SIGGRAPH 2022 Reveals Art Gallery Preview, Plus Featured Speaker Details

At SIGGRAPH 2022 Digital Art Takes Center Stage With Gallery Experience, Featured Speaker Session

Preview the Vancouver Art Gallery and Featured Speaker Sougwen 愫君 Chung Details

CHICAGO—SIGGRAPH 2022, the world’s leading computer graphics and interactive techniques conference, will showcase the latest innovations in digital art in its Art Gallery and with a separate Featured Speaker session from artist and (re)searcher Sougwen 愫君 Chung. The gallery is set to feature nine installations from five countries, including a jury-selected Best in Show, and the conference will run 8–11 August at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

“It is an honor to bring the Art Gallery back to a physical space after two years of virtual,” said SIGGRAPH 2022 Art Gallery Chair Daria Tsoupikova, of University of Illinois Chicago. “The projects the jury has selected are fascinating, remarkable, and complex in the ways that they experiment with interactivity.”

Chosen by an expert jury from more than 120 submissions, this year’s Art Gallery selections epitomize the 2022 gallery theme, “Arts and Health, the Convergence” celebrating diversity of the art helping humanity. Amid the anxieties and uncertainty brought on by a global pandemic, artists around the world continued to apply cutting-edge technologies to create experimental works that promote mental health, fight social and cultural isolation, augment physical well-being, and improve communication over distance. Highlights from the program include:

My Data Body

Marilene Oliver and Scott Smallwood, University of Alberta; Stephan Moore, Northwestern University; and, J.R. Carpenter

“My Data Body” is a collaborative, multimedia installation that include sculptures, video projection, prints, and virtual reality. In “My Data Body”, the medically scanned, passive, obedient, semi-transparent body becomes a data processing site that can be pulled apart, de- and re-composed, or, as Yuval Harari warns, “surveilled under the skin”.

BEST IN SHOW

RAY

Weidi Zhang, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)

“RAY” provides a responsive art experience that re-interprets Rayograph (photogram) — a 20th Century cameraless image-making technique — in the perspective of artificial intelligent (AI) surveillance and the changing ontology of images. The system implements Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks and a computer vision system to translate human portraits into new images of Rayograph with semantic meanings, which are further developed algorithmically through visualizing in the aesthetics of light painting.

Sympathetic Wear

Junichi Kanebako, Kobe Design University; Naoya Watabe, Miki Yamamura, Keisuke Shuto, and Hiroko Uchiyama, Joshibi University of Art and Design; Haruki Nakamura, SANNANE G.K

Taking the human back as theme, Sympathetic Wear is an artwork that brings gentle healing to the mind and body of a person on the other side of the network, employing an “expanding leaf” actuator our team developed to create the tactile sensation of soft caressing on the back of the receiver that is invisible to them on screen.

Separate from the Art Gallery, the digital art focus will kick off with a Featured Speaker session from Sougwen Chung on Monday, 8 August. The session, entitled “Seeing Double — Bridging Dualities With Relational Intelligence”, will cover the thesis question: Where “AI” ends and “we” begin? Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and (re)searcher based in London, and former MIT research fellow, whose work explores the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine.

“It’s an honor to deliver the opening keynote for SIGGRAPH 2022,” shared Chung. “More than ever, the interdisciplinary nature of our fields demand new spaces for interrogation, invention, and collaboration. After two years away from Canada, where I was raised, I’m looking forward to returning and connecting with fellow researchers across disciplines about what we build and why.”

The SIGGRAPH 2022 Art Gallery is open to the Experience, Experience Plus, Full Conference and Full Conference Supporter registration levels. Featured Speaker sessions, including Chung’s, are open to the Full Conference and Virtual Conference registration levels. Register for the conference at s2022.SIGGRAPH.org/register.