Papers (sorted by Exhibition Year)
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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: Aspects of the Aesthetics of Telecommunications
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1992: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
For the past fifteen years, increasing numbers of artists around the world have been working in a collaborative mode using telecommunications. In their “works,” which we shall refer to as “events,” images and graphics are not created as the ultimate goal or the final product, as is common in the fine arts. Employing computers, video, modems, and other devices, these artists use visuals in a much larger, interactive, bi-directional communication context. Images and graphics are created not simply to be transmitted by an artist from one point to another, but to spark a multidirectional visual dialogue with other artists and participants in remote locations. This visual dialogue assumes that images will be changed and transformed throughout the process in the same way that speech gets changed-interrupted, complemented, altered and reconfigured-in a spontaneous face-to-face conversation. Once an event is over, images and graphics stand not as the “result,” but as documentation of the process of visual dialogue promoted by the participants. This unique ongoing experimentation with images and graphics develops and expands the notion of visual thinking by relying primarily on the exchange and manipulation of visual materials as a means of communication. The art events created by telematic or telecommunication artists take place as a movement that animates and unbalances networks structured with relatively accessible interactive media such as telephone, facsimile (fax), personal computers, e-mail, and slow-scan television (SSTV). More rarely, radio, live television, videophones, satellites, and other less accessible means of communication come into play. But to identify the media employed in these “events” is not enough. Instead, one must do away with prejudices that cast off these media from the realm of “legitimate” artistic media and investigate these events as equally legitimate artistic enterprises. This essay partially surveys the history of the field and discusses art events that were either motivated by or conceived specially for telecommunications media. The essay attempts to show the transition, from the early stages, when radio provided writers and artists with a new spatiotemporal paradigm, to a second stage, in which telecommunications media, including computer networks, have become more accessible to individuals and through which artists start to create events, sometimes of global proportions, in which the communication itself becomes the work. Telecom munications art on the whole is, perhaps, a culmination of the process of dematerialization of the art object epitomized by Duchamp and pursued by artists associated with the conceptual art movement, such as Joseph Kossuth. If now the object is totally eliminated and the artists are absent as well, the aesthetic debate finds itself beyond action as form, beyond idea as art. It founds itself in the relationships and interactions between members of a network.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Reality Versus Imagination
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1992: Art Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Fifteen years ago I exhibited some work that explored unusual perturbations in otherwise consistent color interpolation. The gallery was a part of University College, London and several scientists saw the show. One, a Polish mathematician and physicist called Andre Lissowski, chased me up. He was interested in the work I had done and wondered if it bore any relationship to other contemporary research into what ore now called non-linear phenomena-port of the field fashionably dubbed Chaos. Chaos studies were still an underground activity at that time and Andre took me along to small back rooms at the Royal Institution and ancient London Colleges where mostly young scientists along with the occasional Nobel laureate discussed the fantastic new ideas that were emerging worldwide.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Light and Dark Visions
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1993: Machine Culture
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Critical theory and cultural studies are increasingly being used to understand the function of the arts in contemporary technology-dominated, postmodern culture. This essay examines the relevance of these analyses to the work of artists who use emerging technologies. The first section reviews core concepts that are useful for understanding art/technology linkages from postmodernist, post-industrialist, and post-structuralist writers. Concepts discussed include the rejection of the modernist idea of a single dominant cultural stream, the demarginalization of diverse voices, the increasing importance of information and the impact of mediated image and representation on ideology and behavior, and the emphasis on deconstructing the language systems and meta-narratives that shape culture.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Aesthetics and Practice of Designing Interactive Computer Events
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1994: Art and Design Show
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Much confusion and hyperbole surrounds discussions of the aesthetics of interactive computer events. This essay works to clarify some of this confusion by analyzing the differences between interactive and non-interactive events, reviewing the variety of forms included under the umbrella term “interactivity,” and investigating the theoretical rationales offered to support claims of interactivity’s superiority derived from psychological, political, art historical, and techno-historical sources. Building on this analysis, the essay suggests extensions to current GUI design canons that uniquely attend to interactivity as an aesthetic issue. It also investigates the challenging interactivity possibilities of emerging technologies.
