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  • IntroductionSIGGRAPH Art Gallery 2019
  • Brittany Ransom (bio)

The SIGGRAPH Art Gallery has historically existed as a leading space for artists whose practices fuse compelling creative vision with technological innovation. The Art Gallery has continually established itself as a leader in generating an annual space for creative contemplation within the art and technology community. For the first time in three years, the Art Gallery returned to an open juried call, allowing the opportunity and conversation within this area of the conference to be shifted back into the hands of a global art community.

In light of shifting ecological, political, social and global relations climates, this year's theme, Proliferating Possibilities: Speculative Futures in Art and Design, offered artists the opportunity to submit creative works that examine the present and the future while ultimately considering the question "What can we do?" Calling to a future full of promise and unknowns, this year's theme was meant as a propositional speculation of issues we face and how we as artists might address them. Since the inception of SIGGRAPH 45 years ago, art, design and technology have continued to propel us into an interwoven evolution of creative practices that fuse elements of research, fabrication and artistic practices from around the globe, and the 2019 exhibition continues to highlight these achievements. Artists have incorporated and continue to incorporate hybrid practices, digital fabrication technologies, science, architecture, design and virtual and augmented platforms in their work as a means of exploring crucial societal questions.

This year artists addressed our unknown future through technically challenging, visually poetic and physically immersive installations that explore artificial intelligence (AI) paired with embodied experiences, the ocean and underwater environments, and monitoring the body in ways that expand upon our sense of self and our physical needs in the future.

AI plays a large part in this year's exhibition and continues to be an area of research that artists explore as we move within a continuously evolving world of machine-learning devices. RuShi, created by John Wong, is a contemplative piece that explores the notions of big data and artificial intelligence as a new type of fortune-teller that pairs ancient histories with new technology. Pairing the ancient Chinese fortune-telling system of BaZi with an algorithmic AI, the piece bathes visitors in a saturated colorful palette of projected light created based on their birthdays that ultimately reflects their destinies through this generative system. Immersive AI continues throughout the exhibition with LAVIN, created by Jieliang Luo and Weidi Zhang, which explores our understanding of neural networks within the real world. Mapping a series of daily objects, this installation allows viewers to navigate a virtual world made of fluid abstract structures through an embodied experience. In a more playful approach, artist Brigitta Zics presents her work Pachinko Machine, an AI pinball machine reminiscent of the traditional game originating in Japan. Zics's machine plays the game by itself, continually improving its odds of winning through performance changes, yet ultimately unable to overcome a second intelligence cycle within the game. Each of these works points to the future of evolution of smart devices and interfaces. Each also ultimately points to an element of unknown within the algorithm of the future.

While some contemplate our digital futures through AI and machine learning, other artists consider our collective speculative future through tangible immediate environments like our shared oceans and personal dwellings. Fiber-Optic Ocean, created by Özge Samanci, Adam Snyder and Gabriel Caniglia, is an installation that explores the sonification of live data and the relationship between fiber-optic cables in [End Page 397] the ocean and live sharks. This work creates an immersive environment that highlights the consequences of our Internet cables that physically connect our continents through international waters. This connectivity results in sharks biting the cables after intercepting their magnetic fields and mistaking them for prey. The work ultimately points to our connective technological interventions for the sake of humanity as well as our constant ignorant disruptions of natural ecological systems. The visually stunning and immersive NOISE AQUARIUM (as seen on the cover), by Victoria Vesna, Alfred Vendl, Martina Fröschl, Glenn Bristol, Paul Geluso, Stephan Handschuh and Thomas Schwaha, provides a...

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