SIGGRAPH '18- ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 Art Gallery

3D printing allows unprecedented freedom in the design and manufacturing of even the most geometric complex forms---seemingly through a simple click of a button. In comparison, the making of glass is an analogue craftsmanship, coordinating an intricate interplay of individual tools and personal skills, giving shape to a material during the short time of its temperature-based plasticity. The two artworks discussed in this article, Augmented Fauna and Glass Mutations, were created during the artist's residence at the Pilchuck Glass School and articulate a synthesis between digital workflows and traditional craft processes to establish a digital craftsmanship.

Inhabitat is a mixed-reality artwork in which participants become part of an imaginary ecology through three simultaneous perspectives of scale and agency; three distinct ways to see with other eyes. This imaginary world was exhibited at a children's science museum for five months, using an interactive projection-augmented sculpture, a large screen and speaker array, and a virtual reality head-mounted display. This paper documents the work's motivations and design contributions, along with accounts of visitors' playful engagements and reflections within the complex interconnectivity of an artificial nature.

There is a crisis in our communities about the tributes to a shared civic life represented in existing public artwork and monuments. Culture wars are being waged herein and appear increasingly unreconcilable. This paper discusses this moment and describes the range of strategies artists and designers have used to remediate these works. It presents a project description of an interactive artwork that suggests innovative approaches in this realm. The author introduces a conceptual model which served as inspiration for the piece that may be useful when discussing and designing such interventions.

Diastrophisms is a sound installation with a modular system that sends images through rhythmic patterns. It is built on a set of debris from the Alto Río building that was destroyed by the 27F earthquake in 2010 in Chile. Diastrophisms explores poetical, critical and political crossings between technology and matter in order to raise questions about the relationship between human beings and nature, to consider the construction of memory in a community by questioning the notion of monument, and to imagine new forms of communication in times of crisis.

Holojam in Wonderland is a prototype of a new type of performance activity, "Immersive Mixed Reality Theater" (IMRT). With unique and novel properties possessed by neither cinema nor traditional theater, IMRT promises exciting new expressive possibilities for multi-user, participatory, immersive digital narratives. The authors describe the piece, the technology used to create it and some of the key aesthetic choices and takeaways.

This paper is an exploration of the processes used and ideas behind an animated full CGI feature film project that attempts to reach blockbuster production values, while retaining Art House sensibilities. It examines methods used to achieve these production values in an academic production environment and ways costs can be minimized while high quality levels are retained. It also examines the film's status as an Art House project, by comparing its narrative design and use of symbolism to existing works of Art House cinema.

To revive the Montreux Jazz Festival's archival live-concert footage, three immersive installations were designed using three different principles of augmentation, physicality and interaction. The primary aim was to engage the user in a new relationship with digitized heritage. Audience observations indicated a strong emotional connection to the content, the artist and the crowd, as well as the development of new social interactions. Experimentation showed close interaction between the three principles, while the three installations suggested methodologies for reviving audio-visual archives.

Data materialization is a workflow developed to create 3D objects from data-informed designs. Building upon traditional metalwork and craft, and new technology's data visualization with generative art, this workflow expresses conceptually relevant data through 3D forms which are fabricated in traditional media. The process allows for the subtle application of data in visual art, allowing the aesthetic allure of the art object or installation to inspire intellectual intrigue. This paper describes the technical and creative process of Modern Dowry, a silver-plated 3D-print teapot on view at the Museum of the City of New York, June 2017--June 2018.

Humans use letters, which are two-dimensional static symbols, for communication. Writing these letters requires body movement as well as spending a certain amount of time; therefore, it can be demonstrated that a letter is a trajectory of movement and time. Based on this notion, the author conducted studies regarding multidimensional kinetic typography, primarily using robots to display a letter and visualize its time and movement simultaneously. This paper describes the project background and design of the three types of robotic displays that were developed and discusses possible expressions using robotic displays.

Examining the use of new media in works by Ruben Komangapik, Kent Monkman and the Wikiup Indigenous Knowledge Network reveals the diverse ways in which technologies are used to disrupt linear time and Western visions of history. New media works challenge those misleading stories that have been told about Canada's indigenous peoples and assert indigenous presence in both the digital and physical landscape. These artists employ QR codes, video and augmented reality to push artistic boundaries and create representations of the past and present.

