Highlights from SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery: Tracing Home

The SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery: Tracing Home presents exceptional digital and technologically mediated artworks that explore issues related to the concept of home in the networked age. From more than 300 submissions, the Art Gallery jury selected 16 pieces to be featured at SIGGRAPH 2011. These include 2D images, audio, video, as well as novel data-driven and mixed-media installations. They explore “home” as both a conceptual category and a physical reality, often blurring the boundaries between the two.

"The interplay of physical and virtual within our lived experience enables simultaneous and discontinuous realities at the touch of a button, echo of a voice, or nudge of a sensor,” said Mona Kasra, SIGGRAPH 2011 Juried Art Chair. “This year’s Art Gallery connects attendees with a unique interactive approach to art that explores this new era of technology, from a platform that captures the story of current world disasters through tweets and stock exchange information to a computer system that allows attendees to remotely control physical aspects of a house in foreclosure.”

The Art Gallery jury includes a wide range of artists, designers, technologists, and critics hailing from academia, industry, and the independent art world. Works exhibited in the Art Gallery are published in a special issue of Leonardo, the Journal of the International Society of Arts, Sciences and Technology. Peer-reviewed SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Papers will also be published in this special issue, which coincides with SIGGRAPH 2011 in August.

SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery Highlights include:

MOSTON - Anya Belkina, Emerson College

A 12-foot-tall suspended inflatable sculpture, MOSTON conjures a technology-driven amalgamation of Moscow and Boston with its three-dimensional form of mutated Russian nesting dolls and two-dimensional surface design of printed artwork and documentary footage projection.

tele-present wind - David Bowen, University of Minnesota

This installation consists of a field of x/y tilting devices connected to thin dried plant stalks installed in the gallery, and a dried plant stalk connected to an accelerometer outdoors. When the wind blows, it causes the stalk outside to sway. The accelerometer detects and transmits this movement in real time to the grouping of devices in the gallery.

Open House - Patrick LeMieux, Duke University; Jack Stenner, University of Florida

An installation that allows visitors to telematically squat in an actual Florida home undergoing foreclosure after the United States housing collapse. Virtual markets transformed this otherwise livable property into a ghost house. Prior to the collapse, movements of global capital seemed like a distant reality, but it was imaginary systems of value, not bricks and mortar, that asserted ultimate authority. Open House temporarily resists eviction by mirroring the market and creating hybrid subjects who occupy both virtual and physical space. Cross the threshold, open the door, flicker the lights, and rattle the shutters.

The Garden of Error and Decay - Michael Bielicky, HFG/ZKM Karlsruhe; Kamila B.Richter, HFG/ZKM Karlsruhe Programmer: Dirk Reinbold Sound: Lorenz Schwarz

A poetic visualization of real-time world catastrophes. In this data-driven narrative of current world disasters, the artist, Twitter users, and stock-exchange information all influence the storytelling.

Wait - Julie Andreyev, Emily Carr University of Art + Design; Simon Overstall, Emily Carr University of Art +Design

Human and canine communication methods are interrogated through this interactive video installation. Taking cues from the movements of the visitor to the installation, interactions with the video point to the relationship of control between human and animal.

View the entire Art Gallery online. Contact media@siggraph.org for high-resolution images. A preview video of the content will be available and posted here in the next few days.