SA '22: Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 Art Gallery

The core idea is that fragments of memory echo through the meta-universe. It is a 360-degree immersive art work using the latest real-time animation technology. It can be displayed in VR or Dome projection. Allowing the audience to immerse themselves in a surreal Oriental landscape fantasy, experience dreams and memories of the past, present, and future growing, changing, disintegrating, and reorganizing in a chaotic meta-universe.

It describes an electronic tree growing from another dimension, with a VR Birdman wrapped together by umbilical cords of optical fiber. The trees were covered with psychedelic electronic flowers. It conveys the conflicts between technology and humanity, memory and the present, evolution and extinction that continue to reverberate in the meta-universe. The landscape floating upside down in the mist adds to the atmosphere of suspense and chaos. The style is a mixture of surrealism, fantasy, cyberpunk, Song Dynasty painting, etc.

Currently uploaded is a work in progress version, but it has also been of fairly high quality, full of artistic and technical challenges throughout the production process. We are trying to put more challenging elements, concepts into the final version, which will have longer duration, multiple different scenes, more complex story lines, full music, etc.

'Gaia' is an eco game that people can play on the web. The background of this game deals with climate change and pandemics experienced by the planet we live on. In this game, the players will view the enviromental information as they select meals, electricity, and medical treatment related to survival. This button means routine behavior in human survival, but there is a point to look at from a social and ethical point of view. Through the selection of a button, we expose specific environmental research information on global changes such as climate change and pandemics, and make people aware that we are connected. The human-shaped character in the game is also a biological body through which radioactivity, dust, contaminated food, and toxic substances accumulate and pass, as well as a material entity through which industrial systems, power structures, and economic interests compete. The body and entity that collapses and resurrects inside the game is placed on a complex network of harmless gas, barren land, rotten food, a system designed to force you to click, and a social system that turns like a cogwheel by a click button. In the process of appreciating the game, you can imagine the future while watching the environmental research. We can look at the world with games and solve problems from various perspectives. The player's choices determine the Earth's morbidity and temperature. As a result, the number of times the Earth is born is updated, which symbolizes that human influence has the power to destroy the planet. As a result, we feel that human choices are interconnected and dependent on the life activities of humans and non-humans, and as a result, we reflect on our position and responsibility.

Besides men and women, people can be neither man nor woman, fluid identity, transgender, and agender. Not only that, in terms of sexual orientation, besides heterosexuals, there are homosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals, and asexuals as well. However, ignorance and lacking empathetic understanding of those sexual minorities make their lives harsh and suffering. For instance, in the case of transgender people, 28% of them postponed their health care due to discrimination, 19% of them refused medical care altogether, and 28% of them experienced verbal harassment by medical professionals, according to a 2011 national transgender discrimination survey (USA). Unluckily, we are apt to generate a basic understanding of others based on their gender expressions and use such irresponsible and heuristic findings to deal with others. Thus, we decided to create an installation to at least minimize the gap for a moment when the audience can enjoy themselves by watching the drawing performance of their idea portrait (inner-self). Regarding the AI portrait painter, we leverage StyleGAN to generate the continuous gender spectrum of each participant based on their facial features, in which they can choose their ideal gender representation that reflects their inner self the most. Then our AI portrait painter "draws" the selected "self" on the canvas. In general professional painters can detect and draw the most confident and beautiful us, on the other hand, we tend to exaggerate our flaws and ignore our attractive parts. When the drawing performance finishes, the audience can receive the drawing result as a well-printed portrait simultaneously. The printed portrait also works as a souvenir of participating in our exhibition. Our work aims to raise an empathic understanding of the various sexual minorities for a more inclusive, preferable, and sustainable world.

"Voight-Kampff 2.0" is a reflection on the sustainable development of artificial intelligence technology in the future. Once a machine becomes conscious, would AI stay as a tool or obtain a soul? Would there be a boundary between human and machines?

A Voight-Kampff test process involving two individuals is simulated in this work, where the emotional fluctuations generated by empathy provide the basis for judging whether the suspect is human or machine. There is a saying in Buddhist philosophy that "what can think is the heart", which means that only equipped with empathy could one be considered with having personality and soul. Unlike breathing or heartbeat, EEG data is the most primitive and cannot be subjectively controlled, which also metaphors the process of "thinking". Therefore, the work chooses EEG data to test whether empathy produces emotional fluctuations.

