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| RAY bridges intelligent visualization with cameraless photography (Rayograph) to engage audiences with an interactive poetic experience that conveys meanings. (Source: “RAY” © Weidi Zhang) |
SIGGRAPH 2022 will take place at the Vancouver Convention Center from August 8 to 11 after being held virtually for two years, enabling Experience, Experience Plus, Full Conference, and Full Conference Supporter registrants to once again enjoy the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery in person within a physical space. The Art Gallery is a juried exhibition that showcases the latest innovations in digital art. Serving as this year’s Art Gallery chair is Daria Tsoupikova from the University of Illinois, Chicago.
From more than 120 submissions, jury has selected projects following this year’s gallery theme, “Arts and Health, the Convergence.” There will be nine installations from five countries, including a jury-selected Best in Show. Highlights from the program include:
My Data Body
Marilene Oliver and Scott Smallwood, University of Alberta; Stephan Moore, Northwestern University; and J.R. Carpenter
“My Data Body” is a collaborative, multimedia installation that include sculptures, video projection, prints, and virtual reality. In “My Data Body,” the medically scanned, passive, obedient, semi-transparent body becomes a data processing site that can be pulled apart, de- and re-composed, or, as popular-science author/intellectual Yuval Harari warns, “surveilled under the skin.”
BEST IN SHOW
RAY
Weidi Zhang, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
“RAY” provides a responsive art experience that re-interprets Rayograph (photogram)—a 20th century cameraless image-making technique—in the perspective of artificial intelligent (AI) surveillance and the changing ontology of images. The system implements image-to-image translation with conditional adversarial networks and a computer vision system to translate human portraits into new images of Rayograph with semantic meanings, which are further developed algorithmically through visualizing in the aesthetics of light painting.
Sympathetic Wear
Junichi Kanebako, Kobe Design University; Naoya Watabe, Miki Yamamura, Keisuke Shuto, and Hiroko Uchiyama, Joshibi University of Art and Design; Haruki Nakamura, SANNANE G.K
Taking the human back as theme, Sympathetic Wear is an artwork that brings gentle healing to the mind and body of a person on the other side of the network, employing an “expanding leaf” actuator the team developed to create the tactile sensation of soft caressing on the back of the receiver that is invisible to them on screen.
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The digital art focus will continue by Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher Sougwen Chung in a Featured Speaker session, in which she will discuss her work in human and machine collaboration in the presentation “Seeing Double—Bridging Dualities with Relational Intelligence.” Chung says, “More than ever, the interdisciplinary nature of our fields demand new spaces for interrogation, invention, and collaboration. Embracing contradictions in art and research can pave the way to a third path, inspired by tradition and the development of new hybridities.”
Featured Speaker sessions, including Chung's, are open to the Full Conference and Virtual Conference registration levels. Register for the conference at 2022.SIGGRAPH.org/register.