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: Teaching Cyber Art, Or How A Painter Copes With Computers In London
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1995: Digital Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Walking back from my painting studio on a summer evening, looking up at the electronic flicker of TVs, I do wonder … how can a painting do anything in a living room? Does the future lie in the hands of the cyber artist? Hold on. I am a painter, and I use computers, and that combination makes a lot of sense, though nowhere in England can you study – or teach – the two together. Computer work is a different kind of art because it’s cyber-this or cyber-that? Oh. Even when it’s flavor-free? At ISEA 5 in Helsinki I wandered out of the interactive show and got absorbed in the early 20th Century Finnish painting next door, self portraits in log cabins, a solitary fir tree losing its snow. Spring. I resolve to give my work more of a lived-in texture, make it connect with what I saw, give it a temperature, make it more reflective.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Digital Ontologies: The Ideality of Form in/and Code Storage - or - Can Graphesis Challenge Mathesis?
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2000: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The attempt to understand the connections that link human thought to its representation through the act of formgiving (in language, image, or signs) is central to Western philosophy and aesthetics. In every generation, some version of this question has been posed: If it were possible to understand the logic of human thought, would there be a perfect representation of it in some unambiguous, diagrammatic symbol set of entities and dynamic relations among them? Informed by classical metaphysics and philosophy, this question also has a life not only in contemporary struggles that are carried on in the varied and very different domains of visual art, information design, and computer graphics, but also in cognitive science, with its legacy of symbolic logic, artificial intelligence debates, and a disposition towards the intersection of speculative and specifiable apprehensions of what constitutes thought.
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 SF of Technoscience: The Politics of Simulation & A Challenge for New Media Art
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2000: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
“In fact, science fiction … is no longer anywhere, and it is everywhere, in the circulation of models, here and now, in the very principle of the surrounding simulation.”
— JEAN BAUDRILLARD
“Biology is becoming an information science … and it will take increasingly powerful computers and software to gather, store, analyze, model and distribute that information.”
— BEN ROSEN
Chairman, Compaq Computer Corporation
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
— RICHARD FEYNMAN
One of the significant characteristics of the last decade, and the new millennium, is the way in which advancements in biotechnology and medicine have come to the attention of the public, through the media, as one of the primary areas in which the future is being vigorously imagined. What distinguishes biotechnology from other sciences is the way in which it is increasingly fusing genetic code with computer code, encapsulated in what Incyte Pharmaceuticals calls “point-and-click biology.”
View Full Paper: [View PDF]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: Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
By the mid-1960s, Marshall McLuhan prophesied that electronic media were creating an increasingly interconnected global village. Such pronouncements popularized the idea that the era of machine-age technology was drawing to a close, ushering in a new era of information technology. Sensing this shift, art historian and curator K.G. Pontus Hulten organized a simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic exhibition on art and mechanical technology at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968. The Machine: As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age included work ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci’s 16th-century drawings of flying machines to contemporary artist-engineer collaborations that won a competition organized by Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc. (EAT).¹
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Dialogue with a Monologue: Voice Chips and the Products of Abstract Speech
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper argues that voice chips and speech recognition chips can be used as a unique analytic tool for understanding the complex techno-social interactions that define, imagine, and produce new products. Using these chips as an in situ instrument allows a focus on products in their actual context of use, capturing the multiple interpretations of new technologies, and a method to analyze their failures and successes in human machine interaction. It is the use of voice that is direct evidence of the interactive, particularized and social aspects of products that are traditionally underrepresented in the attempts to understand technological innovation, design, and deployment.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Notime: Identity and Collaboration
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Although communication networks offer the possibility of a distributed community that can collaborate and exchange vital information, there is little time for these collaborations and exchanges to occur. Ironically, the same technology that makes distributed community a possibility and promises to save us time prevents us from actually having time to build community. Distributed presence inevitably moves us towards group consciousness, which shifts our perception of time and even productivity. This essay uses a large collaborative networked art piece, “notime,” as an example of how the creative process shifts when working on the networks. The project attempts to rethink the idea of the avatar as a physical representation and compares it to that of energetic bodies carrying information and evolving with the time people devote to participating, onsite and online. “notime” is conceived to raise questions about our perception of time and identity as we extend our personal networks through technology.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Rethinking Agency and Immersion: Videogames as a Means of Consciousness-Raising
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Until recently, most videogame characters did not reflect our everyday life for the simple reason that most of them were trolls, aliens, and monsters. However, this has changed since the introduction of “The Sims,” the people simulator. Nevertheless, characters in this game are still flat since “The Sims” simulates life in a Disneyland-like way, avoiding ideological conflicts.