"Voight-Kampff 2.0" aims to create emotionally charged experiences through biological data. With the changing images visualization of brain waves, the human facial image is artistically processed in a retro pixel style. Specifically, when a question is delivered by the judge, the emotional changes of suspect is stimulated and reflected in EEG data, which is visualized clearly in graphics and facial images on screen of both sides. The Match degree between emotion reflection and correct answer will help the judge determine whether the suspect is human or AI. Real human brainwave art images have obvious area changes and sound feedback due to the question, but machines don't. The work not only allows audiences to empathize with the work, but also founds a connection among audiences' emotion.

The work provides references for the creation project of EEG biological cooperation. Furthermore, significance of maintaining self-awareness in relationship of human-machine is also emphasized, which helps derive the sustainable development between human and AI.

Lizardians is a three-channel 3-D animation that depicts a world in which the human body has been commercialized for mass consumption. The lives of two people unfold synchronously to reveal the consequences of the late-capitalistic system on individuals' freedom, labor, creativity, and authorship.

"Itadakimasu" is a gesture performed before a meal in Japan. It is meant to express gratitude for the cycle of life and the upstream supply chain. Still, it is also meant to express gratitude for the awareness of the boundary between self and others before eating a piece of life and using it as one's own flesh and blood. This ritual, which we all perform almost unconsciously without question, is a ritual that has become customary in recent years thanks to the invention of the radio, which allows us to share the same topics of conversation even when we are far away from each other.

Today, physical reality and the XR/metaverse, here and there, are being connected without seams. As a result, the boundaries between oneself and others, oneself and the world have become blurred, and the loss of the "self" recognized by each living in this society is not far away. In the present age, when anyone can easily make discrete phase transitions anywhere, we believe it is necessary to perform appropriate rituals to recognize the boundaries between self and others, rather than just connecting without difficulty blindly.

We sense and recognize all signals from the world through our five senses. It is a recursive structure in which one perceives one's existence for the first time as a contrast to the world one smells, and one can sense the world only through one's existence. In this art Zeroth, the user confronts himself in physical reality and himself in XR simultaneously. This experience allows the user to consider the appropriate ritual actions.

Keep Smiling is an online interactive experience in the form of a job interview conducted by an AI agent. The agent asks the participant to smile, to smile even more, and to count objects she/he can see through a nearby window while continuing to smile.

Many assumed that the increased use of modern technology in the workplace would allow mankind to sit back more, yet some people are working longer hours than ever. This series by Axl Le reflects on the role of a modern work environment and how it impacts our life.

Scope of the Cloud sets its stage on a floating city in 2051, CLOUD, a city of climate refugees. Each game console sets Planner, Researcher, and the Flightless bird as the main protagonist. In a playful way, the game questions how mobility can affect ecosystems and human lives.

A VR art experience provides a conceptual response to the issues of data authorship and data oblivion. It visualizes 1945 Twitter posts retrieved from Twitter API under the construction of a server farm with a paper shredder. It questions the possible future of digital heritage.

The project "human-like non-human - HAOS human cognition liberation project" to attempt using electrical perception sensing in the oral region as an addition to the Eight Consciousness defined by Buddhist disciplines and expanding beyond the biological identity of a human.

Have we ever heard the voice of river carefully? We use the technology of speech recognition, including the emotion recognition function to analysis audio samples of underwater recording. So we can hear the underwater sound into a dynamic piece of music and let the river play the music itself.

Window is an interactive multimedia installation that reconstructs the Quarantine experience with point clouds, sound and diary texts. It creates a poetic digital environment, arouses the audience's empathetic feeling together and reflects on the relationship between body and space, the individual and the universe, the physical and the spiritual.

This work is a virtual catwalk animation based on modern urban diseases, consisting three themes: information leakage, social behavior alienation, and environmental degradation. Taking the catwalk as the form of presentation. This work aims to inspire people to focus on the Sustainable Development Goals by realizing the environmental damage.

This is a public art project centred on an AI chatbot called Wander. She can generate interactive fiction based on realworld locations' knowledge graphs. Through public participation, the stories are visualised on an interactive map, a fictional earth chronicle contributed through crowdsourced interactions.

"People of the Gold" is a project that reflects on the identity, and history of the early Chinese immigrants in California during the period of Gold Rush. The project consists of multiple archive-looking moving images generated by a machine learning algorithm trained with historical documents. The work is presented in a dimmed room with interface for viewer to browse. The constantly changing portrait photo of people and the "identity information" next to the photos are presented. Viewers are invited to browse those files slowly, replicating the experience of browsing historical documents. The project aims to raise awareness and emotions to the history of those people of the gold through exploring the potential of machine learning algorithm in the field of photographic imaging and anthropology studies.

