology necessarily encourage a state that affirms the Cartesian duality in which people can leave Earth, nature, and body behind. I counter this notion because I do not believe that the mind can be separated from the body; rather, the two are inexplicably intertwined.
Although this “Gibsonesque” scenario is rich with metaphors and metaphysical implications, I suggest that any virtual space is an embodied experience because the imagination of the artist and the viewer refer back to the body, to nature, and to the Earth. From the physical reality of Earth and our bodies, we may understand and perceive many more realities, perhaps facilitated by virtual space art installations. In fact, I maintain that even the virtual is real. It is a perception that is a real experience, which makes reference to our encounters with the physical world and our flesh.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: A Zooming Sketchpad, a Multiscale Narrative: Pad++, PadDraw, Gray Matters
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Pad++, a general-purpose zoomable substrate For creating and interacting with structured information, is under development by researchers at the University of New Mexico and New York University. All Pad++ objects support zooming, and there ore mechanisms for navigating through a multiscale space using panning, zooming, and hyperlinks. Pad++ includes a number of efficiency mechanisms that help maintain interactive framerates with large and complicated graphical scenes.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Agree to Disagree Online
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Any collaboration is a negotiation. While most artistic teams hide the filibustering, intellectual posturing, and shifting alliances that lie behind their decisions, Agree to Disagree Online brings these facets of collaboration to the fore.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: An American Gothic... or a Pound of Prevention
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Manifest destiny: In “Excerpts from the Vancouver Lectures,” Jack Spicer relates the story: Yeats, 1918, a train bound for Los Angeles. His wife in a trance, automatic writing, taking dictation from “spooks.” Yeats poses the question: “What are you here for?” And the spooks reply: “We are here to give metaphors for your poetry.”
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Computer Graphics as Stainless Steel Output
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
A history of hand-held graphics might include Tarot cards, playing cards, the carte de visite, business cards, credit cards, and more recently telephone cards. While each of these subsets has a differing history and function, they also have shared attributes that continue to attract our interest. Proportions, scale, content, cast, and techniques of production all merge with more recent communication functions. Borrowing from these physical and conceptual traditions suggests possibilities for an artist using digital typography to create a kind of permanent ephemera. Incorporating stainless steel output offers an option for the designer to employ a technology similar to computer chip technology and to investigate the conversion of digitized art to artifact.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: CyberHuman Dances Series: An Articulation of Body, Space, and Motion in Performance
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The CyberHuman Dance Series is an experimental dance work exploring simulations of physical and virtual phenomena in the context of performance. By integrating innovative digital technology with the choreographic and design process, this work investigates all aspects of design and performance in cyberspace, with particular emphasis on issues of real and perceived boundaries between virtual space and real space, and the possibility of a blurred distinction between two intersecting worlds.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Design Speech Acts: "How to do things with words" in Virtual Communities
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Cyberspace is language-based (cf. Cicognani, 1996, 1997; Winograd,1987), and so are virtual communities. The author argues that virtual communities are ideal places to experience and enhance a language for design, and for designers.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Disability in the Arts
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Life with a physical disability has allowed me a unique and humbling perspective that has manifested in my art work. I create art with and for people who live with various types of physical and/or mental limitations.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Dream Grrrls: Metaphors
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The process of designing multi-user virtual environments (VE) is similar to the process of designing code or imagery, in that it is necessary to passionately maintain a catalog of ideas and references. VE design combines these passions to construct a consistent graphical user interface (GUI) with metaphors for exploration and self-reflection in a collaborative team effort.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Dynamic3: Interactive Physics and Physicality In Three Dimensions
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
We lose the joy of pliability in our interactions with the computer when we get lost in a cacophony of visual iconic references. There is no grace. Dynamic3 emphasizes the subtleties of interaction. Not what is seen, but what is felt. A physics-based computational model and a fluid physical interface amplify the expression.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Genderbender, Smartstall, The Automatic Confession Machine
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This presentation reviews three works: Genderbender, Smart Stall (exhibited in The Bridge: SIGGRAPH 96 Art Show), and The Automatic Confession Machine (exhibited in Machine Culture, SIGGRAPH 93).