Encouraged by authors like Brenda Laurel and Janet Murray, videogame designers have been taking for granted that a high level of agency and immersion are desirable effects. However, I will show that alternative, non-Aristotelian techniques could be used to develop character-driven videogames that enhance critical thinking about ideological issues and social conflicts while keeping the experience enjoyable. I will do this by borrowing some concepts from Bertolt Brecht’s and Augusto Baal’s ideas on non-Aristotelian theater and applying them to videogame design. In this paper, I propose that a modified version of “The Sims” would allow players to create behavioral rules for their characters that reflect their personal opinions. Like in Baal’s Forum Theater, this game would foster critical discussion about social and personal problems.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]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.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: The Pleasures of Immersion and Engagement: Schemas, Scripts, and the Fifth Business
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Presently, designers of interactive narratives and video games have only a slender understanding of the aesthetic experiences their audiences and users seek. Using schema theory, this study articulates the two varieties of aesthetic pleasures that users of interactive works enjoy: immersion and engagement. It uses schema theory to define the characteristics of immersion and engagement in both conventional and new media. After examining how readers’ experiences of these two different aesthetics may be enhanced or diminished by interface design, options for navigation, and other features, the essay concludes by looking beyond immersion and engagement to “flow,” a state in which readers are both immersed and engaged.
It must be granted that there is some value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment… This is so, however, only under two conditions. First, there must be no danger of losing basic form or orientation, of never coming out. The surprise must occur in an overall framework; the confusions must be small regions in a visible whole. Furthermore, the labyrinth or mystery must in itself have some form that can be explored and in time apprehended. Complete chaos without hint of connection is never pleasurable. – Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City⁵⁷
Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were nonetheless essential to bring about the recognition or the denouement, were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business. – Robertson Davies, The Fifth Business: The Deptford Trilogy²²
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Thick & Thin: "Direct Manipulation" & The Spatial Regimes of Human-Computer Interaction
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2001: n-space
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Consider a design trajectory, figured on one end by the screens of early command-line computer interfaces and Coleco Vision’s “Donkey Kong” (1981), and on the other, by the more complex and finely rendered spaces depicted in “Tomb Raider III: The Adventures of Lara Croft” (1999) and Apple’s newly-released Mac OS X.
Lara Croft runs, jumps, tumbles, and blasts away at her opponents in visual fields that are more subtle and perspectivally sophisticated than those inhabited by Mario and “Donkey Kong.” The responses of the screen images to the user’s keyboard, gamepad, or joystick have been enormously enhanced, in both quickness and variety. But the fundamental spatial tropology – the tropology of space: abstract space, empty space, space that doesn’t get in the way of players or their agents on the other side of the glass – remains consistent, from the earliest to the most recent examples of both desktop computing interfaces and computer gaming. The conceptual and psychological commonplace that grounds play in the domains inhabited by Mario and Lara, and the principles of “direct manipulation” in the graphical user interface, is the assumption of a permeable field of agency, essentially free of substance or resistance, or marked only by the sorts of resistance that a more efficient game pad, a faster processor, or a more “intuitive” visual metaphor, may eliminate.
