SIGGRAPH 2009: Information Aesthetics Showcase

• Victoria Szabo -
  • Duke University

August 3 - 7, 2009

For over 35 years, the SIGGRAPH conference has been the premier venue for showcasing work in computer graphics and interactive techniques, and it has a long history of recognizing beauty in concert with technology. For SIGGRAPH 2009, the conference has developed Information Aesthetics: a new thematic area for talks and exhibitions.

The emergent field of information aesthetics combines a rich variety of technical and artistic disciplines. Designers and new media artists are joining scientific visualization, informatics, and medical imaging specialists to create purposive, predictive, and creative representations of information. SIGGRAPH 2009 is highlighting this field in recognition of the increasingly prominent role that information visualization and data graphics are assuming in our digitally mediated culture.

The 2009 Information Aesthetics Showcase includes 2D and 3D prints, interactive and presentational screen-based works, multimodal installation environments, and physical objects instantiating information. In keeping with this year’s theme, Networking the Senses, the works shown here engage not only the visual, but also auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile modalities. The relationship to information expressed in these exemplary pieces ranges from straightforward visualization of data to fanciful re-invention and transformation of it.

Presenters include computational journalists, visual and material artists, biological and neuro-scientists, graphic designers, scientific visualization developers, historians, cultural theorists, and digital media center collaborators.

The Information Aesthetics theme extends beyond the exhibits themselves. Informal artists talks provide discussion opportunities to visitors in the gallery. In addition, within the main conference program we are hosting a formal, curated panel discussion on The State of Aesthetic Computing or Info-Aesthetics, as well as offering three practitioner-oriented developer talks. Finally, we are very pleased to welcome Steve Duenes, Graphics Editor from the New York Times, as one of this year’s Keynote Speakers. His works remind us just why Information Aesthetics matters just as much in everyday life as it does in academe or industry.

It is our hope that by bringing this diverse community of innovators together at SIGGRAPH 2009 we can help establish connections that develop this interdisciplinary emergent community further within SIGGRAPH and beyond.

Victoria Szabo Duke University

General Committee:

• C. Nicole Coleman -
  • Stanford University
• Sue Gollifer -
  • University of Brighton
  • ISEA International Headquarters
• Marilenis Olivera -
  • Stanford University
• Jana Whittington -
  • Purdue University, Calumet

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https://www.siggraph.org/s2009/galleries_experiences/information_aesthetics/