This paper investigates CASTING, Yiyun Kang's site-specific projection mapping installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, U.K., and the acquisition of the piece by the V&A in the following year. It identifies how CASTING developed distinctive properties in the field of projected moving-image installation artworks and how these novel characteristics were reflected in the acquisition by the V&A.

Coding, the translating of human intent into logical steps, reinforces a compulsive way of thinking, as described in Joseph Weitzenbaum's "Science and the Compulsive Programmer" (1976). Two projects by the author, Entropy (2010) and FatFinger (2017), challenge this by encouraging gestural approaches to code. In the Entropy programming language, data becomes slightly more approximate each time it is used, drifting from its original values, forcing programmers to be less precise. FatFinger, a Javascript dialect, allows the programmer to misspell code and interprets it as the closest runnable variation, strategically guessing at the programmer's intent.

Advertising Positions integrates 3D scanning, motion capture, novel image mapping algorithms and custom animation to create data portraits from the advertisements served by online trackers. Project volunteers use bespoke software to harvest the ads they receive over months of browsing. When enough ads have been collected, the volunteer is interviewed, 3D scanned and motion captured. Each ad is then mapped to a single polygon on the textured skin of their virtual avatar. Outcomes have been displayed as 2D/3D images, animations and interactive installations.

We started reading science fiction as teenagers. We fell in love with the fantastic worlds, the strange societies, the alien cultures and the amazing technologies. As we got older, though, we began to notice the lack of Native people in those futures. In fact, there were barely any nonwhite people at all.

Should we see the early development of computer-aided design as an aesthetic movement? Just as eighteenth-century England had picturesque gardens and the world of social media today has spawned its own universe of visual conventions (to take two examples at random), was there such a thing as a "computational aesthetics" some 50 years ago? These are questions not about "computer art" per se, but about how a new visual culture might emerge alongside new practices and new concepts. They are particularly tricky questions to ask of early computational images because such images come from an era when people were eager to frame their work as scientific research, and aesthetics was often ruled out of bounds.

In this note I describe my personal development of art systems over 50 years. In all of this work I have used computers and computational processes both to make the works and to advance my conception of art. This history is marked by a trace of publications in the journal Leonardo, itself being 50 years old. I will relate the story with specific reference to these publications. Each of the following sections relates to one Leonardo publication and includes quotations from that paper. In the earlier writing "he" or "him" is used sometimes to refer to a person who could well be female, as used to be the custom.

"Archaeology of CAD" is an ongoing project that examines the origins of Computer-Aided Design by bringing to life some of its pioneering technologies, which were central to re-shape design practices in the image of computation during the second half of the twentieth century. On display at SIGGRAPH will be two interactive installations from this project: the reconstructions of Steven A. Coons's "Coons Patch" and of Ivan Sutherland's "Sketchpad." Drawing from primary archives and oral sources, these interactive installations playfully revisit these transformative technologies from the 1960s, and enable visitors to approximate the experience of designing with the first Computer-Aided Design systems. Developed with computational design students at Carnegie Mellon University using present-day hardware and software languages, these reconstructions are inquisitive artifacts of historical inquiry. By evoking the embodied experience of interacting with these technologies, they shed light on the new forms of human-machine work that emerged with the rise of interactive computing during the Cold-War years, and highlight the sensual and gestural dimensions of the "computer revolution." Along with the two reconstructions, a selection of rare handwritten notes and documents by Coons, and a selection of key contractual documents between the US Air Force and MIT, are displayed to offer glimpses of the institutional and intellectual context that motivated these foundational technologies of computational design.

This sci-fi retelling of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) creation story reimagines Sky World as a futuristic utopia and Sky Woman as a brave astronaut and world-builder. When she learns that her planet is dying, Sky Woman volunteers to become the seed of the new world---an Earth yet covered in water. She Falls For Ages boldly mixes ancient storytelling with science fiction to connect the deep past with the far future.

