Comment on this story What: SIGGRAPH Traveling Art Show When: Ewing Gallery, UT’s Art and Architecture Bldg. Where: June 14 thru July 2. Opening reception: June 11, 6-10 p.m. with refreshments, Dennis Dow Jazz Quartet with theremin player Paul Wise, emcee Norris Dryer and speaker Stewart Dickson.

SIGGRAPH works prove computer art has feelings, too

by Leslie Wylie

Intuitively, we perceive a dichotomy between art and computer technology. One traditionally exists as the end product of a highly organic and emotive creative process; the other seems formulaic and cold, a mechanical axis of responses to external data.

On second thought, however, this assumption becomes shortsighted. Are the artist’s creative facilities themselves not a kind of information processing system wherein outside stimuli—memories, observations, ideas—is filtered through an internal database of predetermined mental and emotional controls to produce an original output? Computers, in turn, are essentially technological manifestations of human knowledge and imagination.

The UT Ewing Gallery’s presentation of the ACM SIGGRAPH (Computer Graphics Special Interest Group of the Association for Computing Machinery) Traveling Art Show is an amalgamation of the two not-so-disparate realms. The international exhibition is composed of 44 works of computer-inspired and computer-generated art, a juried subset of those on display at the organization’s 2003 annual conference.

“Technology and art do intersect, and this is where they intersect,” says Kyle McDaniel, program chair of the East Tennessee SIGGRAPH chapter that is hosting the exhibit.

Digital art, having inherited the black sheep role formerly assumed by photography and filmmaking, is written off by some in the critical art world as a less valid medium than traditional fine art forms. But there is much more involved than point-and-click misconceptions imply, and the use of computers is rapidly gaining acceptance within contemporary art’s expanding definition of itself.

Greg L. Weinstein, a co-founder of the local chapter who now resides near San Jose, Calif., has viewed several previous SIGGRAPH annual conference art exhibitions.

“A whole new medium has opened up,” he says. “The new tools being provided to artists through computer technology are just like new types of paints and brushes being added to an art store. It doesn’t make the creation of the art any easier, but it expands the range of what is possible for artists to envision and realize.”

What the artists choose to do with the tools and what issues they choose to address is a subject of infinite variation. Several of the artists approach their work with a scientific or mathematical precision, dissembling complex geometric formulas and algorithms and reconstructing them within a visual context. Others begin with direct perception as their starting point and then alter that perception until it assumes the identity of something wholly fantastic or unidentifiable.

New York artist Victor Acevedo combines the two. For his work in the show, “Nu Cynthesis,” he uses 3D software to create a matrix of artificial structures and superimposes them onto visual data from a photograph of a woman’s face, demonstrating how layers and dimensions can exist within a 2D plane. The resulting image is as much a statement about spatial physics as it is a work of art.

“Nu Cynthesis” also articulates another, more tactile theme present in several of the exhibition’s works: facial expression. Huguette Chesnais, chair of the show, says that she wanted the chosen pieces to be accessible and emotionally evocative even though they were created using computers.

“You find that quite a lot of these pieces are not abstract art,” she says. “Particularly the expressions of the face, what is in the eyes, are so fascinating. When you look at them, it is human; it is not what people think about computers.”

In assembling the show, Chesnais wanted the art itself to be more present than the technology used to produce the art. Nearly all of the works are by professional artists who employ the computer as one of their forms of expression, and many of the pieces fray the edges of what would otherwise be considered traditional art with almost imperceptible digital alterations.

Helen Golden’s “tradigital” creations, for example, use a synthesis of computer technology and traditional art forms. With software, she modifies what she senses to be a photograph’s most important fractal elements to convey a more emotionally proportional experience than what the original photo could express.

Dona Geib scans permutated images of her own sculptures, photos and prints, transfers them onto a new material—wood, in the instance of her SIGGRAPH work “Into the Tunnel”—and embroiders the surface with handwork of encaustic, gold leaf and metal. The result is a multi-textual hybrid of manual and virtual media.

“You want to touch them,” Chesnais says. “These artists know technique as opposed to those who only know software, and there are people who tell me they cannot believe that this was made by the computer. They have that feeling of the real thing.”

June 10, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 24 © 2004 Metro Pulse