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Gradus: Revealing the Shape of the English Language
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Is there a way to make a meaningful shape from a collection of the individual words of the English language? What would that shape look like? Why would this approach be preferable to a traditional representation — a printed dictionary, for example? These were among the questions we asked when we set out to visualize the English language as a single entity.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Hand Held Tools for Navigating Information
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
If computers are tools for manipulating information, they have been notoriously poor at using the hands of the people who use them. By engaging the hands of the user, it is possible to get a literal handle on complex visualizations of information. In this project, the goal is to design a more practical, productive, and fluid kind of interface.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: izzy bombus and the story of flight
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
izzy bombus and the story of flight is a prototype CD-ROM consisting of an animated story with associated games and educational activities for children ages four through seven. Izzy, a young bumblebee, discovers that according to the laws of aerodynamics, the bumblebee cannot fly. Dismayed but undeterred, izzy collects implements from a kitchen drawer to build a flying machine and asks her viewers for help with the construction. With izzy in the cockpit, the viewer pushes the launch button, the countdown begins, the smoke swirls … lift-off!
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Making Caricatures with Morphing
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The talent of a caricaturist is important when using traditional media such as pencil and paper. Since traditional media are not interactive, caricaturists must complete the caricatures in their minds before starting to draw. Since this ability does not exist in most people, it has always been considered some sort of magical talent of a gifted few.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Multi-Media Metamorphosis (or making the medium shoe fit)
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
A large portion of my work has entailed taking a theme or story and giving it life in a variety of media. The Mutant Gene & Tainted KoolAid Sideshow CD-ROM (completed October 1995) is a navigable interpretation of a series of performances I staged in 1994, by the same name. The performances incorporated live and pre-recorded, multiple-monitor and projected video; animation; text; both sequenced and live instrumental music; and dramatic artifacts and performance elements such as masks and dance.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Multimedia Interactive Artist's Archive and Retrospective
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Creative options and challenges: a digital art archive grows into a dynamic showcase with new views of the art.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Technophobia
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Technophobia is a collection of original multimedia art in an interactive exhibition. In addition to the original multimedia artwork, the CD-ROM includes a studio visit with each artist.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Virtual Harvester Project
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The Virtual Harvester Project is an effort to address the need For global commitment and action to fight one of human society’s most basic problems: food insecurity. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) created the Poverty Clock to illustrate how quickly poverty grows. Each successive digit on the clock indicates another person living on less than $1.00 (U.S.) per day. Synchronized to the Poverty Clock’s ticking, one new plant sprouts on the virtual corn field; yielding approximately 47 plants each minute.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Using Video to Create Avatars in Virtual Reality
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The VideoAvatar Library is a collection of functions that works in conjunction with the CAVE Library and can be used to add static, photo-realistic, three-dimensional representations of remote users, as well as other objects or agents, to virtual reality applications. The process involves obtaining views from 360 degrees around the person, then selecting two of these images, one for each eye, to represent the user in 3D space.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Getting Women Wired: New Connections in Art and Technology*
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1996: The Bridge
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Does computer science in its theory and practice embody discrimination nation against women, and if so, how does embedded discrimination work itself out in applications to the arts? This essay, guided by this introductory question, will connect concerns of discrimination against women in the field of computer science with issues that arise in the development of theory and application in the emerging electronic computer based arts. Bias against women in computing, I will suggest, occurs in the epistemology or knowledge construction of modern science, works itself out in knowledge construction of modern science, works itself out in knowledge distribution and socialization processes, alienates women, ethnic groups, and class groupings, limits access, and skews applications in the arts.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Illusions/Delusions
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1996: The Bridge
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This presentation describes the author’s use of stereoscopic computer imaging procedures to construct artworks that explore the viewer’s relationship to virtual/pictorial space.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Internet Hybrids and the New Aesthetic of Worldwide Interactive Events
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1996: The Bridge
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This essay discusses interactive art events realized on the Internet in conjunction with other electronic media, such as television, radio, telephones, and telerobotics. The essay includes references to material that can be immediately accessed on the Internet. The reader is invited to read by the glow of the CRT, letting digital strokes carry him or her from one country to another.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: ParkBench Public-Access Web Kiosks
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1996: The Bridge
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
ParkBench kiosks address the problem of elitism in cyberspace. The Internet’s information and connectivity resources seem to promise universal access. Our aim is to reach out to those who lack the prerequisites for getting online.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: SPACE|R A C E
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1996: The Bridge
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