Perception of War is a data art that visualizes human perception data about the Ukraine-Russia war by replacing it with emotions through artificial intelligence technology. Data are collected from SNS media that relay human perception by replacing it with a message. 60,000 images, texts, and latitude data tagged with the Ukraine-Russia War were collected, and the perception inherent in each data was analyzed and classified as emotions through artificial intelligence technology. Each emotion is given a unique visual tactility function such as color, pattern, and texture, and is expressed towards the Ukraine latitude. The human perception left behind in Ukraine is in an aesthetically fascinating and somewhat bizarre form. This is a means of exploring the fragments of war left in the present and in the future, and presents a discourse about heterogeneity in the definition of war.

The installation consists of an urban/rural Japanese landscape influenced by a Latinx community. Model structures are made of printed photographs, and small screens for seeing details, both part of a bigger archive. In this setting, attendees will be able to see the visual communication of the city.

Chandra X is a series of artistic diagnoses on the state of Planetary, implemented as WebXR(2021) and 3D Performative Apparatus-Environment(2022). The series speculates on how the natural environment and biodiversity still functions as a large capital in the near future. Inspecting the multilayers of remote surveillance system powered by virtualreal networks and neo-colonialist interactions, the artwork reimagines the audience's performative engagement as a counterbalance to such system.

In Chandra X, audiences are invited to perform as meta-authorities to Chandra(they/them), who are interplanetary network environment manager(s) living in a near future, authorized with a certain degree of access to bio-resources in the universe. Remotely accessing the planets in charge, Chandra perform a set of labor such as Wielding, Archiving, Supervising, Detecting ('WASD') the planetarian's production and use of resources, for which Chandra earn 'hyper-capital' from their meta-authorities. As meta-authorities to Chandra, the audience-performers are also remotely connected to the labor of Chandra(s), infinitely doubling their acts of Wielding, Archiving, Supervising, Detecting.

The technical mise-en-scene of Chandra X is defined as "3D Performative Apparatus-Environment". This setting comprises 1) WebXR as a 3D virtual labor-scape and, 2) mobile-based AR as an intervention tool. These apparatuses together serve as audiovisual diegeses that are inter-connected via cross-device interactions, hence interoperate. In such a setting, audiences can connect and intervene in each other's experiences in real-time, across the heterogeneous realities in heterogeneous device network environments; give and receive interaction and feedback on their performative behaviors.

In the 3D Performative Apparatus-Environment, Chandra X intends to constantly re-situate the audience-performers amid the indeterminate states of being colonized and/or colonizing; of being autonomous and/or subordinate to a predesigned labor and belief system; and as a contemporaneous being in AD 2022 who receives the SOS message and alerts sent by Chandra themselves.

This performance aims to transform the traditional classical music experience through emerging media technology. Generative visualization will analyze and use not only musicians' audio but also audience-generated noise and ambient sound. This will make the audience's expression part of the performance, and the visual outcomes will become nonfungible experiences.

Worldwide StRhyme is an experience that rhymes in many languages by selecting words through stepping forward aiming to blur the boundary of words as sound and meaning. Although the experience is mainly performed by two people, bystanders also have an unprecedented auditory experience.

Everything is going digital in our lives. I am looking for an invisible, formless creature born out of a gap of radical change. I call it, "Digital Being". I recently discovered a new version, NFT creature that has settled on the abandoned TV over the internet.

We create a series of origami tessellations by simulating the growth of membranes. The self-organized winkling patterns allow the transformation of one surface into another with a different curvature without stretching or shrinking. Our work demonstrates the universality of the principle of folding in nature, art, and mathematics.

Remembrance: Magma is an immersive virtual reality animation addressing the poetics of a mind as it is dying of dementia. Remembrance: Magma incorporates modern tech, cutting-edge research on the aging brain, East Asian crafting aesthetics, and Korean shamanic traditions as it examines the nature of the brain as a sensor that desires data even as it slowly fails. Culturally intersectional, Remembrance explores the poetic and painful processes of memory degeneration.

Land Enough uses the issues of rising sea levels, energy, waste, and diversity in a fictional climate-destroyed future. Each participant was given the role of explorer, architect, scientist, or engineer to create artful technologies in a fictional climate-destroyed future. These post-apocalyptic technologies signal the non-fungibility and fragility of nature.