Papers (sorted by Author)
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Title: The Emergence and Growth of Evolutionary Art - 1980-1993
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2013: XYZN: Scale
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
One of the most interesting-if frustrating-aspects of charting the history of computer art is trying to understand the intersections of specific technologies and artistic experimentation. It is rarely as clear-cut as a simple linear influence of one to the other, partly because artists are able to envision all kinds of possibilities that technology might enable them to realize in some kind of form, but as they do so, the technology is itself shaped, especially in terms of how it is perceived by others. Do artists find a way to give technologies an aesthetic outlet, or do some technologies possess-or facilitate-a characteristic aesthetic that finds its expression through specific artists? Certainly, in the history of computer art it would seem that particular aesthetics, technologies, and artists are closely intertwined in certain periods. This intertwining of art, technology, and ideas stolen from the natural world has never been so arguably merged as the period in the history of computer art from 1980 to 1993. We take as the defining start of this period the initial work of Mandelbrot on fractals that became known as the Mandelbrot set and led to his famous illustrated art-science book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. In 1993, this first highly creative period in evolutionary computer art came to an end with major publications by pioneers Karl Sims, Stephen Todd, and William Latham.
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: Extraordinary Accident: an immersive metaphor of Hong Kong
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2019: Deep Dreaming
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper presents Extraordinary Accident, an immersive experience exploring how different levels of abstraction can coexist and collaborate in a representation and recreation of urban space. Using Hong Kong as both inspiration and data source, the work attempts to liberate virtual reality compositions from their metaphorical ballast –that is, their recreational onus– and instead, with a temporal amalgamation of poetic representation at different scales, contribute to an alternative, potentially more intimate, understanding of the urban experience.
Title: Hybrid Embroidery: Exploring Interactive Fabrication in Hand Crafts
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2020: Think Beyond
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“Hybrid Embroidery” is a framework for interactive fabrication that leverages the potential of computation to broaden the possibilities of the craft of embroidery. “Hybrid Embroidery” is set out to offer an example of how computational methods may enrich craft and refining technical interactions to support expressiveness and open-ended practice.
Title: Making Visible the Invisible: A Data-Driven Media Artwork, in Continuous Operation for 14 Years
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2019: Proliferating Possibilities: Speculative Futures in Art and Design
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Making Visible the Invisible is a six-screen, dynamic data visualization artwork at the Seattle Public Library. It visualizes patrons’ library checkouts received by the hour through four different animations to give a sense of community interests. The artwork was activated in September 2005 for a 10-year operation and was extended.
Title: SwarmVision: Autonomous Aesthetic Multi-Camera Interaction
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2013: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
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.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: From Wunderkammern to Kinect – The Creation of Shadow Worlds
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2012: In Search of the Miraculous
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper focuses on two projects, Still Life No. 1 and Shadow Worlds | Writers’ Rooms [Brontë Parsonage], to reveal the creative approaches the authors take to site, technology, and the self in their production of shadow worlds as sites of wonder. Informed by the uncanny (re-animation and the double) and an interest in the limen (thresholds in the real and virtual realms), the projects explore white light and infrared digital 3D scanning technologies as tools for capture and transformation. The authors will discuss how they suture the past with the present and ways that light slips secretly between us, revealing other realms.
Title: Inverse-rendering Based Analysis of the Fine Illumination Effects in the Salvator Mundi
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2020: Think Beyond
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
We have provided an inverse-rendering analysis that provides plausible optical explanations for the fine illumination effects in the Salvator Mundi. Our analysis supports Kemp’s main argument for authenticating the painting as Leonardo’s based on its optical accuracy and Leonardo’s study of optics.
Title: The Aesthetics of Liminality: Augmentation as Artform
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2014: Acting in Translation
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
From ARToolkit’s emergence in the 1990s to the emergence of augmented reality (AR) as an art medium in the 2010s, AR has developed as a number of evidential sites. As an extension of virtual media, it merges real-time pattern recognition with goggles (finally realizing William Gibson’s sci-fi fantasy) or handheld devices. This creates a welding of real-time media and virtual reality, or an optically registered simulation overlaid upon an actual spatial environment. Commercial applications are numerous, including entertainment, sales, and navigation. Even though ARbased works can be traced back to the late 1990s, AR work requires some understanding of coding and tethered imaging equipment. It was not until marker-based AR, affording lower entries to usage, as well as geo-locational AR-based media, using handheld devices and tablets, that augmented reality as an art medium would propagate. While one can argue that AR-based art is a convergence of handheld device art and virtual reality, there are intrinsic gestures specific to augmented reality that make it unique. The author looks at some historical examples of AR as well as critical issues of AR-based gestures such as compounding the gaze, problematizing the retinal, and the representational issues of informatic overlays. This generates four gestural vectors, analogous to those defined in “The Translation of Art in Virtual Worlds,” which is examined through case studies. From this, a visual theory of augmentation will be proposed.
