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Artwork
1. Anna Ursyn: www.ursyn.com"> 2004
(1) Data Mining
(2) Green Architecture
Humans create cities, whereas a city metaphor reflects data sets.
What technological and human worlds have in common?
Natural order guides our understanding of big data sets related to network analysis, when we employ physical analogies of the data, render the data graphically, explore them ‘by eye’ and interact in real time My task is to juxtapose the regularity of nature with man's physical and intellectual constructions. The big city, for example, combines how humans affect their environment, and how a city metaphor reflects rhythm and organization of big data sets, and makes data mining easier. Observers — whether artists or technology experts — perceive such relationships from different perspectives and different points of view.
www.ursyn.com/twod/pages/Data%20Mining.htm"/> 2008
We care about knitting together dwellings with a landscape, with roofs repeating the line of the hills, and slowly learn to draw natural resources from the power of sun, wind, and water.
www.ursyn.com/twod/pages/Green%20Architecture.htm "/>2. Wobbe F. Koning www.ideepix.nl"> September 2010 / May 2012
(1) City.Flow (crosswalk)
(2) City.Flow (still.4)
Smeared out in time and space, in this optical flow of re-purposed processed video images show headless bodies and disembodied heads move through their natural (that is constructed) environment which is about to be overflown with the seaweeds that will eventually reclaim the city as their natural habitat.
Process
Created using Adobe Photoshop from video images which were heavily processed in Ado"/> September 2010
This still frame from the video 'City.Flow()' shows the urban landscape being washed over by natural forces, the people in it reduced to smears of pixels.
Process:
Created by heavily processing original video footage using Adobe After Affects."/>3. Leslie Nobler Farber
(1) Caves & Flickers
(2) Rusty Tear2010
Photos/scans of rooftops from Croatia/Serbia and fenced-off decrepit lots in Palestine were superimposed. A regular grid of abstract biological cell-like forms was used to add the notion of life/nature and its structure. A brass charm/medal with a door that depicts a house of prayer was Photoshopped in also. It suggests the idea of praying for and rebuilding peace.
Process:
Digital image made with Photoshop and Illustrator. It was printed on white plastic and had needlework elements added."/> 2008 (through 2012)
I took photographs of details of gorgeous old homes in New Orleans just prior to Katrina – many are now gone or damaged. I travel there frequently as well as to other port cities, where I shot pictures of waterside rusted barriers which have beautiful colors and forms. I superimposed images I painted digitally based on these two photo-studies. A grid of dotted x-forms was used as a metaphor for blocked escape routes.
Process:
Digital image made with Photoshop and Illustrator. It was printed on non-woven polyester textile and overprinted with dye; pastel/pencil also added." />4. Francesca Samsel www.francescasamsel.com/home_html/Tiled-Displays.html">
(1) Vapor
(2) Oxygen
Vapor speaks global water vapor pattern and their predictive and contributing role in climate change.
The original is a video in which etchings, drawings, and photographs morph across the screens highlighting the connections and implications of the changes occurring in water vapor patterns and thus water distribution and climate change.
The embedded visualization is by Jamison Daniel at NCCS.
Process:
Vapor was created in in the ACES Visualization Lab of The Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin on their 75-monitor tiled-display."/>
Oxygen is a work reflecting the expanding hypoxic zones in the oceans.
Hypoxic zones are areas where there is not enough dissolved oxygen to support life. The original is a video in which etchings, drawings, and photographs morph across the screens tracking the journey of the water and accumulating contaminates which contribute to dead zone formation. The work builds on the unexpected connections between our lifestyle and changing species distribution within the oceans.
