Guest Editorial

It is with great pride that we bring you this third special issue, the result of an ongoing collaboration between Leonardo/ISAST, an organization that has fostered the exchange of ideas between practitioners in art, science, and technology since 1968, and ACM SIGGRAPH, a venue that has been bringing together scientists, engineers, and artists since 1947. Through this issue, SIGGRAPH 2011 extends its commitment to and recognition of the community of artists, designers, and scholars who work at the intersection of art, design, computer graphics, and interactive technologies.

In her introduction, Mona Kasra presents the juried SIGGRAPH 2011 Tracing Home Art Gallery, which includes digital and technologically mediated artworks exploring the concept of home in our highly networked age. We also recognize the accomplishments of our 2011 recipient of the ACM SIGGRAPH Lifetime Achievement Award in Digital Art, Charles Csuri, who inspired generations to embrace the aesthetic potential of computer imaging. Finally, we are happy to publish, for the third time, a new set of Art Papers; this program aims to feature not only artists and artwork, but also the processes and theoretical frameworks for making art and contextualizing its place in society.

What is an Art Paper?

Having served on the Art Papers jury, as juror and chair, since its inception three years ago, I have come to realize that writing an Art Paper is a very ambitious undertaking. It necessitates a seamless integration of creative practice, visionary thought, technical innovation, conceptual complexity, and theoretical rigor.

An Art Paper can take many forms. It can be a project description, a position paper, a thematic survey, a technical paper, or a monograph. This breadth and freedom can sound very liberating until we consider that an Art Paper must also fulfill a complex set of needs. In addition to providing a well-articulated description of a compelling artwork, the Art Paper must present the historical and theoretical framework for the piece, argue that the work is technologically innovative, as well as provide a conceptual and contextual narrative that inspires and provokes. Artists traditionally do not write about their own work. SIGGRAPH artists, however, have to wear many hats. Their work usually includes computing and interactive technologies and is often done in an academic context. They need to find funding for their work, produce it in a collaborative setting, document the work, and write about it. Publication and dissemination encompasses a variety of venues, including those devoted to technological innovation and those devoted to artistic expression. The work needs to be personal, but not too personal; technical, but not too technical; controversial, but not too controversial. SIGGRAPH Art Papers are a complex and multifaceted endeavor. They need to showcase simultaneously artwork, novel technologies, and innovative ways of working in computation and interaction.

For the current set of Art Papers published in this special issue of Leonardo, we have accepted five papers from a pool of 64 submitted manuscripts (ratio 1:13). Jurors were seeking papers that provide context (historical and theoretical), present practical considerations within a solid conceptual/theoretical framework, provide critical reflections and analysis, and describe the significance and the unique contributions of the work under consideration.

The Art Papers would not have been possible without the dedicated involvement of the Art Papers committee, over 30 reviewers, the advisory board, SIGGRAPH contractors, our colleagues at Leonardo, and the authors themselves. I sincerely thank all of these contributors for their hard work, inspiration, and expertise.