SPACE|R A C E, an interactive multimedia piece about the 1960s U.S. Civil Rights movement and space program, encourages viewers to experience paradox and ambiguity as natural parts of human existence in a complex world.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Telematic and Telepresence Installations
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1996: The Bridge
Writing Type: Sketch / Art Talk
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
My work with telecommunications started in 1985, when I created a virtual gallery that could be accessed via the videotext system. Since 1989, I have been working with Ed Bennett on the Ornitorrinco project of telepresence installations. The basic structure of these installations is comprised of a wireless telerobot, regular phone lines (both for vision and remote control), and remote spaces. Viewers become participants as they transport themselves to the remote body and navigate the remote space freely by pressing the keys on a familiar telephone.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Bridge
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1996: The Bridge
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
In the dream, I am driving over the Charleston Bay Bridge in South Carolina. As I reach the crest of the bridge, my car veers, lifts, and suddenly, without the car, I am flying high over the bridge and the bay. It is snowing, and I am very cold, high in the dark blue night above an even darker blue sea. I realize I am numb. I am dead, I think. It is not an unhappy thought. Thinking I am dead brings a wonderfully exhilarating and freeing sensation. I am at peace.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Teaching Cyber Art, Or How A Painter Copes With Computers In London
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1995: Digital Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Walking back from my painting studio on a summer evening, looking up at the electronic flicker of TVs, I do wonder … how can a painting do anything in a living room? Does the future lie in the hands of the cyber artist? Hold on. I am a painter, and I use computers, and that combination makes a lot of sense, though nowhere in England can you study – or teach – the two together. Computer work is a different kind of art because it’s cyber-this or cyber-that? Oh. Even when it’s flavor-free? At ISEA 5 in Helsinki I wandered out of the interactive show and got absorbed in the early 20th Century Finnish painting next door, self portraits in log cabins, a solitary fir tree losing its snow. Spring. I resolve to give my work more of a lived-in texture, make it connect with what I saw, give it a temperature, make it more reflective.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Transformed And Transforming Image In The Shift From Print To Digital Culture
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1995: Digital Gallery
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper investigates issues germane to “reading” images in a digital medium by considering both visual language as it is constrained by hardware and software, and visual culture as it is changed by a medium that pushes us towards a thought idiom that embodies multiplicity and simultaneity.
Images in and of a culture reflect our cultural understandings of ourselves. Images in any culture are constantly changing, and as they change, they transform the culture. Likewise, as a culture undergoes change, the images of the culture are transformed. In this way, image and how we read images are both the trace element of and a visual wake following the shifts in our collective understandings. Image operates both as an integral part of an organic, changing energy system that generates momentum towards a culture shift and as a footprint that references visual metaphors in describing a cultural shift that is taking—or has taken—place.
To understand the transformed and transforming nature of images in culture, we must first understand the components of the image, particularly the compositional or visual language and the cultural context of the image. What sits between the visual language and the cultural context of the image is the medium in which the image appears. It is not that the medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan has suggested; rather the medium creates both a cultural context and a medium-particular visual language, contributing significantly to the meaning we “read” from an image.
Medium in a larger sense designates the boundaries of our collective understandings – our epistemology – in the ways in which it is integral to both how we “read” the cultural context and visual language of the text and how that constructed “reading” defines our thought idiom. Just as the medium in a fine arts context creates a medium-specific visual grammar and a cultural context from which the artist is able to shape an image from his or her own inner vision or knowing, so too does medium in the larger sense define what kinds of “pictures” we collectively create to understand or know the world. In this way, the digital medium is much more than a new tool or toy used by visual artists. Rather, this paper argues that our tentative steps towards using this new medium represent a shift as significant as the move from oral culture to print culture — that we are in the midst of a shift from print culture to digital culture.
Through a comparison of images based on Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and the Mona Lisa, this paper lays a foundation for similar comparisons of hypertexts which use visual images. By looking at the characteristics of digital visual language and cultural context and noting the similarities and differences between them and the more familiar print culture visual language and cultural contexts, this paper considers issues germane to reading images in the digital medium.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Computer Sculpture: New Horizons
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1994: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
An essay that focuses on opportunities for a new approach to computer-generated sculpture through the use of the interactive, user participatory attributes associated with virtual reality technology. The text briefly reviews the progress of sculpture from a static, physical art form through the use of computers as sculpture visualization tools, towards true ‘virtual sculpture’ as a metaphysical, three-dimensional experience. The author discusses two of his own recent prototype virtual reality pieces to demonstrate his projection of possible future trends in the viewers’ immersion in sculpture as an activity and an art form, not merely as an observer of a set of objects.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Aesthetics and Practice of Designing Interactive Computer Events
