Inhabitat is a mixed-reality artwork in which participants become part of an imaginary ecology through three simultaneous perspectives of scale and agency; three distinct ways to see with other eyes. This imaginary world was exhibited at a children’s science museum for five months, using an interactive projection-augmented sculpture, a large screen and speaker array, and a virtual reality head-mounted display. This paper documents the work’s motivations and design contributions, along with accounts of visitors’ playful engagements and reflections within the complex interconnectivity of an artificial nature.

Diastrophisms is a sound installation with a modular system that sends images through rhythmic patterns. It is built on a set of debris from the Alto Río building that was destroyed by the 27F earthquake in 2010 in Chile. Diastrophisms explores poetical, critical and political crossings between technology and matter in order to raise questions about the relationship between human beings and nature, to consider the construction of memory in a community by questioning the notion of monument, and to imagine new forms of communication in times of crisis.

There is a crisis in our communities about the tributes to a shared civic life represented in existing public artwork and monuments. Culture wars are being waged herein and appear increasingly unreconcilable. This paper discusses this moment and describes the range of strategies artists and designers have used to remediate these works. It presents a project description of an interactive artwork that suggests innovative approaches in this realm. The author introduces a conceptual model which served as inspiration for the piece that may be useful when discussing and designing such interventions.

3D printing allows unprecedented freedom in the design and manufacturing of even the most geometric complex forms—seemingly through a simple click of a button. In comparison, the making of glass is an analogue craftsmanship, coordinating an intricate interplay of individual tools and personal skills, giving shape to a material during the short time of its temperature-based plasticity. The two artworks discussed in this article, Augmented Fauna and Glass Mutations , were created during the artist’s residence at the Pilchuck Glass School and articulate a synthesis between digital workflows and traditional craft processes to establish a digital craftsmanship.

This paper is an exploration of the processes used and ideas behind an animated full CGI feature film project that attempts to reach blockbuster production values, while retaining Art House sensibilities. It examines methods used to achieve these production values in an academic production environment and ways costs can be minimized while high quality levels are retained. It also examines the film’s status as an Art House project, by comparing its narrative design and use of symbolism to existing works of Art House cinema.

Holojam in Wonderland is a prototype of a new type of performance activity, “Immersive Mixed Reality Theater” (IMRT). With unique and novel properties possessed by neither cinema nor traditional theater, IMRT promises exciting new expressive possibilities for multi-user, participatory, immersive digital narratives. The authors describe the piece, the technology used to create it and some of the key aesthetic choices and takeaways.

Examining the use of new media in works by Ruben Komangapik, Kent Monkman and the Wikiup Indigenous Knowledge Network reveals the diverse ways in which technologies are used to disrupt linear time and Western visions of history. New media works challenge those misleading stories that have been told about Canada’s indigenous peoples and assert indigenous presence in both the digital and physical landscape. These artists employ QR codes, video and augmented reality to push artistic boundaries and create representations of the past and present.

To revive the Montreux Jazz Festival’s archival live-concert footage, three immersive installations were designed using three different principles of augmentation, physicality and interaction. The primary aim was to engage the user in a new relationship with digitized heritage. Audience observations indicated a strong emotional connection to the content, the artist and the crowd, as well as the development of new social interactions. Experimentation showed close interaction between the three principles, while the three installations suggested methodologies for reviving audio-visual archives.

Coding, the translating of human intent into logical steps, reinforces a compulsive way of thinking, as described in Joseph Weitzenbaum’s “Science and the Compulsive Programmer” (1976). Two projects by the author, Entropy (2010) and FatFinger (2017), challenge this by encouraging gestural approaches to code. In the Entropy programming language, data becomes slightly more approximate each time it is used, drifting from its original values, forcing programmers to be less precise. FatFinger, a Javascript dialect, allows the programmer to misspell code and interprets it as the closest runnable variation, strategically guessing at the programmer’s intent.

Data materialization is a workflow developed to create 3D objects from data-informed designs. Building upon traditional metalwork and craft, and new technology’s data visualization with generative art, this workflow expresses conceptually relevant data through 3D forms which are fabricated in traditional media. The process allows for the subtle application of data in visual art, allowing the aesthetic allure of the art object or installation to inspire intellectual intrigue. This paper describes the technical and creative process of Modern Dowry , a silver-plated 3D-print teapot on view at the Museum of the City of New York, June 2017–June 2018.