Process:
The work was created in in the ACES Visualization Lab of The Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin on their 75-monitor tiled-display."/>5. Edward Johnston
(1) Looking At Trees, Variation 2
(2) Looking At Clouds, Variation 22009
Johnston’s Experiential Extension Process: I go on walks and photograph curious shapes in the surrounding environment. I highlight these shapes using image-editing software. In 3D modeling software, I stack these photographs proportionally to the time at which each photograph is taken. Next, I extrude a virtual surface through the collected shapes in each photograph. Then, I collect the virtual forms and fabricate them as physical objects using additive manufacturing machines. The original photographs are at the top left. Photographs of the fabricated sculpture are on the right. More information can be found at the following website: www.edwardjohnston.co
Media:
Time-based Digital Composition; Digitally-Fabricated Sculpture, Nylon"/> 2009
Johnston’s Experiential Extension Process: I go on walks and photograph curious shapes in the surrounding environment. I highlight these shapes using image-editing software. In 3D modeling software, I stack these photographs proportionally to the time at which each photograph is taken. Next, I extrude a virtual surface through the collected shapes in each photograph. Then, I collect the virtual forms and fabricate them as physical objects using additive manufacturing machines. The original photographs are at the top left. The photograph of the fabricated sculpture is in the bottom right. More information can be found at the following website: www.edwardjohnston.co
Media:
Time-based Digital Composition; Digitally-Fabricated Sculpture, Photopolymer"/>6. Annette Weintraub
(1) Under The Clock: Big Clock Left
(2) Under The Clock: Kiosk2006
Under the Clock: Big Clock is also a still image from the QuickTime movie Under the Clock from the project Waiting Room. It shows another view of the Waiting Room space. This space also exists in an interactive version in which the viewer can move through the space. With proximity, moving image sequences are triggered on the image walls.
"/> 2006
Under the Clock: Kiosk is a still image from the QuckTime movie Under the Clock from the project Waiting Room.
Under the Clock uses the space of Waiting Room as stage set. A model of an imaginary railway waiting room becomes the backdrop for a series of experiences that examine the psychological effect of space. This video is part of a larger discourse on travel, time and space. Under the Clock explores the anxieties of travel, feelings of displacement and the sense of isolation within public space and views space as narrative container, intertwining physical space and psychological state. Kiosk shows an overview of the Waiting Room space."/>7. Molly Dilworth mollydilworth.com/"> Golden, Colorado
(1) Field Test (NYC)
(2) Field Test (Golden)
January 2011
Contemporary Golden is built on top of incredible geological wealth, a pocket of resources and power existing just below the surface. Over the last two centuries, this geology generated a demand for engineers that facilitated a culture of research, technology and innovation. The Golden of today is a combines this physical history with geopolitics; it is a global innovator in high tech materials and applications and a center for mining operations around the world.
The ceiling was chosen as the site of the painting to simulate a subterranean space, calling attention to the geology of Golden."/> Pulse Art Fair, New York City
March 2011
Field Test (NYC) is the second in a series of site-specific paintings that use X-Ray and Electron Microscopy images of Rare-Earth elements as visual references. These materials – hidden in plain sight – power our electronic environment, running everything from mobile phones to MRI's.
"/>8. Nu'a Bön
(1) Tokio 2008 Thangka numérique
(2) Zintun-Sun Moon Lake 2009 Thangka numérique2009
Mixed media. 2009. 120 cm x 180 cm. Mineral pigment paint, diamond dust, and bone char on pigment print on canvas. Sound art and single-channel video. Created after pilgrimage to Yasukuni Jinja, a Shinto shrine located in Chiyoda, Japan which has attracted controversy for enshrining the kami (spirits) of war criminals from WWII."/> 2009
Mixed media. 2009. 120 cm x 180 cm. Mineral pigment paint, diamond dust, and bone on pigment print on canvas. Sound art and single-channel video. View of Zintun from the Daoist Wenwu Temple in Taiwan.
"/>9. Lucy Petrovich
(1) "desert views, desert deaths"
(2) 'Under control / In control' – 1c2005
www.cfa.arizona.edu/lucy/control.html
The issue of control in human culture permeates every aspect of our existence. While as individuals we seem determined to control everything and everyone around us there is always someone or something asserting its control over us, (government, church, employer, etc). Much of contemporary western control is better symbolized by manipulation than coercion, by computer chips as much as prison bars.
'Under control / In control' addresses the complexity of this issue by examining it through some of its simplest permutations.