In this paper, I propose that the “thin” spaces typical of the modern GUI and videogaming appear self-evident or “intuitive” to users and designers because they draw upon conventions of spatial thought that strategically foreclose traits of actual embodied encounters of human-computer interaction. It is desirable, I argue, to reconceive the forms of space commonly presupposed by the contemporary discourses of the GUI – to grasp these spaces materially, not as empty domains, open to the user’s purposive manipulations of objects sited within them, but rather as persistently impermeable, resistant – “thick” – spaces, in which objects are only imperfectly manipulated and incompletely detachable from the lived moment of the interaction.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]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.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Art Games and Breakout: New Media Meets the American Arcade
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2002: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper explores how the interactive paradigms and interface designs of arcade classics like Breakout and Pong have been incorporated into contemporary art games and offer new possibilities for political and cultural critique.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Feminist Transgressions? Object and Process in Transgenic/Genetic Works by Women
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2002: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Interest in new technologies has fostered a growing interdisciplinary exploration between artists, scientists, social scientists, and designers. Particular types of artwork have held attraction for the artist-scientist in the 20th and 21st centuries: artificial life, evolutionary art, and genetic art have been created by those with an interest in science and organic structures. Concerns inherent to these contemporary interests are centuries old; 1 the use of novel technologies to mimic or create life can be traced to the Ancient Greeks, Jewish, Chinese, and Egyptian cultures, in which stories of famous pneumatic automata and golem originated.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Interface Ecosystem, The Fundamental Unit of Information Age Ecology
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2002: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The Information Age is the period of history in which products and services based on information and knowledge have principal economic value. Information artifacts are implements of use and aesthetic expressions that both reflect and create the ways in which people individually and collectively think and act. Interactive artifacts are designed to engage people in access to and development of knowledge and information. Their human computer interfaces are instances of a broader set of phenomena. Cultural, creative, technological, and everyday frames of reference, spoken languages, economic positions, programming languages, and runtime platforms converge through the lens of the interface nexus. It is necessary to abstract and extend our notion of interface and to contextualize the operation of interfaces amidst dynamic meshworks, in order to address these phenomena.
With regard to life on earth, ecology investigates the web of relations between interdependent organisms and their surroundings. In the Information Age, people, activities, codes, components, and systems form the same kinds of interrelationships. Interfaces are the multidimensional border zones through which these relationships are constituted. Interface ecology investigates the dynamic interactions of media, cultures, and disciplines that flow through interfaces. The semiotic encodings of these wide-reaching systems of representation are their interactions’ building blocks. Interfaces recombine semiotic codes, forming hybrids.
The ecosystems approach brings the perspectives of diverse disciplines to bear on what interfaces are, how they work, and how they can work. Disciplines, and the media, cultural, and epistemological forms to which they apply, are free to relate in meshworks, opening inquiry. No system of representation dominates; none are considered subordinate. Rather, they are interdependent elements, connected by referential flows of interaction.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Ludology: From Representation to Simulation
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2002: Art Gallery
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Most of the current studies of the creative potential of computer games have been done through tools designed for narrative media (literary theory, narratology, film theory). Several attempts have been made by both academics and designers to create “interactive narratives” that would allow players to experience the qualities of narrative while being able to interact with the environment, characters, and events in the “story.” Nevertheless, authors have so far failed to provide a compelling example of “interactive fiction.” Brenda Laurel, a long-time advocate of this genre, recently described it as “a hypothetical beast in the mythology of computing, an elusive unicorn we can imagine but have yet to capture.” [Laurel 2001]
In this paper I argue, following the work of such theorists as Espen Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen, that narrative is not the best paradigm for understanding not only computer games but also cybernetic art and toys, simply because they do not rely on traditional representation but on simulation.
By simulation, I mean an alternative form of describing and understanding reality that is based on the modeling of systems. My semiotic approach to simulation is close to the one developed by computer science’s simulation theory, but it differs in that its goal is not necessarily predicting behaviors. Rather, I view it as an alternative representational form that opens a new set of rhetorical possibilities that stress system behavior and user experimentation.
