Do-Bu-Ro-Ku Shunsaku Hayashi drew this piece with a ballpoint pen, scanned it, and merged it with oil and watercolor.
In the Sweet Bye & Bye SL Part of a large project, this still from Philip Mallory Jones is a fusion of art, literature, and digital media from within the interactive environment of Second Life.
Dynamo The result of a vortex simulation, this image by Mark Stock was rendered with Radiance, a lighting simulator.
Flow 19 Diffusion-limited aggregation algorithms written by Andy Lomas in C++ helped create this form.
Kanyon Reconstructed- Murat Germen created this with photos, which were etched onto Plexiglas.
When SIGGRAPH introduced the Art Gallery to the conference and exhibition many years ago, the roots of digital art were taking hold within the CG community, though outside this nourishing environment, digital art struggled for acceptance. Over the years, that situation has certainly changed, and now digital pieces are regularly featured in galleries around the world. And just as traditional artwork has evolved in content and style, so, too, has its computer-generated counterpart.
This evolution was evident at the 2007 SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, titled “Global Eyes.” As always, the gallery contained a wide range of works, including animations, monitor-based work, wall hangings, sculptures, installations, digital performances, and more. And, there were a number of pieces that were difficult to categorize, says the University at Buffalo’s Vibeke Sorensen, who served as this year’s gallery chair.
The committee received more than 660 submissions for “Global Eyes,” and in the end, 150 were accepted—some of which were juried while others were curated. The group saw a rise in the number of submitted (and accepted) installation and video works. “And they are getting more refined,” says Sorensen. “The technology is more malleable, and we are seeing this beautiful flowering of work around that. There is an increased innovation and specification of the understanding surrounding the technology, and artists are smart about using it.”
A selection of still images from featured works in the gallery is presented on these pages. —Karen Moltenbrey
Hydrodynamics Ocean In the installation from which this still was taken, big waves roll toward viewers from calm water. Drops of water then fall from the simulated sky, creating an experience of scientific beauty. From Yoichiro Kawaguchi, this work uses a real-time, particle-based hydrodynamic simulation, an algorithm implemented on GPUs. In fact, all computation was done on the GPUs, so no CPU processing was necessary.
Time Slice (melia) Brian Evans used proprietary software to create this slice of an animation, illustrating how a scanline evolves over time. The slice was then sonified to create the music that accompanied the animation, so viewers can “hear” the colors as they “see” the visual music.