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1994: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Much confusion and hyperbole surrounds discussions of the aesthetics of interactive computer events. This essay works to clarify some of this confusion by analyzing the differences between interactive and non-interactive events, reviewing the variety of forms included under the umbrella term “interactivity,” and investigating the theoretical rationales offered to support claims of interactivity’s superiority derived from psychological, political, art historical, and techno-historical sources. Building on this analysis, the essay suggests extensions to current GUI design canons that uniquely attend to interactivity as an aesthetic issue. It also investigates the challenging interactivity possibilities of emerging technologies.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Engineering of Vision and the Aesthetics of Computer Art
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1994: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The rise of modern image industries, such as computer graphics, human factors research, or computer vision, can be seen as a part of the shift to the post-industrial society of perceptual labor. In contemporary society, human vision has become the key instrument of labor: the channel of communication between human and machine. If the industry aims to make human vision as productive and as efficient as possible, the computer artist, in contrast, can be defined as a designer of bad interfaces: interfaces that are inefficient, wasteful, confusing.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: There are No Philosophic Problems Raised by Virtual Reality
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1994: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
There is widespread agreement that virtual reality presents serious new challenges to perceived ways of thinking about such fundamental concepts as reality, simulation, representation, perception, and sensation. It has been seen as a practice that might have deep consequences for conventional ways of construing the mind-body problem, including the minimal requirements for a body, requirements for the coherent reception of sensation, and the relation between reason and intuition. Most fundamental of all, it has been said to entail a new kind of space, differing from Cartesian and other spaces and requiring new definitions of space and form. This paper argues, on the contrary, that virtual reality does not raise any new philosophic problems.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Feedback to Immersion
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Cybernetics speculates about the coupling of machine and person. Since Norbert Wiener’s seminal Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (1948), the trajectory of technology development has been one of an increasing possibility of achieving that interface. In the past decade, the possibility of defining a relationship not simply between but within technology has become plausible. Yet the commercialization of cybernetics comes neither as a technical panacea nor without deep ethical concerns. As machines mutate into biology, the philosophical and political values of technology are challenged to confront more than conceptualized situations but rather to theorize the materiality of programmed or enhanced being. At the same time, the development of”realities” that are characterized as immersive or virtual are beginning to surround experience. The penetration of technology within the body and the socialization of simulated realities is more than a signifier of technological progress-it marks a transformation of knowledge, of biology, and of the cultural order in which knowledge is linked with ideology, biology with identity in terms of a technological imperative not necessarily connected with necessity. The issues raised by this potential for the narrowing of the boundary between technology and experience are vast. In many ways the development of several parallel technologies has reached a crucial point.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Interaction and Play
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“I prefer the form of seduction for it stems from a mysterious duality/confrontational relationship, an enticing, intense, and covert attraction between the living and the non-living. It is not a form of response, but a challenge, a duel, imbued with an intriguing sense of distance and constant antagonism on which the rules of theme are also based.” – Jean Baudrillard
Reflecting upon the frantic commotion surrounding the new media, one can easily gain the impression of a world turned upside down. Naturally, there are technologies available today that in the course of evolution have attained a certain degree of complexity and perfection offering mindboggling possibilities not only for the entertainment industry but for the artist as well. However, when we consider the perilously desolate state of computer art, it is difficult to understand why in our so-called post-modern era-inured as we are to the euphoria of technological advances-so much rhetorical and institutional endeavor is being invested in persuading artists to take up technologies that neither they nor their recipients really comprehend. Traditional modernists might, of course, take a more balanced view and contend that a different artistic concept is needed. They may also view that the arts simply have to yield to state-ofthe-art technology and its inherent forms of perception in order to remain contemporary, or offer viable alternatives to the prevailing forms of application. But occasionally it is difficult to avoid the impression that instead of the artist creating the art, it is the art and the artists that now have to be manufactured for a technology, which has not arrived but has made deep inroads into our daily existence. If we exclude musicians and composers, artists have been very reticent in availing themselves of the computer, in the area of computer graphics, it was the technicians, programmers, and scientists who first submitted computer images as art. Quite the contrary was true in photography, cinema, or video, where artists soon seized upon this technology and began developing it in the initial phases without the generous support from the state and patrons of the arts.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: It is Interactive—but is it Art?
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“The possibilities of egalitarian, more democratic, constructive forms offering new kinds of interaction, knowledge, and understanding may well be enhanced by the novel capabilities of the new technologies. They will, more than ever before, have to be struggled for.” – Andy Darley
The Myth of Interactivity
“Well, my next thing is going to be something interactive … ” For some years now, this has been a stock answer in interviews with artists, and not only those who already work with electronic and digital technologies. Indeed, “interactive art” seems well on its way to becoming the art form of the 1990s. Yet one shouldn’t let its present visibility delude oneself. Although contemporary interactive art may seem “groundbreaking,” the ground had already been grubbed by such movements as Fluxus and E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) in the 1960s, as well as by a great variety of “postmodern” strategies, emphasizing recycling, deliberate confusion between “the original” and “the copy,” and aiming at repositioning, sometimes to the point of reconstituting, the traditional art audience.
