SIGGRAPH '22: ACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Art Gallery

In My Data Body, the magnetic resonance (MR) scanned body of the artist Marilène Oliver floats prone within a `cloud' of her textual Facebook data. Into the semi-transparent, virtual body are multiple other data corpuses downloaded from social media platforms plotted into cross sections of the body. In the horizontal plane, Mac terminal data is plotted into bone, Google data into muscle and Facebook data into fat. In the vertical plane are plotted data usage agreements. Passwords and logins flow back and forth through veins and arteries, whilst retinal images, dental scans and 3D meshes of organs and bones are suspended within the quantified and datafied body [Lupton 2016; Van Dijck 2014]. There is a continuous stream of text particles that flow through and around the data body that one can swat away or nestle into.

Humans once perceived oceans as boundless, and thus impossible to pollute---until we created the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The same pattern is now repeating in outer space. VastWaste is a data-driven, projection art installation that illuminates the parallels and interplay between marine pollution and space debris. It can also be experienced in Virtual Reality.

Soil is the foundation for healthy ecosystems and plays an important role in sustaining life. Soil serves as the baseline for life and provides a variety of ecosystems and societal functions. Despite sustaining the world's demands of food, fibers, and fuels, regulating Earth's air and water quality, and storing greenhouse gases, the value of soil, commonly termed "dirt", is often dismissed. This human disconnect from this important source of life, especially in the middle of our climate crisis, needs to be addressed as a vital sustainability practice. Soil health is largely dependent on a diverse thriving microorganism composition. This unseen world of microorganism biodiversity (diversity of life) can be detected, enumerated, and characterized through advancement in molecular methods such as the use of Environmental DNA (eDNA). This tool takes advantage of DNA found in the environment, from organisms in the form of feces, skin cells, pollen, whole cells (microbes) that can then be collected from soil, sediment, water, and even air! We can use the eDNA from the sample to obtain information on the organisms found in soil from microbes, plants, and vertebrates. From the Greek morphê - shape, and genesis - creation, literally means "the generation of form." Morphogenesis is the process that controls the spatial organization and distribution of cells during the development of an organism. An example of this mechanism includes the transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly, which demonstrates the ability of an organism's cells to self-organize a new body shape. However, morphogenesis also represents coordinated behavior to build and develop the shape, position, and interconnection of a structure, for example, the replicated pattern of termite mounds. Morphogenesis is a transcending concept that captivates the human imagination. Morphogenesis captures the essence of this project, by expressing how soil can be considered a complex living organism in combination with the computational process of neural cellular automata.

In 1922, Man Ray, a significant contributor to Dada and Surrealism movements, invented the term "Rayograph" to describe his cameraless darkroom created photo images. He revealed the dreamlike characteristics of daily objects by placing them in photosensitized paper and exposing them to light. His Rayographs are situated in-between visual representation and abstraction, pointing to a new cameraless photographic method. Man Ray wrote in 1921 that he wanted to "make my photography automatic---to use my camera as I would a typewriter."

The human body has historically been a constant source of fascination in the arts and sciences. With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the debate over the virtues and disadvantages of physical versus virtual bodies has increased dramatically. One of the most difficult attributes of the human body to translate into other forms is the essence of human movement and, by extension, energy. Radiant Soma emphasizes the ephemerality of human movement by visualizing motion capture data with light. The installation of lasers and phosphorescent objects transforms choreography that the original performer can no longer perform into a constant stream of lively spirits.

Three Stage Drawing Transfer is an experimental human-robot performance and emerging media arts research project exploring drawing, cognition, and new possibilities for creative, embodied interactions between humans and machines. The work creates a visual-mental-physical circuit between a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), a co-robotic arm, and a five-year-old child. Building on traditions from experimental performance and collaborative drawing, it extends these with the emergent capabilities of generative neural networks and robotic automation. The live child-robot interaction occurs within the space of a shared sheet of paper, where they together develop a collaborative drawing guided by the GAN's understanding and the child's imagination, resulting in a drawing as artifact and video as documentation.

In situations where people must maintain physical distance from one another and rely on communication through digital screens, we sometimes feel a sense of absence and loneliness. Sympathetic Wear is artwork that supplements communication through digital displays and considers the person on the other side of the network. When we are sad or in pain, the action of having our backs rubbed can provide comfort. Adopting the back as our theme, Sympathetic Wear brings gentle healing to people's minds and bodies by creating a soft tactile sensation on the back that is invisible on screen.

Glaciers are sentinels of climate change. They are the most visible evidence of global warming today. This series of works embodies the stunning beauty, rapid change, fragility, destructive power, and magnificence of glaciers. At the same time, they challenge the audience with the dramatic, irreversible ecological damages from climate change.

Imagraph is a medium that arbitrates between two primordial "attitudes": projecting the images and closing the senses. Participants lie on their backs in a box-shaped bed and shut their eyes. Two pieces of LED display board are suspended above their heads, with optical fibers from each pixel extending to the surface of their eyelids. The video prepared in advance is unilaterally played after the spectral compensation against the "blood-red" unique to their own flesh. There, the eyelid becomes the medium for the very object it is trying to block off. The intended colors and their placements are sent, but this in no way implies the triumph of projection over closing. The ritualistic posture forms a distinctive video place filled with the "tone of the unconscious." Just as eye closure deprives the participant of the rejection capability, projection as the arrayed commands also loses its authority. Participants unintentionally derive movements and colors that are not actually presented to them and blend the internally sprung image into the video irreversibly. Both projecting and closing are dysfunctional, and a singular relationship is established between the "projector" and the "projectee." What is the freedom each pole has, and where does the "image" inhabit?