Title: Being Paintings
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper focuses on art created by new techniques such as cellular machines, L-Systems, genetic algorithms, neural networks … We propose here several methods of implementation combining the rules of construction of cellular machines and L-Systems with genetic, neuronal networks, couplings, translation of codes. These methods result in the morphogenesis of bodies, as well their structure (shape) and their functional aspect (neuronal networks with driving, sensory neurons, balance, etc.). It’s a part of what we can call “a new kind of art”, and we can see here how Beings Paintings emerge.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Life After Life
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2015: Life on Earth
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The tension between biology and political economy brings the following questions: is an individual an owner of its own body? does owning constitute its property? and under which conditions? what are the methods for authorising and selling organs, cells or DNA? under which conditions can companies manage biological material?
Title: Identifying New Myths for Convergence and Creative Collaboration in the Age of Digitalia
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2007: Global Eyes
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
To assume that it is possible to predict the future of technology innovation beyond the next week, month, or year is sheer folly. To believe that our participation in endless think tanks, conferences, or seminars will shape a consensual vision, one that we all agree may be worth perpetuating, is merely an elitist group exercise in courage. I propose another scenario: that business, educational, and cultural institutions exist as the sum total of the myths they believe about themselves. In this context, myths are not only about who we are, they are essential to the development of all human understanding and belief systems. This practice is not to be confused with acquired situational narcissism, a self-bestowed sense of ingratiation, but a shared belief that the invention of new myths is an on-going design and discovery process unique to all sensing/feeling human beings. Such an enterprise evolves into creation of enlightened and expressive forms through continuous real-time simulation of living and learning in the stacking of moments. The challenge is to prepare individuals to adapt to rapid changes, ones we can’t even imagine, and to prepare to be comfortable living through one’s imagination, and to trust and embrace the inevitable transformations that will challenge future participatory energies.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Computer Art in the Context of the Journal Leonardo
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1989: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Since 1968, the journal Leonardo has published over 150 articles dealing with the uses of computers in the fine arts. Discussing the work of artists published in Leonardo, the author responds to a recent assertion by art theorist David Carrier that”… it is genuinely unclear to me whether any art using computers is truly significant”. It is argued that the significance of computer art must be viewed in a number of contexts. Within the context of the development of the computer itself, advances in computer graphics and animation have provided the artist with a powerful plastic medium under the artist’s control.
Most artworks produced, except in animation, either realise artistic ideas developed before the advent of the computer or are artistically equivalent to work produced in other media. The impact is significant in the context of the commercial and applied arts. Contemporary artists, as the colonisers of technology, are producing significant artworks as collaborators in Renaissance teams of artists, scientists and technologists. In the larger context of the history of art, however, the significance of contemporary computer art work is not yet clear. It is argued that artistic significance should be sought in works that could not have been made without the use of a computer.
Such works must involve the particular attributes of computers, such as their application in interactive situations, their capability for artificial intelligence, their function in networks with telecommunications media, and their ability to allow the synthesis of sound and vision in timebased art forms. The lack of adequate theoretical, historical and critical frameworks is currently the largest impediment in assessing the significance of computer art.
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: Fractals and an Art for the Sake of Science
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1989: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
A new form of art redefines the boundary between ‘invention’ and ‘discovery’, as understood in the sciences, and ‘creativity’, as understood in the plastic arts. Can pure geometry be perceived by the ‘man in the street’ as beautiful? To be more specific, can a shape that is defined by a simple equation or a simple rule of construction be perceived by people other than geometers as having aesthetic value – namely, as being at least surprisingly decorative – or perhaps even as being a work of art? When the geometric shape is a fractal, the answer is yes. Even when fractals are taken ‘raw’, they are attractive. They lend themselves to ‘painting by numbers’ that is surprisngly effective, even in the hands of the rank amateur. And the true artist’s sensibility finds them a novel and attractive support.
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: Conserving Digital Art for Deep Time
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2011: Tracing Home in The Age of Networked Techniques
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Displaying digital art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is already proving to be a challenge. Exhibiting this same art in the distant future will depend upon new thinking and practices developed today by artists, conservators, and curators. Established software engineering methods for dealing with aging systems can provide a new model for the conservation of digital art, and a foundation for the enhancement of art-historical scholarship. Artists with an interest in a more refined approach to the programming that underpins their work will also be interested in software engineering concepts.
