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Title: Emergent Aesthetics - Aesthetic Issues in Computer Arts
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1989: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

The production of art, as much as any other production, takes place in the context of human interaction-with others, with nature, with tools, with artifacts, and with ideas from times passed. Artistic work, more than any other, is probably a projection of the experiential structure of the act of producing artifacts (or events) with qualities socially acknowledged as artistic and values culturally celebrated as aesthetic. Throughout history, the patterns of human interaction have continuously changed, and so has art. Nonetheless, changes like the ones we experience today are unprecedented, requiring that we understand that the condition of art is probably more dependent than ever on the condition of humanity in general, and of science and technology in particular.

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Title: Animated Robotic Sculptures: Using SMA Motion Display to Create Lifelike Movements
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2020: Think Beyond
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Animated robotic sculptures are works of art that combine plant and animal motifs with robotics to give their audience a sense of the objects being alive through their lifelike movements, such as stirring leaves or squirming tentacles.

Title: Meditative Process In New Media Art: An Affective Possibility Of Digital Media In The Art Making Process
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2015: Life on Earth
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper explores the affective potentials in digital media as looking into the process of art making. Contemplating the unique experience of artists with technology, this paper suggests alternative ways of building a relationship between digital media and human bodies, considering the gap as an open space for a metaphysical freedom.

Title: The Bailey-Derek Grammar: Recording the Craft of Wire-Bending in the Trinidad Carnival
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2015: Hybrid Craft
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper presents work on the development of a shape grammar that records the dying, undocumented craft of wire-bending in the Trinidad Carnival. This craft is important for the building and continuation of cultural heritage and identity. Due to the lack of prior research in this non-Western design practice, the author conducted site visits, interviews and observations, and visually examined wire-bent artifacts in Trinidad to develop this grammar. This paper presents the materials, steps and shape rules that begin to synthesize the craft, as well as one design. This study and the resulting grammar have positive implications for design education and practice.

Title: Visual Anecdote
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2010: TouchPoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

The discourse on information visualization often remains limited to the exploratory function -its potential for discovering patterns in the data. However, visual representations also have a rhetorical function: they demonstrate, persuade, and facilitate communication.

In observing how visualization is used in presentations and discussions, I often notice the use of what could be called “visual anecdotes.” Small narratives are tied to individual data points in the visualization, giving human context to the data and rooting the abstract representation in personal experience. This paper argues that these narratives are more than just illustrations of the dataset; they constitute a central epistemological element of the visualization. By considering these narrative elements as parts of the visualization, its design and knowledge organization appear in a different light.

This paper investigates how the “story” of data representation is delivered. By means of ethnographic interviews and observations, the author highlights the different aspects of the visual anecdote, a specific point where the exploratory and the rhetorical functions of visualization meet.

Title: Conceptual Superposition. The Aesthetics Of Quantum Simulation
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2015: Life on Earth
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

I examine the conceptual and aesthetic implications of quantum simulation by reading Richard Feynman’s lecture “Simulating Physics with Computers” with Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory; I argue that the very notion of quantum simulation is in a state of conceptual superposition – which is, at its core, an aesthetic principle.

Title: Aeolian Traces
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2019: Proliferating Possibilities: Speculative Futures in Art and Design
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Aeolian Traces is a multimedia artwork that collects human migration data to generate gusts of wind around the gallery space, closely synced to oral narratives triggered from a database of recordings. A work of data sonification and visualization, this project explores the aesthetics and socio-cultural possibilities in environmental data.

Title: A Transformational Object: Artistic Authorship and the Phenomenal Aesthetics of New Media
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

If there is any metaphor that has come to act as a signpost of current developments in the realm of digital art and design, it is the blur. We have seen the blur as a building, the blur as the theme at conferences, and the blur as a means to describe the totality of the overlapping processes and intentions that all converge in what can be called interactive experiences. For shorthand, we call this convergence new media. Given the various aims and contexts from which the larger category of art objects arrives, the blur seems to best approximate a still undistinguished body of work and its cultural momentum.

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Title: Secrets of Balanced Composition as Seen Through a Painter’s Window: Visual Analyses of Paintings Based on Subset Barycenter Patterns
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2019: Proliferating Possibilities: Speculative Futures in Art and Design
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

In this paper, various paintings are analyzed using the subset barycenter pattern implemented by the author. An image’s or an image group’s subset may reveal genre and artist characteristics. The suggested barycenter pattern analysis can enrich the methods of art history and criticism.

Title: Topics on Aesthetic Data Visualization: Viewpoints, Interpretation, and Alternative Senses
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2013: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

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.