Title: Light and Dark Visions
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Critical theory and cultural studies are increasingly being used to understand the function of the arts in contemporary technology-dominated, postmodern culture. This essay examines the relevance of these analyses to the work of artists who use emerging technologies. The first section reviews core concepts that are useful for understanding art/technology linkages from postmodernist, post-industrialist, and post-structuralist writers. Concepts discussed include the rejection of the modernist idea of a single dominant cultural stream, the demarginalization of diverse voices, the increasing importance of information and the impact of mediated image and representation on ideology and behavior, and the emphasis on deconstructing the language systems and meta-narratives that shape culture.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Old Ideas in New Boxes
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
When we look at ‘cutting edge’ technologies, it is the radical newness that we are encouraged to see. This radical newness helps us forget that technologies arise out of past culture. The generation raised on Buck Rogers grew up to make the space race, and the generation raised on Star Trek are making the Holodeck. In order to understand the historical significance of 3D imaging, we must place it as part of the historical development of the automation of perspective. Lev Manovich has followed this line of study in his essay, as do Paul Virilio and Harun Farocki elsewhere. According to this line of reasoning, we must look at computer graphics, interactivity, and virtual reality as moments in the larger cultural progression of the automation of visual systems.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Soft Future
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Will you see a technological utopia, a city of gleaming metal spires orbiting spacecraft, a world spared from nuclear annihilation and united by a common belief in the benefits of rational progress? Nowadays, probably not. At most your vision is likely to be an end to recession, economic stability for at least a while, a new order of gray-suited bureaucracy. Perhaps you see nothing at all, just a hazy mist of half-forgotten ideals. But when I close my own eyes there is still something there lurking in the background, like a memory chopped up into disparate fragments. It coagulates, forming an surface-it is the surface of a computer screen.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Artistic Origins of Virtual Reality
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The history of virtual reality is often obscured. It is easy to get the impression that the Big Bang occurred at NASA in 1984 and that virtual reality is a triumph of the technical establishment alone. What has been overlooked is the important contributions that artists have made to the development of the field.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Mapping of Space
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
1991 saw two events, of different importance and seemingly unrelated. One was the longawaited publication in English of what can probably be called the single most influential essay of modern art history—Erwin Panofsky’s Die Perspektive als ‘Symbolische Form.’¹ The interest generated around the re-emergence of this legendary essay, written in 1924-1925, demonstrates that the problem of perspectival representation is still felt to be relevant to contemporary culture. The second event was the Gulf War, the outcome of which was largely predetermined by Western superiority in the techniques of perspectival representation.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Virtu-Real Space:
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Essay
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
A significant shift is occurring in the makeup, physical nature, and composition of space as it is experienced in contemporary culture. This shift, which is a direct result of the ubiquitous presence of information technologies in the cultural landscape, signals that physical components alone no longer comprise the infrastructure of the contemporary social environment. The ads, which show American Express cards in locations where they function as architectural elements (i.e., a bridge support, a path on a golf course, a canopy over a restaurant dining area, and others), indicate that it is now a combination of physical components and virtual systems that support and sustain the “real” world. Virtual credit space, symbolized in the advertisements by the credit card, functions not only as structural support for the physical world, but also as solid footing and shelter for the people who live in that world. And since virtual credit space is operationalized by information technologies, it becomes clear in these commercials that the extent to which physical space has been infiltrated by information technologies is both extreme (the cards are pervasive) and covert (no one in the ads notices the cards). Furthermore, because the cards blend into their surroundings unnoticed, these corporate images also indicate that information technologies are our natural setting. It becomes clear, then, that the use of the credit card icon in these commercials represents the extent to which information technologies have become naturalized as an intrinsic part of contemporary social life.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Artistic Frontiers in Virtual Reality
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1992: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
At a conference called “Inner Reality and Outer Space” sponsored by the Jung Institute in San Francisco several years ago, former astronaut Rusty Schweickort told a wonderful story. He was outside the spacecraft, the first astronaut in space without a tether-nothing but a backpack to supply air. His goal was to determine whether a person could move hand-overhand over the surface of the capsule to reenter it, and astronaut Dove Scott was to take pictures of him from inside. The camera jammed, and commander Jim McDivott gave Scott five minutes to try to fix it. For that interval, Schweickort says, he became “the world’s first unemployed astronaut.” He swung out on one arm and regarded the Earth, and at that moment he realized that he had a choice. He asked himself, “Am I going to let it in?” He did, and his life changed.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Aspects of the Aesthetics of Telecommunications
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1992: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
