Mitchell believes 3D electronic installations appeal to all of the senses. Physically the viewers walk into the space and are immersed in the experience. Often participants trigger actions in the environment. Having collaborated as an artist with a composer to create room-size installations, Mitchell had also come to realize the importance of audio both in art forms and animations. She looked for pieces that included audio installations, not just a visual experience.

Bion, by Adam Brown and Andrew Fagg, is an example of Art Gallery chair Bonnie Mitchell’s desire to include installations that offer audio and visual experiences to the participants. Unless otherwise indicated, all images courtesy of SIGG

Bion, by Adam Brown and Andrew Fagg from the University of Oklahoma, creates an environment where “blue entities” hanging from the ceiling react to the presence of the viewers as they enter. These entities communicate with each other, blinking and chirping.

With no funding, independent Israeli artists Daphna Talithman, Orna Portugaly and Sharon Younger created Heartbeats, an installation that uses the pulse of participants to determine the movement and interactions of characters projected down from the ceiling onto a round white table. In order to influence the action, participants jog in place to get their pulse up or take deep breaths to slow their heartbeats down in order to control the movement of the characters.

Media Mirror, by Jefferson Han of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, uses sixteen feeds of cable TV channels coming into a large collage, projected on the wall. As the participants walk by their silhouette becomes the cable channel. All the motions are tracked and determine what channel is playing and where it plays.

Rarely seen in art are pieces that deal with the sense of touch and temperature. Thermoesthesia, by Japanese artist Kumiko Kushiyama, uses a touch screen with a variation of temperatures between hot or cold that allows users to feel the temperature of visually displayed objects. The visuals are made up of abstract, stylized graphics that accentuate the sense of temperature by the colors used.

Mitchell is also passionate about experimental art animations — works that deviate from the traditional Hollywood three-act narrative structure and take experimental approaches that are more metaphorical than literal or play with time in creative ways. Sometimes these works use abstractions in colorform, motion-painting pieces. Others have very recognizable objects such as the dragonfly in Alive an animation by Lucy Blackwell. “The animation somewhat tells a narrative, but you have to think about it to get the story,” says Mitchell. There are 14 art animations in the gallery, plus additional ones showing at the Electronic Theater.

“I don’t just look for the path of least resistance. I look for the most challenging path,” admits Mitchell. “So I decided that one of the things I don’t really see at SIGGRAPH that I have seen at some other conferences is electronically mediated performances.” Mitchell wrote a grant to CAG, the Conference Advisory Group, to secure extra funding so she could present a broad scope of live performances.

Abracadabra is an interactive magic performance by Jun Oh and Min Jeong Kang.

The show includes 13 on-stage and three off-stage performances that use either electronics or computer graphics in creative, groundbreaking ways. Music, theater and dance as well as various hybrids are included — a live DJ mixing visuals with audio; a number of dance performances where the dancer interacts with the graphics on the screen and the graphics respond to the dancer’s emotions such as Perceivable Bodies by the German group, Palindrome; Abracadabra, an interactive magic performance by Jun Oh and Min Jeong Kang; Gil Weinberg’s Jam’aa for Haile that has a robotic drummer doing sessions and reacTable, an interactive tabletop performance and presentation by Spain’s Sergi Jorda that creates music when participants move objects on the table.

There are also many beautiful 2D works showcased — works created with 3D modeling, genetic algorithms or digital painting and imaging. A number of these pieces are by researchers who work for NASA or in labs such as MIT — people working very technically that come up with algorithms at work and then create art on the side using those algorithms.

Joanna Berzowska, of XS Labs in Quebec, Canada, is well known in the electronic fabric world. Krakow: a woven story of memory and erasure is a weaving that deals with the disappearance of women in Krakow due to political problems in the society. Using electronic dyes in the piece causes the fabric to change from seeing street scenes with the women to not seeing the women.

Jeff Lieberman, a renaissance man who is an artist, photographer, musician and engineer at MIT, shows Slink, an experiment with matched mechanical, electrical, and visual resonances, using a spring and light. This is not a computer simulation, but a physical, vibrating strobed spring. The art is comprised of two mechanical arms on both sides of a large wall-mounted piece with a cable between them. Behind that are 10,000 blue LED lights in a grid. The arms move, causing the cable to vibrate. By staggering the strobbing, the viewer perceives the cable fragmenting and floating in little pieces in mid-air creating an artistically beautiful optical illusion. This work crosses over into the fusion area where innovative technology plays with perception.