Introducing the SIGGRAPH 2019 Art Papers

SIGGRAPH 2019 marks the eleventh joint publication by ACM SIGGRAPH and Leonardo/ISAST of this special issue of Leonardo. The Art Papers program brings together communities of researchers and practitioners working at the intersections of art, design, humanities, science and technology. For this edition, the open call encouraged authors to submit project descriptions, theory/criticism of digital art, methods/techniques of creative practices and history/media archaeology of materials and supports. In particular, this year we placed an accent on innovative and provocative self-critique forms, for example, multiple views of the same project, multicultural translation or multigenerational communication.

The SIGGRAPH 2019 Art Papers international jury, composed of renowned scholars, artists and scientists, accepted 15 papers from more than 60 submissions from 20 countries. The selection process started with a rigorous double-blind evaluation by at least two members of the jury and one external reviewer. Then, the highest-scored papers were discussed in detail over the Virtual Jury Meeting. In the last step, jurors served as shepherds of accepted papers and engaged in an intensive period of edits to arrive at the final version. With the intention to foster dialogue and diversity of topics, the printed issue of Leonardo includes the six accepted Long Papers, while the nine Short Papers are available through the ACM Digital Library and ARTECA (the digital art-science library from The MIT Press and Leonardo/ISAST). All the papers are accessible in open access from the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference Content website.

At the SIGGRAPH 2019 conference in Los Angeles, authors presented their papers in three sessions that gathered contributions according to resonant or complementary topics. In the first session, the main themes comprised spaces and territories including our relationship to fictional and psychological constructions such as borders, frontiers and our inherent human vantage point. The papers were "CAVE : Making Collective Virtual Narrative" by Kris Layng, Ken Perlin, Sebastian Herscher, Corinne Brenner and Thomas Meduri (which also received the Best Paper Award); "Terra Mars : When Earth Shines on Mars through AI's Imagination" by Weili Shi; "Learning to See : You Are What You See" by Memo Akten, Rebecca Fiebrink and Mick Grierson; "alt'ai : Designing Machine-To-Machine Interfaces for Automated Landscapes" by Paul Heinicker, Lukáš Likavčan and Qiao Lin; and "Aeolian Traces : Listening to the Resonances of Wind and Human Migration" by Joel Yuzhi Ong.

In the second session, some of the steering topics dealt with digital tools and archives, preservation of artworks and memorializing social events with digital media. Among the concrete practices and methodologies that were presented, these covered artist residencies, data visualization projects, installations and performances. The authors and papers in this session were "Secrets of Balanced Composition as Seen through a Painter's Window: Visual Analyses of Paintings Based on Subset Barycenter Patterns" by Jin Wan Park; "Off-Lining to Tape Is Not Archiving: Why We Need Real Archiving to Support Media Archaeology and Ensure Our Visual Effects Legacy Thrives" by Evanthia Samaras and Andrew Johnston; "Artist Residencies for Innovation: Development of a Global Framework" by Nicolas Henchoz, Pierre-Xavier Puissant, Ana Solange Leal, Tânia Moreira and Hugues Vinet; "Making Visible the Invisible : A Data-Driven Media Artwork, in Continuous Operation for 15 Years" by George Legrady and Rama Hoetzlein; and "Awakened Silence : A Projected Performance" by Rachel Dickey.

In the third session, the contributions shared a consideration of volume and space as a key component for interaction and interpretation from 3D printing techniques to multimedia installations. Authors reflected not only on new methodologies for design and interactive techniques, but also, in connection to the SIGGRAPH 2019 theme, "Thrive," on different ways of being together. The papers were "Weaving Objects: Spatial Design and Functionality of 3D-Woven Textiles" by Claire Harvey, Emily Holtzman, Joy Ko, Brooks Hagan, Rundong Wu, Steve Marschner and David Kessler; "The Trained Particles Circus : Dealing with Attractors, Automatons, Ghosts and Their Shadows" by Patxi Araujo; "Knowing Together : An Experiment in Collaborative Photogrammetry" by Rosalie Yu and Charles Berret; "Air Hugs : A Large-Scale Interactive Installation" by Rachel Dickey; and "No in Disguise : Algorithmically Targeted Conversations About Sexual Consent in a Multimedia Art...