Advertising Positions integrates 3D scanning, motion capture, novel image mapping algorithms and custom animation to create data portraits from the advertisements served by online trackers. Project volunteers use bespoke software to harvest the ads they receive over months of browsing. When enough ads have been collected, the volunteer is interviewed, 3D scanned and motion captured. Each ad is then mapped to a single polygon on the textured skin of their virtual avatar. Outcomes have been displayed as 2D/3D images, animations and interactive installations.

This paper investigates CASTING , Yiyun Kang’s site-specific projection mapping installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, U.K., and the acquisition of the piece by the VA in the following year. It identifies how CASTING developed distinctive properties in the field of projected moving-image installation artworks and how these novel characteristics were reflected in the acquisition by the VA.

Humans use letters, which are two-dimensional static symbols, for communication. Writing these letters requires body movement as well as spending a certain amount of time; therefore, it can be demonstrated that a letter is a trajectory of movement and time. Based on this notion, the author conducted studies regarding multidimensional kinetic typography, primarily using robots to display a letter and visualize its time and movement simultaneously. This paper describes the project background and design of the three types of robotic displays that were developed and discusses possible expressions using robotic displays.

This paper examines the history of the influential Interactive Image computer graphics showcase, which took place at museum and conference venues from 1987 to 1988. The authors present a preliminary exploration of the historical contexts that led to the creation of this exhibition by the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL), which included the integrated efforts of both artists and computer scientists. In addition to providing historical details about this event, the authors introduce a media archaeology approach for examining the cultural and technological contexts in which this event is situated.

In this paper, the authors explain how they created Blade Runner—Autoencoded , a film made by training an autoencoder—a type of generative neural network—to recreate frames from the film Blade Runner . The autoencoder is made to reinterpret every individual frame, reconstructing it based on its memory of the film. The result is a hazy, dreamlike version of the original film. The authors discuss how the project explores the aesthetic qualities of the disembodied gaze of the neural network and describe how the autoencoder is also capable of reinterpreting films it has not been trained on, transferring the visual style it has learned from watching Blade Runner (1982).

This paper discusses Creature:Interactions (2015), a large-scale mixed-reality artwork created by the authors that incorporates immersive 360° stereoscopic visuals, interactive technology, and live actor facilitation. The work uses physical simulations to promote an expressive full-bodied interaction as children explore the landscapes and creatures of Ethel C. Pedley’s ecologically focused children’s novel, Dot and the Kangaroo . The immersive visuals provide a social playspace for up to 90 people and have produced “phantom” sensations of temperature and touch in certain participants.

Rover is a mechatronic imaging device inserted into quotidian space, transforming the sights and sounds of the everyday through its peculiar modes of machine perception. Using computational light field photography and machine listening, it creates a kind of cinema following the logic of dreams: suspended but mobile, familiar yet infinitely variable in detail. Rover draws on diverse traditions of robotic exploration, landscape and still-life depiction, and audio field recording to create a hybrid form between photography and cinema. This paper describes the mechatronic, machine perception, and audio-visual synthesis techniques developed for the piece.

Generative artists engage the poetic and expressive potentials of film playfully and efficiently, with explicit or implicit critique of cinema in a broader cultural context. This paper looks at the incentives, insights, and implications of generative cinema, which significantly expands the creative realm for artists working with film, but also incites critical assessment of the business-oriented algorithmic strategies in the film industry. The poetic divergence, technical fluency, and conceptual cogency of generative cinema successfully demonstrate that authorship evolves toward ever more abstract reflection and cognition which equally treat existing creative achievements as inspirations, sources of knowledge, and tools.

After decades as a novelty, lenticular technology has resurfaced in compelling large-scale projects. Without any required energy, the medium offers stereography without glasses and frame animation without electronics. A kinetic artwork installed in a remote river in the French mountains broke from the technology’s previous restrictions of static and flat display, recalculated the print mathematics for a curved surface, and explored narrative structures for a moving image on a moving display. This paper documents how the sculpture used custom steel fabrication, site-specific energy, and revised lens calculation to present a previously unexplored hybrid of animation.