Located in its own area, set up like a museum, SIGGRAPH's Art Gallery is known as a place where one can find works of art that capture the curiosity, even if one hasn't any idea what it's about. The gallery features a variety of art installations created with old and new graphics technologies that embody original ideas -- works that intrigue viewers and make them a part of the experience. This year, a fair amount of the art pieces combined images and sounds in creative and technically challenging installations.

Bubbles represent sound components in James Lane/squidsoup's Altzero3. All images courtesy of the artist and SIGGRAPH 2001.

Music and Art
Altzero3 (www.squidsoup.com, Squid Soup, UK) is a spatial composition that allows one to explore subtleties and variations in sound by moving through an environment where lines of bubbles rise toward the surface, each representing a single sound component. There are fifty distinct sounds within the environment, designed and positioned to create a rich, complex chord that develops smoothly over time.

Haruo Ishii creates a harmonious chord out of hundreds of bells in his sound installation Omnipresence Version 4.

Omnipresence Version 4 (Haruo Ishii, Japan) is a sound installation where hundreds of bells send out different sounds but form an organic and harmonious chord, symbolizing a sort of multidimensional perspective of the cosmos.