Guest Editorial

One thing I absolutely love about SIGGRAPH is that it is produced under the umbrella of The Association for Computing Machinery. ACM, a group founded in 1947, has brought together scientists, engineers, and artists to share ideas for 63 years!

This year also marks the 37th SIGGRAPH conference and the 28th SIGGRAPH Art Gallery. Publications of technical papers and artworks presented at ACM events are the documentary record of those ideas, and they have set research, innovation, and publishing standards in the industry.

In 2010, SIGGRAPH continues 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 techniques. Our goal is to continue elevating the quality of art and art research presented at the annual SIGGRAPH conference toward the long-established level of excellence in the Technical Papers program, and set standards for other art publications while fitting the selected works within the overall conference themes.

For this second edition of Art Papers, published as a special issue of Leonardo, the journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, we continued to model the jury review and paper selection process on the one applied for the Technical Papers. The review process is extremely rigorous, thoughtful, and fair: every paper receives three or four very detailed reviews by specialized experts. This year, we accepted six papers from a pool of 36 submitted manuscripts (ratio 1:6). Two broad themes emerged during the selection process: Design Computation (Process, Product, Play) and Information Aesthetics. The Art Papers are presented at SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles in these two themed sessions.

The Art Papers would not have been possible without the generous involvement of the Art Papers Committee, over 20 reviewers, the Art Papers Advisory Board, SIGGRAPH contractors, our colleagues at Leonardo, and the authors themselves. I would like to thank all of these people for their hard work, support, inspiration, and endless patience.