SIGGRAPH Asia 2013: Art Gallery

• Ricardo Muñoz

A mischievous Monster, a naive Sidekick, ten shallow Girls, a retired Villain, an apathetic Robot, and a Megalomaniac from outer space live under one roof in the “5 Story Building”. Five simultaneous stories tell the lives of the singular occupants of this confining building. These neighbors carry on with their own ambitions and inherited craziness without realizing that their stories are intertwined in this episodic interactive fiction.

Jean Paul Sartre and “Sleep No More” inspire this experience for digital tablets that explores the nuances and opportunities enabled by the introduction of interactivity in storytelling.

“5 Story Building” is intentionally crafted to show off things that traditional media cannot. This project explores the possibility of multiple simultaneous stories that are part of a bigger plot. These stories develop regardless if they are seen or not: the users’ decisions are not only about what they sees but also, and maybe most importantly, what they decide not to see.

Multiple readings are necessary and voyeurism is encouraged.

• Jordi Puig
• Andrew Perkins
• Aud Sissel Hoel
• Alvaro Cassinelli

A-me is a fictitious memory-evoking apparatus at the intersection of science, art and technology. The system enables users to experience other people’s memories as well as store their own by interacting with a volumetric representation (MR) of a human brain. The user retrieves or stores memories (audio traces) by pointing and clicking at precise voxels locations. Triggered by their exploratory action, a story is slowly revealed and recomposed in the form of whispering voices revealing intimate stories. A-me it’s a public receptacle for private memories, thus exploring the possibility of a collective physical brain.

The installation introduces an original optical see-through AR setup for neuronavigation capable of overlaying a volume rendered MR scan onto a physical dummy head. Implementing such a system also forced us to address technical questions on quality assessment of AR systems for brain visualization.

• Yiyuan Huang
• Alain Lioret

The research focuses on combination of novel technology and traditional art. In this paper, a novel interactive art installation (IAI) using user’s thought to interact with a digital Chinese ink painting is introduced. Meanwhile, the final purpose of this
research is to establish a link between novel technology and traditional arts and further to bring out traditional art philosophy by taking the advantages of novel technology. Finally, this research aims to help people understand not only the visual expression of an art, but also its philosophy and spirit through different kinds of interaction. Based on this, the theory research focuses on four parts: traditional art philosophy, artistic and cognitive psychology, traditional art, novel technology. Meanwhile, for practice, a Chinese style IAI experiment including brain waves control technology is introduced to help people better understand the purpose of this research.

• Kang Zhang
• Jinhui Yu

This paper presents a recent project on automatic generation of Kandinsky style of abstract paintings using the programming language Processing. It first offers an analysis of Kandinsky’s paintings based on his art theories and the author’s own understanding and observation. The generation process is described in details and sample generated images styled on four of Kandinsky’s paintings are also demonstrated and discussed. Our approach is highly scalable, limited only by the memory space set in Processing. Using random generation, every styled image generated can be unique. A selection of the images generated in the required resolution is also submitted and 70 images are made into a video companion.

• Seonah Mok
• Jaehwon Jeon
• Monson H. Hayes

This paper presents an artwork that is concerned with the interactions among people rather than the interaction between an audience and the artwork. We visualize the physical motion variations from the interactions among different participants using Kinect-based depth estimation and video tracking algorithms. The proposed work can visualize the affective experiences based on the physical distance between participants. We also provide experiences in which a participant becomes a part of the artwork in the form of both shape and interface. The body of a participant plays an important role in communicating and interacting with other participant and the artwork itself.

• George Legrady
• Danny Bazo
• Marco Pinter

A platform of exploratory networked robotic cameras was created, informing new directions in computer vision engineering and utilizing an aesthetic approach to experimentation. Initiated by research in autonomous swarm robotic camera behavior, SwarmVision is an installation consisting of multiple Pan-TiltZoom cameras on rails positioned above spectators in an exhibition space, where each camera behaves autonomously based on its own rules of computer vision and control. Each of the cameras is programmed to detect visual information of interest based on a different algorithm, and each negotiates with the other two, influencing what subject matter to study in a collective way. The emergent behaviors of the system suggest potential new approaches in scene reconstruction, video-based behavior analysis and other areas of vision and imaging research.

• Diana Arellano
• Volker Helzle

This paper presents the motivation, background and implementation of The Muses of Poetry, an interactive installation that combines dynamically generated character animation, semantic analysis, natural voice interaction and affect in poetry. Inspired by the subjectivity and ethereal quality of this literary art, we wanted to enhance the act of reciting poetry by providing a set of characters the possibility to “understand” and manifest the emotional content of the poems through facial expressions and affective speech. We believe that this original installation will bring poetry closer to a wider audience, while creating a playful, interactive and surprising experience for the user.

• Jin Wan Park

Aesthetic data visualization, which looks at complex data sets from an ingenious perspective, is difficult to empirically organize due to its insufficient records. Fortunately, insightful artists and curators have recently provided some notable interdisciplinary exhibitions and publications. This author was a recent participant at such an event; however, it is not easy to summarize the various projects into a single vision because each artist’s value, method, philosophy, and aesthetic preference are unique. This paper categorizes data visualization based on various topics. Aesthetic data visualization is similar to conventional data visualization in that it organizes ambiguous data into a database. Artists then tend to integrate the information into their art. In this regard, it might be possible to identify tendencies and examine data as contemporary iconology, as well as discover hidden possibilities of recent aesthetic data visualizations.

• Hyoyoung Kim
• Jin Wan Park

Text visualization begins with understanding text itself which is material of visual expression. To visualize any text first and the expressive approaches theoretical foundation about the about the approaches for text visualization by diverse examples of test visualization which are derived through the various characteristics of the text. To do this, we chose the “Bible” test which is well known globally and digital data of it can be accessed easily and thus diverse test visualizations examples exist and analyzed the example of the bible text visualization. We derived the unique characteristics of the text-content, structure, and quotation as criteria for analyzing and supported validity of analysis by adopting at least 2-3 examples for each criterion. In the result, we can comprehend that the goals and expressive approaches are decided depending on the unique characteristics of the Bible text. We expect to build theoretical method for choosing the materials and approaches by analyzing more diverse examples with various point of views on the basis of this research.