Introduction

This year’s SIGGRAPH theme, Xroads of Discovery, invokes the analog idea of a piecework quilt to express the variegated—yet integrated—conference experience our gathering offers participants each year. Like a quilt, each panel at SIGGRAPH reflects a history and tells a story; together they reveal larger patterns about the state of computer graphics and interactive techniques in relation to the wider world. Within that interweaving, SIGGRAPH art papers (and panels) explore the role of artists and art-making in a computationally mediated world. This year’s papers touch on history, memory, and human experience itself as they are archived, documented and produced through art and computation. They raise questions about surveillance, appropriation and utility at the same time as they point towards emergent aesthetic possibilities and cultural effects.

In “Articulating Media Arts Activities in Art-Science Contexts,” Angus Forbes develops a system for understanding how media artists might most effectively take part in art-science collaborations. Developing categories of engagement that include generation, augmentation, provocation and mediation, Forbes refines a concept of art-science collaboration that relies on application of these methodological themes as guiding principles for collaborative engagement. His framework rests upon an assumption of utility that speaks to the larger question of the role and position of media art in scientific practice, at a time when those boundaries can seem increasingly fluid.

If Forbes is conscious of the role of the media artist in the context of scientific collaboration, in “Ethics, Ecology, and the Future: Art and Design Face the Anthropocene,” Kayla Anderson shifts the focus to the artist’s aims and impact in the post-human environment as a whole. Surveying a range of art and design interventions that rely on novel technologies and speculative bio-transformations to engage the topic, Anderson’s essay points towards technofutures where the line between nature and culture is blurred, and we are living—or dying—in the new ecologies we have helped produce.

What does this hybrid world look like? Claude Fortin and Kate Hennessy provide a glimpse of future states in “The Dual Skins of a Media Facade: Explicit and Implicit Interactions.” Their paper documents the ways in which a technological intervention into urban space simultaneously calls upon past spatial practices, in this case the historic idea of the Speaker’s Corner, and creates a fundamentally transformed environment through data-driven large-scale displays and sonic amplification. Implicitly bringing up questions of surveillance and control, their ethnographic analysis provides a glimpse past the hyperreal and into the workings of the emergent urban Anthropocene.

While Anderson reveals to us the adaptations humans may need to make to survive an Anthropocene crisis, and Fortin and Hennessy provide a glimpse of the future at an urban scale, Vernelle Noel describes and demonstrates some best practices in archiving existing, but endangered, analog forms of human creativity and reimagining them in digital contexts. “The Bailey-Derek Wire Bending Grammar: A Shape Grammar Describing the Undocumented Craft of Wire Bending in the Trinidad Carnival” provides an overview of the process involved in making explicit the implicit craft of wire bending, which includes understanding the human motivations and contexts for this work as well as the primitives, production steps and shape rules for the craft. The goal, to preserve the craft as well as introduce it to new audiences, leaves open the question of how digital intervention transforms its fundamental nature.

Further developing the theme of documentation and digital reproduction of past artistic practices, in “Yturralde: Impossible Figure Generator,” Esteban Garcia Bravo and Jorge Garcia explore Jose Maria Yturralde’s influential relationship to early computer art in the 1960s and 70s. Drawing upon original manuscripts and observation, the authors use contemporary software to reproduce effects originally produced on a mainframe. In re-creating the Impossible Figure Generator, the authors re-establish Yturralde’s presence not only in the history of computer art, but also as an ongoing “creator” of new work via the new software.

Finally, Daniel Temkin’s “Light Pattern” project draws upon the idea of the esolang, or “esoteric programming language,” to reframe art coding itself. Inspired by self-generating art practices such as Fluxus and...