"/> c2004-2007
www.cfa.arizona.edu/lucy/desert.html
‘Desert Views, Desert Deaths’, an interactive immersive stereoscopic environment (using CAVE technology) that addresses the U.S. / Mexico border enforcement policies.
This virtual unreality is a memorial for those who have died of heat stroke or dehydration during the summer months while crossing the Sonoran desert. When you enter the digital environment you are in the middle of an elusive graveyard of crosses. In the distance you can see into translucent overlapping caskets composed of desert images. While traversing the landscape you hear sounds of the desert that follow you as you move through your journey. "/>10. Christian Kerrigan
(1) Bloodline 1.0
(2) Encased Nature2010
A fragment of a resin made digital through 3d scanning is seen interacting with virtual airflows and particles. The imagery generates a symbiotic landscape of real matter and virtual space, incorporating both artificial and natural elements.
"/> 2010
Close-up photograph of the installation 'Chemical Garden'.
A sample of moss is seen encased by curing skins within a highly concentrated body of salt water. The 'chemical sculpture' of moss and alginate, an extract from seaweed, form over time, before they drop to the bottom of the tank."/>11. Cynthia Decker
(1) The Nature of Things
(2) Winter garden2009
This image represents the essence of 3d modeling and rendering as artistic media. Creating environments on a digital stage, everything can be manipulated and repositioned. It's real and unreal, physical and ethereal. It exists and it doesn't.
"/> 2011
This image is an exploration of the beauty of natural decay, and the tones of a minimal palette when applied to a rich textural subject matter. This is a peek into the structure of something that we normally value for it's verdant lushness - stripped by winter yet equally beautiful."/>12. Liz Lee
(1) A New Leaf – Guilt
(2) A New Leaf Series – Hope2009 (11‐1‐2009)"/> 2009 (10-09-2009)"/> 13. Martha Jane Bradford
(1) Quarry Hill Afternoon colour
(2) Meridiem2006
This image was hand-drawn using Corel Painter software and a Wacom tablet. It depicts spruce trees, a summer cottage, a wildflower meadow, and the distant ocean in Midcoast Maine. The print is from a series of digital monoprints. The black-and-white image is constant throughout the two dozen prints, while the color is unique to each individual print. The goal of the series was to explore how many different looks could be achieved with one black-and-white drawing. While the style is realistic, this not a manipulated photograph nor a reproduction of analog art. It is an original fine art print."/> 1999
This image was hand-drawn using Corel Painter software and a Wacom tablet. It depicts a nineteenth-century summer “cottage” (actually more like a mansion) in Round Pond, Maine, along with a bit of the harbor’s coast line and a sky full of dramatic clouds. The wild, untamed quality of the clouds and water contrast with the very civilized summer home. My goal in this series of drawings was to demonstrate that the digital medium could be used to create work that was equal in appearance and quality to work created with traditional media, specifically charcoal in this case."/> -
Jury statement
John Hyatt, 6 April 2012
The Environment is what? The Environment is where? We live in uncertain times. We live in uncertain spaces. The borders between 'Self' and 'Environment' are vague. There is no map other than the one we are perpetually drawing but let us start our journey together, now, from here. It is into this uncertainty that the artist consciously steps forth.
We are born inscribed with genetic clues for survival, inherited from the ancestors' bodies that we came out of and that they inherited from those that bore them, back through time down the ever-branching tree of life. The past collections of experiences of environments repeated and inscribed as code are passed on to us. This inherited knowledge still remains ultimately plastic and is able to be changed by the living recipient. However, the more consistently it is embedded the harder it is to cast off. In periods of rapid change, like the present, we need to be able to be flexible and able to discard old paradigms of knowledge and ways of being in the face of changing environments.
