Press release from AMC SIGGRAPH:

Chicago, IL – SIGGRAPH 2012 Art Gallery: In Search of the Miraculous presents exceptional digital and technologically mediated artworks that explore the existence of wonderment, mystery and awe in today’s world of mediating technologies and abundant data. Of the nearly 400 submissions, 12 were hand-picked by a jury to be exhibited at SIGGRAPH 2012, 5-9 August at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The jury included a wide range of artists, designers, technologists, and critics hailing from academia, industry, and the independent art world.

“The Art Gallery call for submissions was purposefully ambiguous, based not on any particular thematic premise but rather on sentiment—simply an open call for works that both inspire or are inspired by moments of awe, surprise, mystery, and wonder,” said Osman Khan, SIGGRAPH 2012 Juried Art Chair from the University of Michigan. “Interestingly, in an ubiquitously digital world, many of this year’s submissions move toward the physical and analog, not in a turn toward ludditery (many projects are quite technically complex), but perhaps as a reflection of a pervasive ennui of the digital.”

Works exhibited in the Art Gallery are published in a special issue of Leonardo, the Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. Peer-reviewed SIGGRAPH 2012 Art Papers will also be published in this special issue, which coincides with SIGGRAPH 2012 in August.

SIGGRAPH 2012 Art Gallery highlights include:

 A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe)
Martin John Callanan, Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art, University College London

A Planetary Order is a terrestrial globe depicting clouds from a single moment in time. The globe itself is a physical visualization of real-time scientific data. To create the work, Callanan took one second of readings from all six cloud-monitoring satellites currently overseen by NASA and the European Space Agency and transformed the information physically into outlines and profiles of the clouds that were emerging at that moment across the surface of the Earth. The shimmering white cloud globe freeze-frames the entire operation of the global atmospheric regime and highlights the fragility of the environmental (and informational) systems that operate across the world.

Art Gallery Chair feedback on this piece: In what at first may look to be a common Earth globe, Callanan’s A Planetary Order makes a poetic statement by shifting our attention from the usual geographic information by voiding the usual terrestrial markings, and instead presents an immortalized ephemeral instant, eternalizing a fleeting moment shared by the global whole, giving us pause to reconsider what really matters in this world.

Kapitän Biopunk: Fermentation Madness
Julian Abraham, Independent Artist

Kapitän Biopunk: Fermentation Madness is an artistic research project manifested via a series of workshops and an acoustic and performative installation. The project developed in response to the high number of poisonings and deaths of alcohol consumers after an increased excise tax was placed on alcoholic products in Indonesia. The project, using do-it-yourself and open-source technologies, strives to educate individuals on fermentation processes to produce safe and affordable alcoholic products, and a means to democratize the laboratory and liberate knowledge for a wider society.