He Ao Hou is a point-and-click adventure game set in the far future, when Native Hawaiians have attained the next level of navigation---space travel. The gameplay is based on kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiian) stories and knowledge, and focuses in particular on the uses of the kukui nut, itself a symbol of knowledge.

Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa) is the product of an uncommon partnership of an Alaska Native community and game developers. Through all stages of development, members of both communities met extensively to ensure that all creative and business decisions were appropriately considered and supported the goals of all stakeholders. Throughout the game and in supporting material, players will hear directly from members of both communities who were instrumental in shaping the game.

The Raven, the ultimate trickster, has become a cyborg. In this collaboration with Microsoft Vancouver, Shawn Hunt moves away from engaging with the handmade, exploring authenticity and our expectations of what it means to be indigenous through the removal of the hand-carved surface. The mask appropriates the traditional aspects of metamorphosis with the transformation from bird mask to human, yet in this adaptation the human mask has been altered, upgraded and merged with the machine. Incorporating aspects of technology, sound and space, each part of the work reflects Hunt's interest in how we understand and identify with the term indigenous.

Somnium is a robotic and audiovisual installation that provides visitors with the ability to contemplate and experience exoplanetary discoveries, their macro- and microdimensions and the potential for life in our galaxy.

INSTRUMENT | One Antarctic Night (IOAN) is a performative, multiparticipant reconfigurable artwork that engages open astronomical data in combination with data generated by robotic telescopes in Antarctica. IOAN places visitors inside a virtual star field of over 800,000 astronomical objects that form part of the Large Magellanic Cloud. This star field, created from observations in Antarctica and fused with additional data from multiple open astronomical repositories, is situated waist high within the virtual environment and stretches out beyond participants in all directions. Multiple participants can walk about the environment and collaboratively explore the star field by taking hold of the "fabric" of space, creating ripples and waves, and interacting with individual or sets of objects to create visual and auditory data remixes. The interaction places the astronomical data within a virtual reality visual and sonic remix engine that is a fundamental component of the artwork and is used to construct the virtual world. All graphics and spatialized ambisonic audio are procedurally generated from the data via real-time database queries. Our work incorporates machine learning approaches combined with granular and concatenative synthesis for generating the environment's unique soundscape. INSTRUMENT | One Antarctic Night evolved from our ongoing work in developing aesthetic data remixing and immersive data-driven experiences. Dataremix proposes the creation of the "datamade," a concept analogous to Duchamp's "readymade." IOAN is a meta-datamade in that it is a virtual instrument within which participants collaboratively create datamades through visual and auditory aesthetically driven remixes of astronomical data.

Considering the paradox between energy production and the contamination of the environment and reduction of biodiversity, cAt research group develops its work considering the discussion on sustainable sources of energy. The group's recent projects---Sopro (The Blow) and Toque (Touch)-have sought to aesthetically use the audience body's energy to interact and to animate the artworks. Simple devices are used to seek, in a kind of technological minimalist and interactive-art way, to raise public awareness of the issue of sustainability.

This interactive installation allows participants to control a digitally simulated ocean using only their brainwaves. Calm seas and storms alike are powered by the viewer's thoughts; the sheer act of concentration can conjure a squall or sunshine. Participants intentionally control their thinking while surrounded by the magnified consequence of their thoughts. Created in 2017, You Are the Ocean is about the theme of origins and one of the key concepts of Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe cosmologies: "land is alive."

Haven is a place of security and tranquility. Reminiscent of a mother's womb, it recalls our origins, where it all begins. The installation allows guests to leave their phones and all other technology at the door so they can be fully present without any of the prevailing modern distractions. They go in, spend some time, find themselves and maybe come out and start their day again. Fresh. A new beginning.

Diastrophisms is a sound installation with a modular system that sends images through rhythmic patterns. It is built on a set of debris from the Alto Río building that was destroyed by the 27F earthquake in 2010 in Chile. With Diastrophisms we were looking for a poetical, critical and political crossing between technology and matter, in order to raise questions about the relationship between human beings and nature, and to consider the construction of memory in a community by questioning the notion of monument, as well as to imagine new forms of communication in times of crisis. This piece has a full paper in the Art Papers section on page 356 of this journal.