Saturday night I hopped on the shuttle bus over to the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Special Performance Weekend exhibits at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California, San Diego. I’m glad I did. It was well worth the 30 minute bus ride.

The Art Gallery is always one of my favorite venues at SIGGRAPH. It is an opportunity to see work produced by artists pushing the boundaries of digital art with a capital “A”. The digital performances and work on display at UCSD were conceptually, technologically and artistically stimulating. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to see everything while I was there. It seems there is never enough time to take in everything I would like to see when at SIGGRAPH. What I did see was a treat for my eyes, ears and mind.

Let me tell you about a few pieces that caught my attention. I found Rutopia 2 by Daria Tsoupikova, particularly interesting. According to the artist, “Rutopia 2 is a virtual reality art project built for a C-wall VR system. It explores the aesthetics of virtual art in relation to Russian folk arts and crafts. The project describes a magic garden with interactive sculptural trees linked to a matrix of several other unique virtual environments that together create a shared network community.” Daria Tsoupikova, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been doing research on how the aesthetic of art affects the viewer of virtual reality. To create this piece, she worked with programmer Alex Hill, who developed special nodes for this project using the Ygdrasil framework.

Rutopia 2 is projected from two projectors with circular polarizing filters, onto a black screen which preserves the polarization. Viewers wear circularly polarized glasses in order to feel fully immersed in the environment. The technology behind Rutopia 2 is certainly interesting, but I also found the visuals and the background music very appealing. This is not the typical VR world. Since the piece is inspired by Russian folk art, it has a rich palette of saturated colors. The textures were all hand painted and scanned, then applied to geometry created in Autodesk Maya. The painterly quality of the textures makes the viewer feel like they are moving through a painting. I could have lingered much longer watching the movement through this virtual painterly world, but I had to move on. It was a pleasure speaking with Daria Tsoupikova about her work.

What if I’m not Real, directed by Kooj Chuhan, in collaboration with Tang Lin, Aidan Jolly (music director), Jilah Bakhshayesh, Miselo Kunda, Hafiza Mohamed and others, represents two years of work which addresses issues of refuge, asylum and migration. Kooj Chuhan describes the narrative, “Three masked figures on rafts at sea appear in each of three screens arranged as a circular triptych: an official, a migrant parent, and a child. The anxious official denies the parent access to safe land and community while engaging in lucrative military games. The conclusion poses an inevitable consequence of current conflicts.”

The hounds tooth gauze screens are framed on top and bottom by bamboo poles, and hung from the ceiling on thin lines. The jagged edges of the screen, in combination with the bamboo, give it a raw, earthy feel. The three screens are arranged in a circular triptych and surrounded by black walls. As you walk around the screens you experience a different view of the story. From some directions the images overlap, weaving into each other. From other directions, an image projects through the screen onto the black wall, creating an interesting distorted ghost image.

The music changes over time, lending a slightly different mood to the visuals with each change in musical intensity. At one point the recorded music was turned off, and Aidan Jolly performed live with two local musicians. Every live performance is improvised, so it is always a little different.

What if I’m not Real is not a piece you walk away from after a few seconds. It takes time and concentration to really understand the narrative, but when you take the time to fully experience it, it makes powerful statement.

The last work I’ll tell you about is Autopoiesis/Mimesis, by Maja Cerar and Luibo Borissov. According to the artists, “Autopoiesis is a work that imagines realities and is, in part, a humorous document of the discussions between the two authors about the beginning of the universe. It is followed and complimented by Mimesis, a more serious exploration of the ancient tension between imperfect reality and ideal form as furthered by art’s mimicry."

I did not have the opportunity to speak with the artists about the technology behind this piece, but it was an interesting combination of visuals and sounds created by a live performance. In Autopoiesis, Maja Cerar was wearing a black suit with neon tubing on the arms and legs. As she moved and played the violin, her moment affected the images projected onto the large screen. The combination of visual and sound created by the performance intertwined to create an engaging experience.

In Mimesis the images on the screen moved like puppets as Maja Cerar played the violin while moving on the sage. At first the puppet was an image of the artist, then it transformed into a figure made up of violin parts. In Autopoiesis/Mimesis there was an engaging interaction between the artist and the art.

I wish I had more time to spend experiencing the other work exhibited, as part of the Art Gallery Digital Performances, at UCSD. It looked like there was plenty of interesting work in the rooms I walked by. The Art Gallery Digital Performances were a great way to start off my 2007 SIGGRAPH adventure.