SIGGRAPH 2006: Intersections

• Janice M. Glowski
• Margit Rosen
• Bruce Wands
• Charles A. Csuri

This panel explores the computer art of Charles A. Csuri, an artist, recognized by Smithsonian Magazine as “the father of digital art and animation,” and includes discussion of his works from 1963 to the present. In this rare opportunity, we will also hear reflections from the pioneering artist himself, now Professor Emeritus and Artist in Residence at The Ohio State University. This art panel is presented in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition, Charles A. Csuri: Beyond Boundaries, 196

• Paul Hertz

No abstract available.

• Dan L. Baldwin
• Michael S. Daubs
• John B. Ludwick

On October 15, 1997, the first-ever cartoon produced solely for the web made its premiere [Sullivan 1997]. Spumco, a Hollywood-based animation house formed by “Ren & Stimpy” creator John Kricfalusi, commonly known as John K., produced the first installment of The Goddamn George Liquor Program after experimentation with Marcomedia’s popular animation and interface-development program, Flash [Tanner 2001]. Although only eight one-minute episodes of the program were produced, the web cartoon launched a new style of animation, which has since earned an unofficial nickname: “Flashimation.” The purpose of this paper is to explore the origins and effects of this type of animation; examine the forces that turned animators towards the web, its visual style, and the meanings with which it is associated; and the effect Flashimation has had on modern animation and the current animation community. Several threads of thought explain the evolution and culturalization of the new-media phenomenon known as Flashimation. Television animation, increasing access to and preference for the internet, the technological restrictions of this new medium, and the availability of animation software itself have coalesced to produce a major change in the cultural reconceptualization and consumption of modern animation. Collectively, they explain a complex and layered transition from “kid-vid” cartoons to short and crude forms of sophomorically humorous animation produced specifically for an adult audience.

• William Latham
• Karl Sims
• Yoichiro Kawaguchi
• Andy Lomas

This panel brings together leading experts of generative and genetic art from the past 25 years, all of whose work has been featured at the annual SIGGRAPH conferences during this period. The panelists examine a range of topics including: “chance and creativity,” “can art be an equation?” “the procedural and generative software toolbox,” “artist as god,” “the creative peaks and troughs of traveling through multidimensional parameter space,” and “genetic art into genetic engineering?” With the gr

• Lizzie Muller
• Ernest Edmonds

This paper describes the development of laboratory concepts in the making and curating of interactive art, in which the exhibition becomes a site for collaboration between curators, artists, and audiences. It describes Beta_space, an experimental public venue that seeks to realise the concept of the exhibition as living laboratory
through the participatory qualities of interactive computer-based art. The paper places this initiative within an emerging phenomenon of hybrid production and exhibition spaces. It argues that the evolution of such concepts has been hampered by the continued distinctions,
within traditional cultural institutions, among art, science and technology, object and experience, creation and consumption.

• Michael Salmond
• Hasan Elahi
• Mike Phillips
• Carlos Rosas

Locative media: the utilization of pervasive, portable, networked, location-aware computing devices that allow for user-defined map­ping and artistic intervention within urban geographies, transmuting them into an experimental canvas. This panel examines the current or future state of locative media practice, establishing an artistic and theoretical discourse on pervasive computing. The advent of an al­ways-on, always-accessible information sphere creates an enhanced reality space that enables c

• Joseph Tekippe

The following paper looks at different ways that space is being dealt with in contemporary visual culture, and attempts to link these evolving modes of spatial representation to emerging technologies, particularly GPS, GIS, and openGL, as well as to suggest links between the depiction and thinking about space in the current moment with similar or related explorations from the history of late-twentieth century avant-garde artistic practice. While this paper is necessarily more suggestive than exhaustive, I’ve made an attempt to choose contemporary visual practices and practitioners that I felt could stand as representatives for larger tendencies in their respective domains. This paper originated as a somewhat personal document, an attempt to situate my recent art practice within a larger historical and cultural context. As such, at times the links between these divergent practices must be made through the sensibility of the author.

• Tomoe Moriyama

When we start to think about “vision,” imaging, and our ways of perceiving the outside world, we must be clear about what we mean. Even in Japan, where imaging technologies play a central role, there are misunderstandings about what “imaging” is and what comes under its umbrella. By “imaging,” I mean the creation of images through any medium that is not simply manual: those that can be traced, reflected, photographed, reproduced, and projected. The term is not restricted to animation, video, film, or other means of creating pictures in motion. “Imaging” encompasses shadow play, magic lantern, anamorphoses, and all the processes of visualization. Since the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (TMMP) opened as a center for photography and other visual media, it has been important to discuss what “imaging” means.

• Ian Gwilt
• Melinda Rackham
• Paul Vanouse
• Ernest Edmonds
• Ted Selker

In coining the phrase “relational aesthetics,” the contemporary French art theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud attempted to define a trend in creative works that configures interactive scenarios in which everyday experiences are the catalyst for audience-driven participation. This panel explores how the tacit activities of urban living are being used to form the foundations for new types of interaction that exploit community life and information-rich environ­ments. Topics include how “relatio

• Andrew Richardson

This paper will examine the use of computer programming in relationship to the practice and approach of traditional crafts, paying specific attention to the ethos of the Arts and Crafts Movement as a model for assessing the use and status of computation in a creative context. In order to consider the role of programming in the context of traditional craft, it is important to provide a brief outline relating to the ethos and practice of craft. What is understood by the term craft, what are its characteristics and outcomes? After considering this, it will then be possible to apply this understanding to the role of programming and its engagement with digital material.

• James Faure Walker

Over the past 10 years, the proportion of painters who use computers in their work has been rising, and rising dramatically. They may not all be expert users, and they probably know next to nothing about digital art or its origins, and nothing at all about its pioneer artists.
They will not have heard of SIGGRAPH. They read Frieze. They probably outnumber hardcore digital artists by a factor of 50 to one. So if we are to speak of the way things are going in “digital art,” they are part of the picture.