SIGGRAPH 2017 (s2017.siggraph.org) will be featuring a special Art Gallery dedicated to works by contemporary Latin American artists, under the banner “Unsettled Artifacts: Technological Speculations from Latin America. Further, this year will see the introduction of the Best Art Paper Award to one of the six accepted papers. The 44th edition of the international conference and exhibition will be held July 30 to August 3 in Los Angeles.
The Art Gallery will present 10 curated installations from seven artists hailing from Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador, Cuba, Chile, Brazil and Colombia for the first Latin American-dedicated exhibition in SIGGRAPH’s history.
“Each curated piece looks at how artists, designers, and local makers and developers are using different tactics to create innovative, sophisticated, experimental, humorous, and rebellious work, and how they navigate the tensions and ambiguities between global and local, political and private, virtual and real, modern and traditional,” said 2017 Art Gallery Chair Paula Gaetano Adi. “It will also feature experimental artworks while attempting to map new grounds on which we can imagine different and alternative futures. Thus the speculative nature of the ‘unsettled artifacts’ idea.”
Highlights include: Milpa Polímera (Mexico) from Marcela Armas and Arcángelo Constantini, a 3D printer modified into a tractor that plants seeds made of polylactic acid — a thermoplastic biopolymer produced from a patented strain of corn, which paradoxically contrasts the very origins of the crop. BioSoNot 1.2 (Mexico) by Gilberto Esparza is a hybrid bio-sound instrument that translates biological activity into sound as it cleans contaminated water samples, creating music and noise by capturing electrons produced by the metabolic processes of bacteria and feeding them into an oscillator. JailHead.com (Cuba) from Rodolfo Peraza of Fanguito Studio uses internet surveillance technology to recreate el Presidio Modelo, an abandoned prison in Cuba, where participants in this multi-player VR “game” become “inmates” identified by their IP addresses — prisoners of the 21st century.
More on the 2017 SIGGRAPH Art Gallery here.
This edition’s Art Papers will investigate the roles of artists and their creative methods in an increasingly global, networked and technologically mediated world. Six papers have been accepted from over 50 submissions from 15 countries, to be presented by the authors on Aug. 1 in 20-minute sessions with five-mine Q&As. All papers will be published in a special issue of Leonardo (along with the Gallery pieces).
Each author will also produce a 30-second “preview” video for display in the conference lobby. And for the first time, a selection of Art Papers will be included in “Technical Papers Fast Forward” session on July 30 at 6 p.m., sponsored by Adobe Research.
2017 Art Papers Chair Ruth West said, “Art Papers explore the contributions of artists to the development of virtual and immersive experiences, bridging the digital-physical interface through engaging our embodiment within virtuality: the emergence of consumer VR and AR, how immersive experiences are shaping the cultural landscape, and their potential contributions to human creativity in art, entertainment, analytics, gaming, medicine, science, engineering, robotics, space exploration, communication, tourism, transportation, and cultural exchange.”
This year’s papers include Creature Interactions: A Social Mixed Reality Playspace by Andrew Bluff (University of Technology, Sydney), on a large-scale immersive/interactive artwork based on eco kids’ book Dot and the Kangaroo which features full-bodied expressive interaction in a social mixed-reality environment in stereo 3D; and Autoencoding Blade Runner: Reconstructing Films with Artificial Neural Networks by Terence Broad (Goldsmiths, University of London) on Blade Runner – Autoencoded, a first-of-its-kind film made by training a neural network to watch the film Blade Runner several times and then reinterpret it.
More info on the Art Papers here