Title: The Immediacy of the Artist's Mark in Shape Computation
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2010: TouchPoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper contributes to the area of computation in the production of artistic form. The author-artist describes a computational system in the form of a curvilinear, parametric shape grammar. Based on an analysis of over 3,000 entries in her traditionally hand-drawn sketchbooks, she describes the grammar that synthesizes drawings in the design language of her evolving style and serves as a tool for selfunderstanding of her artistic process.
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: 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 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: Transforming the Commonplace through Machine Perception: Light Field Synthesis and Audio Feature Extraction in the Rover Project
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2017: Unsettled Artifacts: Technological Speculations from Latin America
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Rover is a mechatronic imaging device inserted into quotidian space, transforming the sights and sounds of the everyday through its peculiar modes of machine perception. Using computational light field photography and machine listening, it creates a kind of cinema following the logic of dreams: suspended but mobile, familiar yet infinitely variable in detail. Rover draws on diverse traditions of robotic exploration, landscape and still-life depiction, and audio field recording to create a hybrid form between photography
and cinema. This paper describes the mechatronic, machine perception, and audio-visual synthesis techniques developed for the piece.
Title: Stepping Inside the Classification Cube: An Intimate Interaction With an AI System
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2020: Think Beyond
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The “Classification Cube” art installation invites participants to become familiar with a machine learning classification system which estimates their age, gender, emotion, and actions. Rapidly changing results encourage participants to actively perform their behavior to the system and alter the way it “sees” them.
Title: What Good is a Computer to an Architect?
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1984: CAD Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
What good is a computer to an architect? Palladio found pen and paper perfectly adequate, after all. And it is hard to imagine Frank Lloyd Wright at a keyboard. (It just doesn’t go with a cape and cane.) The most sophisticated piece of technology on most architects’ desks, even today, is an electric pencil sharpener.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Shadow Awareness: Enhancing Theater Space Through the Mutual Projection of Images on a Connective Slit Screen
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2011: Tracing Home in The Age of Networked Techniques
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This study discusses media technology that enables the continuous creation of performers’ physical improvisation as inspired by the reflection of imagery evoked from the audience. To realize this, the authors have focused on “shadow media,” which promote the continuous creation of imagery through “bodily awareness.” The authors have developed a system that can project shadows of the performers in various ways, which are then transformed into various shapes and colors. The shadows are connected to the performers’ feet and projected on a “passable” slit screen set up between the stage and the audience. As a result, the interactive and mutual creation of imagery by performers and audience can form an “empathetic” stage. To demonstrate its validity, the authors applied the system to a dance performance at Festival della Scienza in Genoa, Italy.
Title: A New System to Appreciate the Visual Characteristics of a Painting
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2009: BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
A painting-viewing system is proposed as a tool to help painting appreciation and to improve the museum experience. This system simultaneously highlights certain visual characteristics of multiple paintings, thus informing users of the links between paintings and the semantic elements that may appear superficially different, and also conveying the art-historical explanation of those characteristics. Through this system’s evaluation, the approach based on “the awareness of the visual characteristics” may be effective as a method of developing the user’s interest in the paintings. When this system is placed in museums and galleries as a mediation tool, it will be useful to a viewer’s preparation for the art-viewing experience. This paper presents the concepts behind the system’s development and the results of the first survey as a piece of a larger project to explore the improvement of painting appreciation as a museum experience.
Title: Participating Interface
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2013: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
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.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: 5 Story Building
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2013: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
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.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Learning from Weaving for Digital Fabrication in Architecture
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2010: TouchPoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This project restructures weaving performance in architecture by analyzing the tacit knowledge of traditional weavers through perceptual study and converting it into an explicit rule in computational design. Three implementations with different materials show the advantages of using computational weaving that combines traditional principles with today’s digital (CAD/CAM) tools to develop affordable fabrication techniques.
Title: Here and Now: Indigenous Canadian Perspectives and New Media in Works by Ruben Komangapik, Kent Monkman and Adrian Duke
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2018: Original Narratives
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Examining the use of new media in works by Ruben Komangapik, Kent Monkman and the Wikiup Indigenous Knowledge Network reveals the diverse ways in which technologies are used to disrupt linear time and Western visions of history. New media works challenge those misleading stories that have been told about Canada’s indigenous peoples and assert indigenous presence in both the digital and physical landscape. These artists employ QR codes, video and augmented reality to push artistic boundaries and create representations of the past and present.
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