By comparing the similitude and differences between simulation and representation, I will provide a theoretical framework that will allow us to better comprehend the process behind the interpretation of such cybernetic systems as toys, cyberarts, traditional games, and computer games. My ultimate goal is to contribute to the understanding of the rhetorical characteristics of these simulational media.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]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.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]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: Dare to be Digital: Japan's Pioneering Contributions to Today's International Art and Technology Movement
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
A number of pioneering artists began experimenting with the computer as a visual arts medium in the late 60s and early 70s when most fine-arts circles refused to recognize art made by computers as a viable product of human creativity. This was the era of computer punch cards, when the visual results of algorithmic input were nothing more than line drawings. Many of the forward-looking artists who were experimenting with this technology were not taken seriously by the established art venues, and were, in fact, often ostracized by their peers. More recently, the work of computer artists has begun to appear in general textbooks on the history of art, but each book fealures one or two completely different artists. The books are inconsistent in their documentation of this fairly new medium. There are a number of journals that have had special issues devoted to this topic, including the Art Journal, and there are also whole journals dedicated to the field, such as Leonardo. There are, however, very few books that do justice to the movement, and few that include artists of Japan. In other words, there is a great deal of activity in the field, but the documentation is neither thorough nor consistent.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: doing interface ecology: the practice of metadisciplinary
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
The interface can be modeled as a an ecosystem: connected, dynamic, and characterized by relationships. The model is predicated on a process of working with the interface as a border zone between heterogeneous systems of representation. This paper uses sensation, embodiment, and semiotics to initiate this process, by addressing the range of systems of representation that are involved in its own production. This presence of the theorist is found to create a self-referential metastructure. As an alternative to the beneficial but ad hoc assemblages of multi-, inter, and trans-disciplinary approaches, the ecosystems approach establishes that meshing of systems of representation is an inherent property of interface phenomena. The meshing process causes elements from the involved representational systems to recombine, forming hybrids. Recombinant information is a structural formula for creating new knowledge, which can be invoked for that purpose, intentionally. Theorists are part of the environment that they theorize about. The products of theorizing are information artifacts that are also part of the environment. They themselves function as interfaces. The term “metadisciplinary” is developed to describe the inherent and self-referential nature of this structure. The structure of metadisciplinarity connects theory and practice. This stands in direct contrast with studies approaches, such as performance studies, which is separate from theater practice.
View Full Paper: [View PDF]Title: Interactive Wallpaper
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
Interactive Wallpaper represents a new category of digital art. Deeply embedded into our built surroundings, interactive wallpapers exhibit
the following characteristics, blurring the boundaries between decorative art and useful science:
1 . They operate in everyday life
2. They are open
3. They are spatial.
4. They are alive.
Interactive wallpapers combine these primitives into powerful “immaterial” building blocks for creation of future spaces, buildings, cities. In this paper, we present a series of interactive wallpaper prototypes in order to explore how the tectonic and psychological effect of our surroundings can be augmented, subverted, and estranged by animating wallpapers and introducing an interactive, possibly darker dimension into architecture. What happens when traditionally static and innocent wallpapers become alive, get a sense of memory, spatiality, connectivity and randomness, and become part of our everyday lives?
Title: Memory Rich Garments: Body-Based Displays
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
This paper describes conceptual and technical prototypes of reactive body-worn artifacts that display their history of use and communicate
physical (or embodied) memory. This work concentrates on garments that reflect more subtle, playful, or poetic aspects of our identity and
history. The pieces described here are part of a larger research project called Memory Rich Clothing. A variety of input and output methodologies are explored to sense and display traces of physical memory, raising the question: What exactly do we want to remember?
Title: Drunk on Technology, Waiting for the Hangover: A Test Plot
Author(s):
Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2006: Intersections
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:
No abstract available.
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