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Title: Visual History with Choson Dynasty Annals
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2016: Data Materialities
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

For this paper, the authors selected three historical events taken from the Annals of the Choson Dynasty that represent dramatic and tragic stories about parents and their sons for data visualization. By connecting names with entities indicating conductions from history books, they found interesting patterns that tell stories with embedded relations. The visualized images in this paper were mainly code-generated, based on the data of the Annals, with some graphic embellishment added.

Title: CAVE: Making Collective Virtual Narrative
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2019: Proliferating Possibilities: Speculative Futures in Art and Design
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

CAVE is a shared narrative virtual reality experience. Thirty participants at a time each saw and heard the same narrative from their own unique location in the room, as they would when attending live theater. CAVE set out to disruptively change how audiences collectively experience immersive art and entertainment.

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.

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Title: (Projection) Mapping The Brain: A Critical Cartographic Approach To The Artist's Use Of FMRI To Study The Contemplation Of Death.
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2015: Life on Earth
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Production of life-sized self-portrait comprising digital animations and live action video projection-mapped onto a 3D print from MRI data gathered as the artist viewed memento mori paintings and meditated on death.

Title: A-me: Augmented Memories
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2013: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

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.

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.

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Title: Raised On YouTube: Cultural Data Materialization Using Plants
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2016: Data Materialities
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Raised on YouTube is an installation and game that grows plants using only the light of projected video and makes ecology legible as a multiplayer game. The challenge of finding the most nurturing video is crowdsourced online. As players watch a webcam feed of the plants surrounded by two-way mirrors, their computer power is diverted to photosynthetic video analysis. The system calculates the photosynthetic score for each video using a basic botanical model. The resulting shape and density of the plant grow bed serves as a data visualization of the energy patterns in the cultural stream. The system provides opportunities to reflect on the effects of long-term exposure to contemporary media and to imagine ecological possibilities of participatory culture.

Title: Cultural Viz: An Aesthetic Approach to Cultural Analytics
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2020: Think Beyond
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Cultural Analytics (C.A.) is an approach for analyzing media and digital culture using data methods and visual computing techniques. This paper explores the aesthetic value of C.A. by approaching cultural visualizations as digital artworks. Through a series of projects, authors discuss their experience in art exhibitions, workshops, and seminars.

Title: Hybrid Animation production and the Dream of Flight.
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH Asia 2019: Deep Dreaming
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Through a detailed account of a recent practice-based research project – a short animation project called Jasper, this paper explores how a hybrid analogue/digital production approach can generate a unique and engaging visual style – one that sits between the tangible, handcrafted feel of miniatures and the cleanness, fluidity and flexibility of computer-generated animation. The author examines the new creative possibilities and challenges that a hybrid animation production approach presents and also outlines various technical platforms encountered during the production of Jasper, including motion-controlled camera systems, 3D printing, game engines, point cloud scans and augmented reality.

Title: The Proceduralist Manifesto
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1989: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

‘Computer art’ has become a meaningless term, because soon virtually all art will be computerized in some way or another. The author introduces the concept of proceduralism as a label to represent a special class of art, one that constructs images using abstract qualitative and quantitative parameters, rather than simulates classical drawing and painting. This approach to making art ditters radically from drawing and painting approaches because the picture-making process is detached from the picture. The net result is that an entirely new area of creativity has been unveiled for the artist. As such, proceduralism is a logical successor to conceptual/process art; it is a major art movement and a new medium.

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Title: Glowing Pathfinder Bugs: A Natural Haptic 3D Interface for Interacting Intuitively with Virtual Environments
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2010: TouchPoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Glowing Pathfinder Bugs is an interactive art project primarily aimed at children and created by the digital arts group Squidsoup. It uses projection to visualize virtual bugs on a real sandpit. The bugs are aware of their surroundings and respond to its form in their vicinity. By altering the topography of the sand, participants affect the bugs’ environment in real time, facilitating direct communication between them and computer-generated creatures.

This highly malleable and tactile physical environment lets us define and carve out the landscape in which the creatures exist in real time. Thus, virtual creatures and real people coexist and communicate through a shared tactile environment. Participants can use natural modes of play, kinesthetic intelligence, and their sense of tactility to collaboratively interact with creatures inhabiting a hybrid parallel world.

This paper describes the project and analyzes how children in particular respond to the experience; it looks at the types of physical formations that tend to be built and notes how children instinctively anthropomorphize the bugs, treating projected imagery as living creatures – though with a ludic twist.

