ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art

The 2018 ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art is awarded to Monika Fleischmann, a research artist who has contributed to the field of interactive media art from the 1980s to the present day. She has pioneered the field of new media art and was instrumental in consolidating digital media into a research-led interactive art practice and a creative discipline—one that is able to engage in, analyze and visualize digital media and their transformations in the context of shifting fields of cultural and educational matters. In Fleischmann's work, these transformations have turned digital media into a reflexive and analytical arena for critical social and cultural thinking. Her artistic goal is to shed light on the contradictory characteristics of digital media.

Fleischmann's work—realized since 1987 and in partnership with architect and artist Wolfgang Strauss—ranges from fashion to digital architecture, interactive design, and poetic and social sculptures that intuitively interact with people and environment to explore intersections between art, science, technology and society.

In 1987 Fleischmann cofounded Art + Com, an interdisciplinary research institute for the convergence of analog and digital culture in Berlin; she was vice chairwoman of this first research institute for digital media in Germany. This center has been carrying on collaborative projects at the intersection between art, architecture, design, computer science and technology.

Fig 1.

Liquid Views—Narcissus' Mirror, interactive art installation (1992–1993), by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss with Christian-Arved Bohn. (© Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss)

In 1992, within the Scientific Visualization research group at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) in Sankt Augustin, Germany, Fleischmann and Strauss (two of the earliest media artists in Germany to initiate working closely with computer scientists for the purpose of increasing research) began to develop groundbreaking interactive media systems in both pure and applied areas. Her work has been exhibited and awarded internationally and is part of the collection of the ZKM, Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Together they have written over 100 publications. One project was the Responsive Workbench (RW), an applied work that followed the artistic installation Berlin–Cyber City. Today, along with the immersive virtual reality (VR) environment CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) and other VR tools, the RW is extensively deployed in visualization environments. Home of the Brain (1989–1992), represents one of the pioneering VR interactive artworks and has earned them a Golden Nica of Prix Ars Electronica for interactive art.

In 1997, Fleischmann founded the MARS Exploratory Media Lab, a research laboratory at the forefront of artistic and technical-scientific research on digital media and one of the world's leading hubs for trans-disciplinary collaborations between artists, architects, designers, cultural scientists and computer scientists. As a research artist in a computer science environment, she has benefited from and extended the research in this field. Fleischmann brought this research across global networks by constructing <netzspannung.org>, one of the first media art archive and eTeaching platforms at Fraunhofer Research Society, Munich. The Fraunhofer is Europe's largest application-oriented research organization.

Fig 2.

Compilation of interactive artworks (1987–2017) (© Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss.

Fleischmann's multidisciplinary background—fashion design, art and drama, computer graphics—has made her an expert in the world of art, computer science and media technology. Her artistic work deals with the change of identity and perception in a digital media culture.

In addition to the VR technology used in Home of the Brain, Fleischmann has contributed to the development of sensitive surfaces for the promotion of joint content exploration. These began with the mixed-reality installation about the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin–Cyber City (1988–1989), and continued with the interactive real time morphing installation Liquid Views (1992), which originated in the first mirror touch screen and extends to a contactless interface—the PointScreen technology that was motivated by a search for alternatives to touching the screen. PointScreen (patented in 2005) is based on gesture and the promotion of electric...