SIGGRAPH Unveils 2012 Art Gallery: In Search of the Miraculous

SIGGRAPH 2012 Art Gallery: In Search of the Miraculous presents exceptional digital and technologically mediated artworks that explore the existence of wonderment, mystery, and awe in today’s world of mediating technologies and abundant data. Of the nearly 400 submissions, 12 were hand-picked by a jury to be exhibited at SIGGRAPH 2012, 5-9 August at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The jury included a wide range of artists, designers, technologists, and critics hailing from academia, industry, and the independent art world.

Osman Khan, SIGGRAPH 2012 Art Gallery Chair

“The Art Gallery call for submissions was purposefully ambiguous, based not on any particular thematic premise but rather on sentiment—simply an open call for works that both inspire or are inspired by moments of awe, surprise, mystery, and wonder,” said Osman Khan, SIGGRAPH 2012 Juried Art Chair from the University of Michigan.

“Interestingly, in an ubiquitously digital world, many of this year’s submissions move toward the physical and analog, not in a turn toward ludditery [many projects are quite technically complex], but perhaps as a reflection of a pervasive ennui of the digital.”

Works exhibited in the Art Gallery are published in a special issue of Leonardo, the Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. Peer-reviewed SIGGRAPH 2012 Art Papers will also be published in this special issue, which coincides with SIGGRAPH 2012 in August.

SIGGRAPH 2012 Art Gallery highlights include:

A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe)

Martin John Callanan, Slade Centre for Electronic Media & Fine Art, University College London

A Planetary Order is a terrestrial globe depicting clouds from a single moment in time. The globe itself is a physical visualization of real-time scientific data.  To create the work, Callanan took one second of readings from all six cloud-monitoring satellites currently overseen by NASA and the European Space Agency and transformed the information physically into outlines and profiles of the clouds that were emerging at that moment across the surface of the Earth.  The shimmering white cloud globe freeze-frames the entire operation of the global atmospheric regime and highlights the fragility of the environmental (and informational) systems that operate across the world.

Art Gallery Chair feedback on this piece: "In what at first may look to be a common Earth globe, Callanan’s A Planetary Order makes a poetic statement by shifting our attention from the usual geographic information by voiding the usual terrestrial markings, and instead presents an immortalized ephemeral instant, eternalizing a fleeting moment shared by the global whole, giving us pause to reconsider what really matters in this world."

Kapitän Biopunk: Fermentation Madness

Julian Abraham, Independent Artist

Kapitän Biopunk: Fermentation Madness is an artistic research project manifested via a series of workshops and an acoustic and performative installation. The project developed in response to the high number of poisonings and deaths of alcohol consumers after an increased excise tax was placed on alcoholic products in Indonesia. The project, using do-it-yourself and open-source technologies, strives to educate individuals on fermentation processes to produce safe and affordable alcoholic products, and a means to democratize the laboratory and liberate knowledge for a wider society.

Art Gallery Chair feedback on this piece:  Abraham’s Kapitän Biopunk combines the aesthetics of a mad chemist’s lab with Dionysian song and (literal) spirit. Though the work uses a simple mediation (Putting microphones on the fermenting jars), the resulting cacophony of bubbling sounds, a by-product of the fermentation process, is both amazing and amusing to hear.

90° South

Alejandro Borsani, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Alejandro Borsani’s 90° South provides a contemplative point of view that allows the viewer to witness and be immersed in the constant evolution of a growing landscape. The work utilizes an irrigation system in conjunction with a highly absorbent material (sodium polyacrylate) to produce a slowly emerging landscape. A thin layer of the white material is placed on top of a round surface. When water reaches the surface, the sodium polyacrylate expands 300 times, producing subtle undulations. The profiles of these miniature mountains are projected onto the walls of the gallery using a flashlight attached to a rotating mechanism.

