New York, USA Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 4:00 pm EST
Los Angeles, USA Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 1:00 pm PST
UTC, Time Zone Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 9:00 pm
The 2nd SPARKS online Zoom discussion, Immersion, Interactivity and Altered Realities, will feature 10 presenters who have responded to the topic of past & present trajectories of immersive media experiences & experiments, as well as the evolving influence of reality altering innovation on art and culture. We will offer a journey through artworks distinguished by totality at the interface of art and consciousness. Following the presentations of the three-minute lightning talks, the zoom audience is encouraged to engage in moderated discussion.
- How have the affordances of immersive reality technology changed?
- What are the challenges to creating immersive media artwork?
- What is the next horizon for extended reality in art and culture?
Further Questions to Consider:
- What does immersive reality technology afford artists today?
- How does the changing landscape of immersive technology impact the ability of artists to work creatively in the field?
- Is it possible to create persistent immersive experiences? Or are they all inevitably performative and ephemeral? How should we document such work?
- What is the impact of relying upon commercial tools, systems, and partners to create and share immersive artwork?
- How does the practice of immersive reality experience design impact other forms of art marking and cultural production?
- What is the impact of the global pandemic on how we understand and experience immersive reality?
- How can we approach questions of accessibility for immersive reality – physical accessibility to interfaces, and economic and social access to authoring environments, equipment, expertise?
- What does the art world have to offer developers creating immersive reality tools and systems?
Aesthetics of Immersion
Prefacing the presentations of AR and VR projects that will follow, I offer a framework for thinking about the aesthetics of immersive media. By drawing on a range of historical examples, I show how immersive aesthetics communicate specific assumptions not only about the goals of representation, but also about how we are already sensuously embedded within a world that exceeds our senses.
I Am Not A Virus
Making ‘Pandemic’ the Art Game that Confronts Xenophobia and Bigotry Online and in Reality.
Website: https://chaneec.com/
Merging Spaces
My work intertwines themes of nature, culture, and technology, with an eco-feminist slant. My work is about shifting consciousness; I use technology to visualize other ways of thinking, knowing, and understanding the world.
RhumbLine: Plectrohyla Exquisita
Portending a dystopic future in which acoustic ecology is encountered only through the mechanical reproduction of environmental sounds, the sounds of this installation are created by a chorus of robotic frogs—a recognition of the catastrophic global population declines amphibians are facing. The virtual environment the robotic frogs inhabit, divided into two web pages, invites visitors to become temporary members of this fragile ecosystem.
Journeys in VR
My virtual reality, now extended reality, makes use of AR, VR, 3D prototyping, and stereoscopic photography. I will show the CAVE as it was in the 90s and how it looks today, a transition from the playfulness of early computer graphics and immersive presence to the seriousness of high resolution photography and its technoecological entanglements.
Sedimental Journey (excerpt) c.2020 on Vimeo – https://vimeo.com/461626223
Sound Sculpture, A Location-Aware Musical Instrument
Sound Sculpture is an interactive sound and light instrument. 25 location-aware blocks comprise a massive, wireless midi controller. Each cube represents a note in spatial dimension and time, and the public’s interaction and placement of the cubes create musical structures.
How to Make Immersive Technologies More Equitable: Confronting the Medium’s Colonial Legacies
At the intersection of cultural storytelling and immersive technologies, my research addresses the medium’s limitations and explores its possibilities. What are the ways emerging media offers us new spaces for community healing and historical justice?
Darcy’s Painting and Sculpture Garden in AltspaceVR
Creating Art that’s digital from end to end: real and virtual. New ways to create and experience Art. Participants are welcome to visit the AltspaceVR site as avatars.
All Her Bodies
All Her Bodies, an experimental VR experience, uses volumetric filmmaking and gaze interaction to immerse you in the stories of five women recounting intimate and powerful memories of violence.
Challenging Technocratic Power: Trespassing in the Parallel Digital Universe
Mariah is a site-specific augmented reality experience involving social justice and the law. She re-augments history with the truth and speculates possible futures
Mariah is available in the Apple App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mariah/id1628118349
Read about Mariah in the Washington Post: https://wapo.st/3UwKC0Q
and in Hyperallergic:
https://hyperallergic.com/592739/mariah-app-metropolitan-museum/
Frederick “Derick” Ostrenko is a media artist and Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University (LSU). He holds a joint-appointment in the Digital Art concentration at the School of Art and the Cultural Computing research group at the Center for Computation and Technology (CCT). Derick creates physical and virtual systems that examine the intersections of media, culture, and technology. He employs custom hardware and software that use various interfaces such as mobile applications, brain waves, generative visualizations, video processing, animation, and games. His research focuses on pushing art and technology to reveal hidden networks between people by creating structures for innovative forms of expression and discovery. Derick received his MFA in Digital+Media from the Rhode Island School of Design. Derick is a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community Committee.
Victoria Szabo is a Research Professor of Visual and Media Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She also directs the Information Science + Studies Program and the PhD in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures. She has a PhD in Victorian Literature and Culture and works in digital humanities and media art, with an emphasis on location-based urban histories, multimodal cultural heritage, and digital storytelling. Before moving to Duke, she worked in Academic Technology at Stanford University. She is also part of the Psychasthenia Studio Art collaborative and the international Visualizing Cities consortium. She has been involved in a variety of SIGGRAPH Art-related roles, including SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Chair, Art Papers Chair, Art Papers Chair for SIGGRAPH Asia, Chair of the Year-Round Digital Arts Community for the Org, and is the current Chair of the Arts Advisory Group. She is also part of the SIGGRAPH Governance Committee. Victoria is the Art Papers Chair for SIGGRAPH 2025.