Papers (sorted by Exhibition Year)

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Title: Identifying New Myths for Convergence and Creative Collaboration in the Age of Digitalia
Author(s):

Richard L. Loveless

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.

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Title: Transdisciplinarity, Yesterday and Today
Author(s):

Carlos Antônio Leite Brandão

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2007: Global Eyes
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

In the first part, this paper intends to show some reasons for the advent of transdisciplinarity as a strategy of knowledge in the 21st century. In the second part, it develops the basis for a transdisciplinary attitude required to solve complex and contemporary problems, and to promote a new articulation among science, art, technology, and culture.

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Title: A New System to Appreciate the Visual Characteristics of a Painting
Author(s):

Tsutomo Miyashita

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: Experimental Interaction Unit: Commodities of Mass Destruction
Author(s):

Anuradha Vikram

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2009: BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper describes several projects by the now-defunct Experimental Interaction Unit that use prod-uct design, software engineering, and digital networking to uncover collective behaviors that contribute to systems of social control. Biology and human behavioral studies are essential aspects of this critique. Experimental Interaction Unit’s projects from 1996 to 2001 represent subversive use of technology to reveal unrecognized aspects of human interaction with networks, such as how telematic distance psy-chologically absolves individuals from taking responsibility for their actions. The fear of vulnerability to terrorist actions, including biological warfare and electronic interference, is exploited in these works, in order to expose the ways in which security is promised in exchange for control.

Title: MobiSpray: Mobile Phone as Virtual Spray Can for Painting BIG Anytime Anywhere on Anything
Author(s):

Jurgen Scheible
Timo Ojala

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: Re-Visioning the Interface: Technological Fashion as Critical Media
Author(s):

Susan Elizabeth Ryan

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: 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: The 200 Year Continuum
Author(s):

Christian Kerrigan

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2009: BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

The 200 Year Continuum is the producer, recorder, and exhibitor in Christian Kerrigan’s advancing anthology of narratives. Central to Kerrigan’s practice is storytelling and mythmaking as a means of engaging his audience. Kerrigan uses drawing as his primary mode of research into these narratives, which are consequently offered in the form of live internet-feed installations acting as ecological sites, scientiﬁc experiments introducing new organic technologies, and digital images of worlds unseen. Each addition acts as a “middle story” within The 200 Year Continuum. In his narrative, The Amber Clock, a ship is grown in the yew forest of Kingley Vale over a period of 200 years. The narrative explores the possibilities of time in relationship to technology and the natural world. In his narrative, artiﬁcial and wild systems are choreographed, and the natural production of resin is harvested from the yew trees as a way of measuring time.

Title: Wearable Forest Clothing System: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
Author(s):

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2009: BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Wearable Forest is a garment that bioacoustically interacts with distant wildlife in a remote forest through a networked remote-controlled speaker and microphone. It expresses the unique bioacoustic beauty of nature and allows users to interact with a forest in real time through a network to acoustically experience a distant forest soundscape, thus merging humans and nature without great environmental impact. This novel interactive sound system can create a sense of unity between users and a remote soundscape, enabling users to feel a sense of belonging to nature even in the midst of a city. This paper describes the theory of interaction between the Human and the Biosphere through the design process of the Wearable Forest concept.

Title: Data Portraits
Author(s):

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2010: TouchPoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Data portraits depict their subjects’ accumulated data rather than their faces. They can be visualizations of discussion contributions, browsing histories, social networks, travel patterns, etc. They are subjective renderings that mediate between the artist’s vision, the subject’s self-presentation, and the audience’s interest. Designed to evocatively depict an individual, a data portrait can be a decorative object or be used as an avatar, one’s information body for an online space.

Data portraits raise questions about privacy, control, aesthetics, and social cognition. These questions become increasingly important as more of our interactions occur online, where we exist as data, not bodies.

Title: Glowing Pathfinder Bugs: A Natural Haptic 3D Interface for Interacting Intuitively with Virtual Environments
Author(s):

Anthony Rowe
Liam Birtles

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: Learning from Weaving for Digital Fabrication in Architecture
Author(s):

Rizal Muslimin

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: The Immediacy of the Artist's Mark in Shape Computation
Author(s):

Jacquelyn A. Martino

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: Touching Space: Using Motion Capture and Stereo Projection to Create a "Virtual Haptics" of Dance
Author(s):

Kim Vincs
John McCormick

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2010: TouchPoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper describes the work of a group of artists in Australia who used real-time motion capture and 3D stereo projection to create a large-scale performance environment in which dancers seemed to “touch” the volume. This project re-versions Suzanne Langer’s 1950s philosophy of dance as “virtual force” to realize the idea of a “virtual haptics” of dance that extends the dancer’s physical agency literally across and through the surrounding spatial volume. The project presents a vision of interactive dance performance that “touches” space by visualizing kinematics as intentionality and agency. In doing so, we suggest the possibility of new kinds of human-computer interfaces that emphasize touch as embodied, nuanced agency that is mediated by the subtle qualities of whole-body movement, in addition to more goal-oriented, task-based gestures such as pointing or clicking.