Art Gallery Chair feedback on this piece:  Like Calvino’s fictional cities, Borsani’s 90° South presents an imagined landscape, replacing Calvino’s urban constructs of the Antarctic. As real as any dream and as much a fiction as any photograph, 90° South rekindles—especially in this heavy mediated and imaged world—the wonderment and magic found in the idea of imaginary places.

SymbiosisS

Kärt Ojavee, Eesti Kunstiakadeemia; Eszter Ozsvald, New York University

SymbiosisS is part of a collection of textile interfaces, SymbiosisO (“O” for objects), which behave as organic displays and react to definable impulses by showing pre-defined patterns that animate slowly over the surface. It welcomes viewers to sit and rest on soft-folded material that displays an active, slowly shifting pattern. When excited, the pattern starts forming, in a playful, curious way, around the place where the textile was touched. Once the disturbance is abated, the pattern continues its peaceful expansion. This vivacious interaction of a vibrant pattern is a demonstration of the potential for tangible textile interfaces. Ubiquitous computation—an active, programmable secondary skin to surround everyday objects—is an ambient, “noiseless,” and thus vigorous way to visualize information and form space.

Art Gallery Chair feedback on this piece:  In letting users leave traces of their hands and bodies via heat sensitive thermochromatic dyes, SymbiosisS mediates and amplifies the conditions of its own use.  Echoing our impulse to leave our mark, the handprints found at the Lascaux caves comes to mind, and in its network of conducting thread, a nod to social networking, interacting with SymbiosisS subtly aestheticizes unique temporal moments of individual and social interactions.

The HeartBeats Watch

Julie Legault, V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, Royal College of Art

Stretching or shrinking hours at the beat of your heart, The HeartBeats Watch is a timepiece in which the duration of time is paced not by seconds but according to the wearer's heartbeat.  Through a heightened awareness of self, The HeartsBeats Watch brings together art and science to reveal emotional complexity of time and the human body. A poetic investigation of the physiology of emotions, health, immortality, and control, the watch bridges the gap between society and medical science, invoking a broader cultural perception of life.

Art Gallery Chair feedback on this piece:  The work was inspired by love; in LeGault’s words “time slows when I’m with you, and time flies, and time stops with every heartbeat.” By relating our ticking mortality with the eternal mechanisms of time, LeGault allows for a profound reflection on our understanding of and connection to time.

Sustainable Cinema No. 4: Shadow Play

Scott Hessels, City University of Hong Kong

The wind-powered Sustainable Cinema No. 4: Shadow Play is a kinetic public sculpture that harnesses sustainable energy to generate a moving image. By using natural power to re-create an early art form that led to the beginnings of cinema, the sculpture references the histories of both motion pictures and industrialization. It explores a possible future of environmentally responsible media; looking forward by looking back.

Art Gallery Chair feedback on this piece: Hessel’s Shadow Play, wrapped in a pre-cinematic nostalgia, ideas of sustainability and especially in context of the digital heavy SIGGRAPH conference, presents an alternative retro-futuristic version of the moving image. Go Windpunk!

Click here for the complete SIGGRAPH 2012 Art Gallery list of artists and works.

Interview with SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery Chair

Following below is a brief interview with Mona Kasra, SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery Chair, who explains her vision and insights into this year's amazing Art Gallery - Tracing Home.

Kasra is a new media artist and educator currently pursuing a PhD at University of Texas at Dallas with a focus on emerging media and communication.

What was your vision behind this year’s Art Gallery?
Tracing Home actually came about as a result of blending SIGGRAPH 2011’s main conference theme “Make it Home” into my personal research interests around the effects of networked media on our culture and our existence. Home is a strong component in production of identities and can signify community and belonging while, on the other hand, can indicate a sense of displacement and isolation. As an Iranian-American, I have been personally fascinated by its personal, political, historical, or cultural definitions.