For the past fifteen years, increasing numbers of artists around the world have been working in a collaborative mode using telecommunications. In their “works,” which we shall refer to as “events,” images and graphics are not created as the ultimate goal or the final product, as is common in the fine arts. Employing computers, video, modems, and other devices, these artists use visuals in a much larger, interactive, bi-directional communication context. Images and graphics are created not simply to be transmitted by an artist from one point to another, but to spark a multidirectional visual dialogue with other artists and participants in remote locations. This visual dialogue assumes that images will be changed and transformed throughout the process in the same way that speech gets changed-interrupted, complemented, altered and reconfigured-in a spontaneous face-to-face conversation. Once an event is over, images and graphics stand not as the “result,” but as documentation of the process of visual dialogue promoted by the participants. This unique ongoing experimentation with images and graphics develops and expands the notion of visual thinking by relying primarily on the exchange and manipulation of visual materials as a means of communication. The art events created by telematic or telecommunication artists take place as a movement that animates and unbalances networks structured with relatively accessible interactive media such as telephone, facsimile (fax), personal computers, e-mail, and slow-scan television (SSTV). More rarely, radio, live television, videophones, satellites, and other less accessible means of communication come into play. But to identify the media employed in these “events” is not enough. Instead, one must do away with prejudices that cast off these media from the realm of “legitimate” artistic media and investigate these events as equally legitimate artistic enterprises. This essay partially surveys the history of the field and discusses art events that were either motivated by or conceived specially for telecommunications media. The essay attempts to show the transition, from the early stages, when radio provided writers and artists with a new spatiotemporal paradigm, to a second stage, in which telecommunications media, including computer networks, have become more accessible to individuals and through which artists start to create events, sometimes of global proportions, in which the communication itself becomes the work. Telecom munications art on the whole is, perhaps, a culmination of the process of dematerialization of the art object epitomized by Duchamp and pursued by artists associated with the conceptual art movement, such as Joseph Kossuth. If now the object is totally eliminated and the artists are absent as well, the aesthetic debate finds itself beyond action as form, beyond idea as art. It founds itself in the relationships and interactions between members of a network.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Reality Versus Imagination
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1992: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Fifteen years ago I exhibited some work that explored unusual perturbations in otherwise consistent color interpolation. The gallery was a part of University College, London and several scientists saw the show. One, a Polish mathematician and physicist called Andre Lissowski, chased me up. He was interested in the work I had done and wondered if it bore any relationship to other contemporary research into what ore now called non-linear phenomena-port of the field fashionably dubbed Chaos. Chaos studies were still an underground activity at that time and Andre took me along to small back rooms at the Royal Institution and ancient London Colleges where mostly young scientists along with the occasional Nobel laureate discussed the fantastic new ideas that were emerging worldwide.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Bonsai
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1991: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
We are currently witnessing the end of an artistic world. Artists of tomorrow will no longer produce works but something yet to be named. They will no longer create objects but rather types of microuniverses in perpetual evolution.
These universes will be woven with uninterrupted changes, with mobile networks of lines, surfaces, forms, and forces in constant interaction, produced by the coupling of mathematics and calculators. From fractal dragons to cellular automata, from zooids to logic viruses, mathematical beings move and metamorphose in their symbolic spaces. They can change or alter the very laws by which they are constituted. They can provide the virtually autonomous substance of a new, intermediary art. The metaphor of the “symbolic bonsai” has been chosen to render the intermediary “life” of this intermediary art. Why intermediary art?
In an attempt to explain art using the words of language, even the greatest minds diverge to some extent. According to Plato, for example, art is the quest for “likelihood;” according to Hegel it aims to “reveal the truth.”Should art seek likelihood or truth? Is the artist a magician or a prophet? What, in fact, is truth? Plato said truth is a “divine vagabondage,” which undoubtedly is why it remains beyond the reach of art, why he contends we must be satisfied with a “likely” imitation.
Since we are not gods, we cannot “vagabond;” we need laws. And this need applies to art. Thus, art must also be a science. As a product of human activity, art must obey rules inherent to the techniques used to create it. But art is also sensible representations, and as such refuses the domination of abstraction and laws. The best way to resist laws is to change them—constantly. Art itself must therefore be change—perpetual change.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Superanimism: The practice of formalised imagery
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1991: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This essay discusses the dichotomy between visual, animated images and the abstract computer program that generates them. This digital and numerical base adds an extra dimension to the animation, whereby the creative experience is divided into a number of different levels.
Digital images are informed by the status of their algorithmic source, creating in the viewer a kind of numerical perception, thereby introducing scientific knowledge into our understanding of the visual. But because of the computer’s formalism and arbitrariness, the relation between algorithmic source and the electronic visual effect is not stable. Imagery is of a different experiential type to logical structures, and this causes their disjuncture or alienation, although they are logically and deterministically connected. Thus synthetic images do not appear “human” or manmade but objective or “natural,” like photographs.
