SIGGRAPH 2001's N-Space Art Gallery

Far away from the buzzing SIGGRAPH floor is the art gallery where high tech meets fine art. Annick Teninge reports on this fascinating realm.

Music Creatures (www.media.mit.edu, Marc Downie, USA) is a harmonious installation consisting of autonomous, virtually embodied characters living within a sonic environment. The movement of their graphic bodies, visualized on a computer screen, produces music on a piano and reflects their understanding of the sound that they hear. Computer movements and piano music are synthesized through the creatures' animal-inspired artificial intelligence.

Although somehow preposterous, some installations were quite amusing. In Poem Vacuum Cleaner (Eunmi Yang, South Korea) the floor is covered with poems coming from an overhead projector. When a viewer vacuums the poetic words, they turn into colorful projected flowers. According to the author, this work reflects on the role of a poem, which is a flower in our desolate urban existence. She commented that reading poems purifies feelings. It is ironic though that a vacuum symbolizes the act of reading.







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