A Guide to Artworks
by Joel Slayton
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SIGGRAPH is affection. You have to love it. This annual simulation of an exhibition alternates between two hippest cities in the U.S., Los Angeles-the City of angels and New Orleans-the City of devils. These thoughtful venues are products of urban simulation that is larger than life. SIGGRAPH is a kind of hyper-real transaction space, an imaginarium-part fun house, part science fair and part sideshow. Its severity of identity and temporaneous utopian articulation serves to contextualize an annual art exhibition staged within the contemporary urban monument of a conferencing center. Each year it seems to get bigger and faster, following a sort of trajectory into the sunset.
Over the years the SIGGRAPH Art Exhibition has helped lay the groundwork for the hypermodern.
Its trajectory required that it ignore conceptualist and postmodern ideology. It is a Show. One of
processes, interactions and simulations in which the idea that anything digital is possible, or should be, or should not be. For SIGGRAPH is a demonstration that you first have to make it to critique it. I like SIGGRAPH. It's weird.
The 2001 Art Catalog expresses its orientation, "N-Space, the SIGGRAPH 2001 Art Gallery, takes viewers to a place where ideas and expression are rich, and this freedom is unconstrained by dimension". OK. This is the language of MTV, Disney, AT&T, SGI and Sun Microsystems.
The Art Exhibition must flow from such phantasm as it embodies an identity based on art as aesthetics, entrepreneurism, communication, marketing and technological research. All of the work in the exhibition was created with or derivative of digital technology and includes over 90 works of installation, digital images, sculpture, performance and interactive systems. That's a lot of art.
Most often radical art is directed at small audiences of intellectuals whose primary concern is to question the nature and function of art. Radical shifts in art are seldom confrontational. Radicalism is sublime, about being almost smart. One might argue for example that an analysis of new media art requires a denial of assumptions stemming from aesthetics, communication and traditional authorial discourses. And therefore, a critical examination of new media art must first demand a refusal of the purely formal and expressionist considerations of artists. But, then again, this is SIGGRAPH and who the hell cares about all that when we can encounter the artistic value of speed, interactivity and complexity. SIGGRAPH is not confrontational.
To its credit SIGGRAPH poisons traditional artists, engineers and the sometimes-punk scientist by creating a hypermodern vocabulary, taxonomy and scale of value. We have to code deeply when considering the SIGGRAPH 2001 Art Gallery. Nothing is what it seems.
Key to Artworks
**** A must see to believe. Understand. Consider.
*** Believe what you see. See. Code.
** See. Decipher. Interpret.
* Don't Believe. Question. Ponder.
Web
Altzero3 *
James Lane and Anthony Rowe
Interactive music visualization.
CollageMachine **
Andruid Kerne
A streaming visualization browser.
HaikuTree *
Doug Goodwin
A computer writing system.
My Language *
Clay Debevoise
Projective narratives as authorial space.
Network Communicate ***
Kazushi Mukaiyama
Representation of chat.
Visual Chaos**
Jody Zellen
Chaos as poetry about Los Angeles.
installations
Beyond Manzanar ***
Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand
Virtual Internment Camp
Case Study 5510/Case Study 5510B*
Tammy Knipp
Guillotine as psychophysiology.
Contact Water *
Taisuke Murakami
Face to face communication, a new tool.
The Floating Words***
Shinji Sasada
Liquidity of words.
Gemotion **
Yoichiro Kawaguchi
Mixed reality as emotion machine.
Invisible Places*
Next Question
Women navigate urban space.
Music Creatures**
Marc Downie
Visualization of musical creatures.
NAFTA Stock Puppets****
Jim Mason
Kinetic puppets tracks stock markets.
Netizens, net-Fringers and Outsiders****
Rejane Spitz
Demographic urban and rural mapping of Internet attitudes.
New York Mural: #2, for SIGGRAPH*
Michael O'Rourke
Digital Mural.
Not You, Not Here**
Michael Rodemer
Remote interaction. Remote space.
Omnipresence ver.1***
Harou Ishii
550 motors ringing bells while LEDs flash.
Poem Vacuum Cleaner**
Eunmi Yang
Sucking words as desolate urban existence.
Protrude, Flow***
Sachiko Kodama Minako Takeno
Fluid motion of physical materials.
Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries**
Diane Fenster Michael McNabb
Making visible what was once hidden.
Telomeres Project on Imminent Immortality***
Ellen Sandor
The obsession of preservation.
You Think Therefore I am (following you)***
Art-here Association
Walking on meta-data.
Interactive Programs
On Shifting Shadows*
Gita Hashemi
Representing the un-representable.
Texas Moments***
Performances
Artificial Paradises****
Martin Howse
Systematics made evident.
Chaotic Robotic Synesthesia*
Leesa and Nicole Abahuni
Performance of tactile, aural and visual perception.
Intuitive Ocusonics***
Involuntary gaze as interaction
Andrea Polli
That Branin Wave Chick V*
Paras Kaul and Mark Applebaum
Surrealism of neural audio imaging
VR Keith 2.0 **
Keith Boverson
Agents as self-arguments.
Sculpture
The Smoker **
Gene A. Felice II
The sublime beauty involved in smoking tobacco.
Proximal Actuator***
Jesse Hemminger
Connectionism as interactive association.
2D 3D Wall Images (highlights)
Closed Concealments***
Kimberely Burleigh
Counterfeit photogram.
Hans Dehlinger****
Excerpts from the 1999 War Refugees Counting Table
Mapping Kosovo war refugees.
Ian Gwilt***
Paintings from the Interface: Battery Power
Details from the ubiquitous computer interface.
Robert J. Krwczlyk****
Curving Spirolaterals
Algorithimic generators and transformations used to develop design.
Hye Jin Yoo***
Overgrown Artificiality 9-12
The negative side of natural disaster on a bright day in a new age that people might dream about.