The underlying algorithm is so contingent that in terms of being an accessible entity it hardly exists at all without reference to its sensory manifestations. The actual substance of the animate is diffused into so many different levels at once, it loses its ontological identity. These effects lead to a description of a computer animation as an object able to vitalize both tangible and intangible spaces and become a super-animate.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Emperor's New Art?
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1991: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Premature over-promotion of any and all “artwork” created with computers has caused art critics to feel as if they are being asked to admire the Emperor’s New Clothes. At the same time, computer artists accuse art critics of being uninformed, myopic, and hopelessly out of touch with the new media concerns.
Artists visiting computer art shows disdain the oft-exhibited science fiction grotesqueries masquerading as art: Bad critical reception is said to be because of this “nerd” aesthetic. On the other hand, technical-minded factions also wonder when computer artists will actually learn to program, or produce something besides canned paint system imagery and indecipherable bad video tapes. Such squabbling and shifting of the blame from one group to the next is not the way to correct the problem.
Adding to the problem is the fact that standards by which we have evaluated computer art have evolved outside of the “high art” community and tend to be too low. Often the concepts of science and tools of technology are merely appropriated and exhibited as art without true artistic transformation or social context. Furthermore, when work refers to contemporary art world trends, it often does so as a form of imitation or serves merely to reinforce what we already know about image making. Without true understanding of either art or science and technology, this work can hardly help being superficial.
We need to fairly evaluate work using standards as high as those by which the rest of the arts are judged. We need to extend beyond the isolation of our small community and address broader issues. Most importantly, we need to take advantage of the uniqueness of computing and push its properties to their limits. Only as these issues are addressed and resolved will computer art gain in significance and authenticity.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Computer Graphics as Allegorical Knowledge: Electronic Imagery in the Sciences
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1990: Digital Image-Digital Cinema
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This informal paper studies the effects of the recent introduction of computer-generated imagery on the practice of science and its function in understanding the world. It intends to introduce the subject of computerized visualization for scientific purposes into a wider debate, to show the diversity of issues involved-scientific, cultural and philosophical-and to build a context in which they can be critiqued. The author seeks to show the variety of scientific imaging and its influences on scientific knowledge; as both experiments and results are increasingly expressed in terms of imagery, the image assumes an integrity of its own and the object to which it refers becomes obscured. This leads to a shift of focus away from abstract theory as the embodiment of knowledge to the ascension of an allegorical image-based science with computer graphics as its natural language.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Computer Graphics: Effects of Origins
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1990: Digital Image-Digital Cinema
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
New forms of art and technology are frequently cast in the mode of old forms, just as other aspects of material and symbolic culture have been. Only when these new forms become available to the larger population can they affect cultural patterns of maintenance and change. The author traces the evolution from alphanumeric hard copy, static and dynamic screen images, through objects and events that are not screen-based, to dynamic, interactive, multi-sensory output. The effects of origins and prior practices in both technology and art on form, content, material, technique, meaning and purpose of computer graphics are explored. Speculation regarding possible and probable futures are raised.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Digital Dilemmas
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1990: Digital Image-Digital Cinema
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Computer imagery is fraught with divers conundrums and paradoxes associated with the fact that it is both abstract and concrete. It confounds familiar ways of understanding appearance and reality. We can begin to resolve the perplexity by using the idea of recursion to contrast digital imaging with picturing. It is particularly useful to explore the concept of an interface and to study its role in the imaging system. Digital images cannot be understood outside the context of the complete interactive system in which they occur.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Digital Image-Digital Cinema: The Work of Art in the Age of Post-Mechanical Reproduction
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1990: Digital Image-Digital Cinema
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Computers are transforming existing art forms and allowing new kinds of art forms to be developed. Because the computer is primarily a machine for processing information, not a machine for making objects, it provides a malleable medium that provides the artist with a large variety of tools for manipulating sense data. The work that contains the result of the artist’s creativity is the software and the data, not any particular image or output produced using that software. The ultimate goal of artmaking using computers, in this light, is not to create art objects but to create dynamic art subjects, to produce families of aesthetically interesting outputs, or art performances, which are as different from each other as possible within the constraints of the software. This situates computer art within a larger context of the study and development of artificial life. To create significant artworks of this type, it will be necessary to improve the computer’s capacity to be an autonomous artmaking subject; this will require the extension of the computer’s senses, the expansion of its capabilities, and means for the computer to provide sensory inputs to the human nervous system and to other computers.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Digital Image-Digital Photography
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1990: Digital Image-Digital Cinema