Title: Within an Ocean of Light: Creating Volumetric Lightscapes
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2012: In Search of the Miraculous
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper documents explorations into an alternative platform for immersive and affective expression within spatial mixed reality installation experiences. It discusses and analyzes experiments that use an advanced LED cube to create immersive, interactive installations and environments where visitors and visuals share a common physical space. As a visual medium, the LED cube has very specific properties and affordances, and optimizing the potential for such systems to create meaningful experiences presents many interlinked challenges. Two artworks exploring these possibilities are discussed. Both have been exhibited internationally in a variety of settings. Together with this paper, the works shed some light on the design considerations and experiential possibilities afforded by LED cubes and arrays. They also suggest that LED grids have potential as an emerging medium for immersive volumetric visualizations that occupy physical space.

Title: A Piece of the Pie Chart: Feminist Robotics
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2014: Acting in Translation
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper analyzes the robotic gallery installation A Piece of the Pie Chart. The project addresses gender inequity in the tech world. It consists of a computer workstation and a food robot. The food robot puts pie charts onto edible, pre-baked pies. They depict the gender gap in technical environments. Visitors use the robot to create pies. Pictures of the pies are disseminated via Twitter, and the physical pies are mailed to the places where the data originated. In the following text, the author disassembles the machine in the context of feminist theory, feminist technology research, visualization, and political robotics.

Title: Re-Visioning the Interface: Technological Fashion as Critical Media
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2009: BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper elucidates two positions (the positivist and the critical) that inform the creative design of technological fashion. On the one side is the instrumentalist trend toward the minimized or disappear-ing interface. On the other, some theorists and artists suggest that increased invisibility presents social and ethical concerns (such as invasiveness and control) when networking and communication devices are involved.

The positivist side has roots in modernist design. Positivist designers create responsive and control-lable fabrics using shape-changing polymers, e-textiles, and nano-scale electronics to resolve clumsy and prohibitive problems of hardware vs. body. The critical side draws upon archetypal ideas about technology and the body that are familiar from literature and science fiction, and includes writers and media artists who emphasize the intractable or mechanic nature of technological clothing to enhance, rather than erase, the body. The paper concludes that both positions must be considered as the field of technological fashion moves forward.

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.

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Title: Off-Lining to Tape Is Not Archiving: Why We Need Real Archiving to Support Media Archaeology and Ensure Our Visual Effects Legacy Thrives
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2019: Proliferating Possibilities: Speculative Futures in Art and Design
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study into the archiving practices employed by professional VFX studios. The current practices are contrasted with best practices from the field of archiving, and suggestions for improvement are made.

Title: MobiSpray: Mobile Phone as Virtual Spray Can for Painting BIG Anytime Anywhere on Anything
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2009: BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper presents MobiSpray, a novel interactive art tool for creating ubiquitous ephemeral digital art. The mobile phone is employed as a virtual spray can to spray dabs of digital paint onto the physical environment via large-scale projections. The gesture-based control of the mobile phone provides a natural pointing mechanism for the virtual spray can. Experiences from extensive field use around the world testify in favor of a successful design. Most importantly, MobiSpray liberates and empowers the artist to change the environment via large-scale artistic expressions.

Title: Souvenirs du monde des montagnes
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2009: BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper describes a particular book called Souvenirs du monde des montagnes, which draws its iconography from the history of a Swiss mountain family from 1910 to 1930. By simply dipping into the first few pages, the reader will be lost between real and virtual universes, wonder about the evolution of the images’ meanings, and question an object’s true content. This setup, developed using state-of-the-art computer vision technology, offers unprecedented freedom: we can make technological references disappear to place the user in fruitful turmoil between visible and hidden meanings. The shadow of a bird flies over the pages, foxes’ lanterns light up the text, paper mountains emerge. Once the last page has been turned, the reader will never look at books in the same way again.

Title: Null By Morse: Historical Optical Communication to Smartphones
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2013: XYZN: Scale
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Null By Morse is an installation artwork that incorporates a military signaling lamp and smartphones. A series of Morse messages is transmitted automatically by the signal lamp. The messages are drawn from the history of Morse and telegraphy. A custom app for iPhone and Android uses the phone’s camera to identify the changing light levels of the lamp and the associated timings. The app then decodes the Morse and displays the message on the screen on top of the camera image. This paper discusses the artwork in relation to the following theoretical aspects: It contextualizes the position of smartphones in the history of optical communication. It proposes an approach to smartphones in media art that moves away from futurist perspectives whose fundamental approach is to seek to creatively exploit the latest features. Lastly, it discusses the interaction with the phone in the exhibition context in terms of slow technology.

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.

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