Title: Visual Anecdote
Author(s):

Dietmar Offenhuber

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: Art and Code: The Aesthetic Legacy of Aldo Giorgini
Author(s):

Esteban Garcia
David Whittinghill

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2011: Tracing Home in The Age of Networked Techniques
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

In 1975 Aldo Giorgini developed a software program in FORTRAN called FIELDS, a numerical visual laboratory devoted entirely to art production. Working extensively as both artist and scientist, Giorgini was one of the first computer artists to combine software writing with early printing technologies, leaving an aesthetic legacy in the field of the digital arts. His individual process was innovative in that it consisted of producing pen-plotted drawings embellished by the artist’s hand with painting, drawing, and screen-printing. This paper is the product of a multi-year study of Giorgini’s primary source materials provided by his estate. The authors examine the methods used by Giorgini during the 1970s that allowed him to create computer-aided art, in the hope that publishing this work will ensure that future generations of digital artists, technologists and scientists can be educated in Giorgini’s contribution to the history of the digital arts.

Title: Collaboration with the Future: An Infrastructure for Art+Technology at the San José International Airport
Author(s):

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2011: Tracing Home in The Age of Networked Techniques
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper summarizes the development and implementation of a three-part infrastructure for the ongoing program of technology-based public artwork at Silicon Valley’s newly expanded airport. The physical, technological, and human infrastructure provides flexibility and opportunities for future artists and future technologies while providing a robust framework for the ongoing maintenance and evolution of the program and mediating between the needs of artists and the constraints of an airport.

Title: Conserving Digital Art for Deep Time
Author(s):

Francis T Marchese

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: 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: The Readers Project: Procedural Agents and Literary Vectors
Author(s):

Daniel Howe
John Cayley

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2011: Tracing Home in The Age of Networked Techniques
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

The Readers Project is an aesthetically oriented system of software entities designed to explore the culture of human reading. These entities, or “readers,” navigate texts according to specific reading strategies based upon linguistic feature analysis and real-time probability models harvested from search engines. As such, they function as autonomous text generators, writing machines that become visible within and beyond the typographic dimension of the texts on which they operate. Thus far the authors have deployed the system in a number of interactive art installations at which audience members can view the aggregate behavior of the readers on a large screen display and also subscribe, via mobile device, to individual reader outputs. As the structures on which these readers operate are culturally and aesthetically implicated, they shed critical light on a range of institutional practices – particularly those of reading and writing – and explore what it means to engage with the literary in digital media.

Title: Entr’acte
Author(s):

Jordon Geiger

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2012: In Search of the Miraculous
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Looking at new public-space formations today, the roles of new technologies grow not only prominent but also noticeably time-sensitive. Due in part to the rapidly changing nature of communications media and the diverse stakeholders, the theatrical “entr’acte” appears to be an apt model for forms and durations of public space with diverse performers (both human and material elements) of different sorts: entr’acteurs. How is public space as physical construct changing with new embedded forms of computing? How is a public formed? What new material sensibilities emerge? And what role does their essentially fleeting or transitional character play?

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: Soundspheres: Resonant Chamber
Author(s):

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2012: In Search of the Miraculous
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

This paper develops a brief historical account of the architectural development of auditory space and identifies the “soundsphere” as an acoustic project that connects the interrelationships between material, spatial form and sound. The instrumental design of the soundsphere has focused on three types of shells: hard, static, and inflexible; physically manipulable; and immaterial (or electroacoustic). This frames a disciplinary and historical context for Resonant Chamber, a prototype-based design research project that develops a kinetic and interactive interior envelope system aimed at transforming the acoustic environment through dynamic spatial, material, and electroacoustic technologies.

Title: Translation + Pendaphonics = Movement Modulated Media
Author(s):

Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 2012: In Search of the Miraculous
Writing Type: Paper
Abstract/Summary/Introduction:

Translation is a multimedia dance performed on a vertical wall filled with the projected image of a lunar surface. Pendaphonics is a low-cost, versatile, and robust motion-sensing hardware-software system integrated with the rigging of Translation to detect the dancers’ motion and provide real-time control of the virtual moonscape. Replacing remotely triggered manual cues with high-resolution, real-time control by the performers expands the expressive range and ensures synchronization of feedback with the performers’ movements. This project is the first application of an ongoing collaboration between the Motivational Environments Research Group at Arizona State University (ASU) and STREB Extreme Action Company.

Title: Within an Ocean of Light: Creating Volumetric Lightscapes
Author(s):

Anthony Rowe

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: Early History of French CG
Author(s):

Cecile Welker