The focus of the Art Gallery for SIGGRAPH 2007 is on international artists. Ireva by 14-year-old Japanese artist, Shunsaku Hayashi, combines evocative painting with animation. Unless noted, all images courtesy of SIGGRAPH.

When SIGGRAPH 2007 convenes in San Diego, the venue won't be the only difference in its annual Art Gallery. This year's Art Gallery, titled Global Eyes, will run concurrently with the main conference and exhibition from Aug. 5-9 at the San Diego Convention Center. However, the digital art performances and site-specific installations will run from Aug. 4-6 at the state-of-the-art facilities of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal-IT2), and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California, San Diego. The main differences in this year's Art Gallery, not surprisingly, are in its selections and scope.

As one might expect from this year's title, Global Eyes, the focus is an international one. While there has been considerable international participation in past Art Galleries, the chairperson for Global Eyes, Vebeke Sorensen, chairperson for Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo, believes that it is greater this year. An artist in her own right and professor working in digital multimedia and animation, interactive architectural installation and network visual-music performance, Sorensen says, "This year we have a theme that's different from most previous years. Our theme is global, so we're trying to be as inclusive of people from other countries and cultures who are working with technologies as possible to give a different kind of view of what is going on around the world. Because now the technology is reaching globally, the question is how and how far are people who were previously isolated being transformed by it. And we're focused on how people see each other and the world around them."

She suggests that the explosion of digital technologies across the globe and the way people are working with them is not only synthesizing different cultures in new ways, but also various fields of study. "Because it very much brings in the whole way people create in the cross media," Sorenson affirms. "That would mean greater physical-digital interaction." She asserts quite correctly that digital technologies have even engendered new ways of looking at and turning to older media. "We have an artist book category, for example," Sorensen points out. "That's because people are making books collaboratively, globally with digital cameras, then uploading (the photos) on the Internet then working collaboratively on the images and then turning them out and distributing them."

This year there were more than 660 submissions from 30 countries that were evaluated by a prestigious international jury. The main categories presented during Global Eyes include animation, artist books, panel discussions, papers, digital performances, art installations, as well as monitor and wall-based works. Sorenson highlighted a few of the works that will surely draw attention at this year's Art Gallery.

La grua y la jirafa (The Crane and the Giraffe) is Argentinian Vladimir Bellini's first animation. He had in mind the interchange of different cultures as his theme.

Ireva is an unusual work by a talented young Japanese artist, Shunsaku Hayashi, from Osaka. Only 14 years old, Shunsaku combines his evocative painting with animation to create a very compelling abstract work. "Ireva means artificial tooth in Japanese," Shunsaku explains. "I saw my father's artificial tooth left on the table. Got inspiration from it. This artificial tooth is bulimia, and loves the human neck." And just how experienced is this young artist? "This work is the fifth work. I am making new freeze-frame animation now. I'll attend SIGGRAPH 2007 from Aug. 5-7. I'll bring and show my new work by DVD at the time." You can preview some of Shunsaku's paintings on his website at www1.odn.ne.jp/~haya4hello/.

Another wonderful animated work comes from Argentina. Although La grua y la jirafa (The Crane and the Giraffe) is Vladimir Bellini's first animation, it's all about the gentle, delicate movement that Bellini is able to give the piece using computer animation. It came about as the result of his last assignment at the University. "I had to create a piece of work of about two minutes," Bellini explains. "I am interested in a story which I can present without dialog. And when I create an animation, I target children mostly. This is, in one sense, a challenge for me. Children are very honest and they would say the truth if they clearly don't like it, period. So I am the most tense when my work is shown to children.

"The first time my animation was shown was at the independent film festival held in Buenos Aires and, to be honest with you, I was very nervous, since a lot of children were there to watch it. In terms of result, it was very well accepted, which relieved me. Last year, when it was screened in Rome, children were there also to watch it. I was delighted that overseas children also at once accepted this strange little love story."