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The SIGGRAPH 1990 Art Show Committee decided to sponsor an exhibition of works that concentrate on the interaction of photographic imagery and computer technology [1]. This exhibition came about because of one interesting aspect of computer-mediated artworks that has been developing over the last several years. As the curator of this exhibition, I chose to put together a group of works that investigate not only the technical combination of these media but also the conceptual basis for choosing such tools of investigation, collaboration and production.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Film Theory for the Digital World: Connecting the Masters to the New Digital Cinema
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1990: Digital Image-Digital Cinema
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This article examines the role that theories of photographic cinema play in the criticism of digital cinema. The theories of Georges Melies, Vachel Lindsay, Lev Kuleshov, Andre Bazin and Rudolf Arnheim-critics, theoreticians and filmmakers, the key-stones of this work-have proven pertinent to the advancing technology of other cinematic forms. Their ideas have applicability to specific aspects of digital cinema, including the manipulation of illusory space, discrete and explicit control of cinematic elements, the transformation of world spaces into screen space and the role of realistic imagery in determining the content of a cinematic work. Parallels can be drawn between the ideas of these theorists, most of whom wrote during the infancy of photographic cinema, on the developing state of film and that of current digital cinema.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Image Quality and Viewer Perception
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1990: Digital Image-Digital Cinema
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Improving the quality of digital images can have great impact on information storage and transfer, pushing the feasibility of image databases well beyond existing practical limits. How good do images have to be? Among the considerations for selecting image quality is the extent to which viewers can discriminate among variations in quality. What differences in resolution and dynamic range (bit-depth) can they see? Groups of art historians were asked to rate a series of displayed test images; the results show how participants’ responses compared with the actual range of image quality. Practical implications of viewers’ perceptions are discussed.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Language and the Early Cinema
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1990: Digital Image-Digital Cinema
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The following short excerpt from Film [1] is all but unknown to the readers of the English version of the book as well as to those of the other translations. The edition of 1957, titled Film As Art [2], on which all these translations are based, was prepared by the author in the conviction that only the essential sections, dealing with the nature of the visual medium, were still relevant whereas much of what had been observed in the infancy days of the sound film was no longer worth saying. A complete English version of the German original of 1932 had been published in 1933 by Faber and Faber in London in a translation by L. M. Sieveking and Ian F. D. Morrow but has vanished of course long ago even from most libraries. The following few pages, slightly retouched by the author, will give today’s readers a taste of the principles that governed discussions of the media in those early days.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Not-Art Digital Images: An Artist's Perspective
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1990: Digital Image-Digital Cinema
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Working with the New York State Police and the Nassau County Medical Examiners Office, a forensic anthropologist, a forensic medical photographer and an imaging systems artist attempted to reconstruct a face from the skull of a young woman. Facial feature components selected from police identification kits were digitized and manipulated to match control points and overlaid onto a digitized version of the skull. In this way a series of images was created that were called ‘not-art’ even though an artistic aspect was present.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Temporal Coherence with Digital Color
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1990: Digital Image-Digital Cinema
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
To structure time with abstract visual materials requires a visual grammar of line, shape and color. Color is especially problematic, difficult to measure in all but the simplest applications; the literature of color theory and harmony is often confusing. To devise a syntax for structuring time with color, one can turn to the concepts of tension-release, of neutral, balanced and weighted color domains and of discrete computer raster images; they help to create and measure time-based color compositions. In para-metrically defined color palettes, Color Study #7 (a computer-generated animated film) demonstrates the application of these ideas to a simple and effective compositional approach. Codifying this now common film-making practice, the author hopes to encourage others interested in aesthetically strengthened visual presentation to explore and develop time-based visual grammars.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: A Brief History of SIGGRAPH Art Exhibitions: Brave New Worlds
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1989: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
In 1981, The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics (ACM/SIGGRAPH) sponsored its first exhibition of computer art in conjunction with the annual conference on computer graphics. The 1989 Art Show will be the ninth SIGGRAPH exhibition of computer-aided art. The present effort can not be understood fully without examining the background and scope of previous exhibitions. During this short history SIGGRAPH Art Shows have become important to computer artists since they are the major sites for the exhibition of new work.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Art and the Information Revolution
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1989: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The author expresses his opinion that new imagemaking technology is providing an interdisciplinary language and creating a requirement for generalists rather than specialists. This new technology is also initiating a paradigm shift in those disciplines that make use of it. Lack of acknowledgment of such effects, particularly in the area of higher education, could lead to significant problems that, in the longer term, could affect manufacturing industry and national economic performance. One solution is to involve practitioners of non-applied disciplines (such as fine arts and pure science and mathematics) that have already adapted to a similar paradigm change and whose perception of the new tools and techniques is likely to be less parochial and more flexible.
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