However, we inherit the toolkit manufactured from the reiterative best-guess, best-chance knowledge of long lines of inquiry, even back further than the relatively immediate and fairly environmentally settled past! For, when we say ancestors, we send an arrow back in time and space to worlds unknown to conscious thought: back through recent parents and forebears and their cultural artefacts and remains and on further to consciousness we experienced as apes; fish; lizards; protozoan single-cell creatures; lichens; soil; plants; chemicals; elements; winds; heat; ice; methane seas and stars. We must have experienced all these to get here, to be here now. All these are environments of which each one of us has profound reservoirs of experiential knowledge delivered once upon a time by different sense organs collecting various forms of evidence. Balancing in pleasures or toppling in pain, gorged on savouries or hungry for sugars, we have sensed perfumes and ordures; sunsets and darknesses; thunders and whispers; softnesses and bone-crunchings; fireballs and sub-zeros. Our genes give us a flexible toolkit to cope with the circumstances of our arrival, whether we are born fish or fowl.
And if we are born in human form, not only do we have genes that are switched off as not immediately necessary but also recent studies of the brain tell us that we are born with thousands more neurones than required to function in the world. These can be linked up in an all-but infinite array of patterns based upon the frequent firing required as we adapt to our environment. As these immediately useful patterns are embedded through frequent use, we discard vast numbers of neurones as unnecessary, surplus to requirement, as we adjust our glorious and innate flexibility to the necessities of the life at hand in the context and environment within which we are made manifest.
Then, as we stretch and unfold, we are affected by our cultural environments: such as gender, the language and artefacts of our social group, family and kinship structures, hierarchical social status and the constitution of faith groups and state etc. These act upon us as we engage in a process of fitting ourselves to their contexts. Our relationship to environment is always riddled with acts of compromise, pushing and pulling at the border between 'in here' and 'out there'. These external stimuli engulf us unless we make ourselves critically conscious of their constructions. They can otherwise play a large part in determining who we become.
Our bodies also alter and we encounter a shape-shifter in the mirror. Our cells replicate and change. In fact, our physical bodies repeatedly transform and mutate. We make stories of our past and dreams of our futures to create narrative threads through this changing topology of negotiation between environment and our fluid bodies. These stories are our lifelines.
The stories we hold onto about ourselves are often underpinned by concepts of Common Sense and Reality which we have actually inherited through our genes and our cultures. We wear the spectacles we are given and what we see we call Reality. But what of Reality when in the time in which we live other choices appear to complicate the picture? When we have Virtual Reality is this in some way off the map of Reality? Is it another world where tables and chairs are made of ones and zeros instead of hard 'stuff'? We are 'augmenting' Reality too! In times like this we realize that the Real is an insufficient concept and it would be better termed 'The Actual' - the timespace in which we act. It is the actions between that become significant and the material things lose their importance. In this environment, we see the growth of new concepts like 'ecology', stressing the connections between elements in relational flow. In the material world, fluidity and mutability now rule and we understand our connections to climate and our kinship responsibilities for fellow species. At one level of the Actual, in a Newtonian zone of order, known physical laws still operate. Here, many of us still cling and police the border of our consciousness. At other levels, such as the quantum or the digital, the material dissipates into doubt because to travel there you have to rip up your maps and abandon your old stories. To travel in the wilderness is to essay without a map and have an experimental carefree foolhardiness willing to shoot an arrow and, as Brian Eno said, "Wherever the arrow lands, paint a target around it". Often these crazy adventurers are called artists.
But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
Chapter 23, The Lee Shore, MOBY DICK,Herman MelvilleIn times of momentous change, such as we are undergoing in our present environment, we gather in circles around the campfire and swap tales with others, triangulating experiences. Humanity has always been a community of interdependence. In the olden days these gathering places became circles of stones to sit on. With new technologies we can make social circles in digital space with others from around the world.
Here, in this first ever ACM SIGGRAPH online juried exhibition, we have chosen digital artists as conscious and deliberate adventurers to come, sit in our circle and tell of their thoughts and experiences of environments through showing us their work. We thank them for contributing and being willing to share their critical reflections.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to all the DAC Board members for jurying this first ever ACM SIGGRAPH online exhibit. Special thanks to John Hyatt for crafting the Jury Statement, and to Cynthia Beth Rubin for all her supporting efforts in making this a reality. Sue Gollifer, our express thanks for working directly with all the selected artists and making sure every i was dotted and t crossed! And also thanks to Dinesh Purohit for creating the beautiful website for the Environment Show!
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Artwork
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Jury statement
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Acknowledgements