Given that our understanding of the word home is constantly being shaped and reshaped, I was eager to see how digital artists trace home in the age of networked technology where our sense of body, space, and time is rapidly dematerialized through non-physical hyper-connections. I was especially looking for artworks that critically addressed the current blurring boundaries between virtual and physical. So, Art Gallery’s Call for Submission (CFS) this year invited artists to submit their digitally mediated artworks that searched for, examined, or constructed different dimensions to the concept of home in the 21st century. I should mention that after the jury process, I was blown away by the variety of perspectives that the participating artists have embarked on - certainly beyond what I had imagined in the first place.

How did the community respond (number of submissions, etc)?
The response to SIGGRAPH Art Gallery’s CFS was quite impressive this year. We received over 300 high quality submissions from across the world in a broad range of mediums and disciplines. Submissions varied from those directly responding to the main theme of the exhibition… to those who drew attention to variety of sub-themes and for instance dealt with the ideas of nostalgia, spirituality, surveillance, privacy, control, etc.

All together, the level of breadth and creativity in many of the entries was incredible. The Selection Committee - which was composed of a group of artists, curators, and academic experts in the areas of art, science, and technology - had to go through a lengthy and difficult process of evaluation in order to identify and assemble the content of this year’s exhibition. The outcome of their careful selection is a fresh look at home in relation to its physicality as well as its emotional and sociopolitical aspects.

How will this year’s experience be different than the past?
Well, Art Gallery this year is thematically much more specific and narrowed down. We asked the artists: “where and what is home in the networked era?” and invited them to creatively engage in a more detailed exploration of a rather familiar concept. As a result, even though the selected artworks are very different in approach and technology, an invisible but unifying conceptual theme connects them all tightly. I certainly hope that such strong interconnection among the artworks would further engage the audience with the content of the works and the content of the overall exhibition.

This year, during the course of the conference, SIGGRAPH 2011 Art Gallery committee will provide the audience with educational opportunities such as guided “Daily Tours” and “Informal Art Talk” sessions. The goal of these programs is to expand on Tracing Home and expose the attendees to the various ways that artists use technology for artistic and conceptual expression.

Additionally, thanks to SIGGRAPH International Center, Art Gallery will be offering multilingual podcasts which will further explain artists’ thoughts and ideas behind their exhibited works. We hope that these podcasts facilitate self-guided tours of the gallery as attendees will be able to access the audio files on the spot just by scanning assigned QR codes using their smartphones. Podcasts will be accessible on the web closer to the conference and can also be downloaded prior to visiting the gallery.

You have been involved with the Art Gallery for several years now, what keeps you motivated to stay involved as a SIGGRAPH volunteer?
Simple… the ultimate opportunity to meet and work with some of the most inspiring artists and art lovers from around the world. The experience has been truly worthwhile.

What is the best advice you can give an artist interested in submitting to future SIGGRAPH conferences?
My advice is three-fold actually:

1- Read SIGGRAPH Art Gallery’s Call for Participation (CFP) carefully and thoroughly. CFPs vary every year. Submissions that do not relate or respond to Art Gallery’s CFP stand no chance of getting accepted to the show by the selection committee.

2- Spend substantial amount of time to review and follow the submission requirements. Incomplete or wrongly completed submissions will not be considered. Write a lucid description for your submission and provide a detailed Artist’s Statement. Explain your vision, intentions, and process in depth and especially address how your work relates to the CFP.

3- Keep an eye on the submission deadline. Every year, Art Gallery receives multiple requests from artists for late submissions, all of which regretfully get declined.

What do you hope attendees take away from this year’s Art Gallery?
First and foremost, I hope Tracing Home will be a memorable exhibition that inspires, informs, and engages the audience with its space and content; one that fosters dialog between attendees and participating artists. Secondly, in terms of our theme and our preoccupation with home in the networked age, I hope the selected works will collectively trigger the audience to re-examine and reflect on our new life trajectories especially in regards to hybrid realities of virtual and physical.

For complete details, visit the Art Gallery web page.

For the preview video, visit the video page.