The Denver Theatre District enlivens a 16-block area of downtown Denver through interactive, immersive and experimental arts experiences. We provide creatives with a platform and financial support for sharing their work, and helped other cities create similar programs. Through use of our various LED screens and projections on historical buildings, we show artworks from hundreds of artists each year.

Artist and curator, Dr. Maiza Laurent Hixson, will discuss the curation and exhibition efforts behind New Media Architectures. As a multimodal artist and curator, Hixson has exhibited and performed widely at such venues as Eisenwunderwelt in Berlin; Little Tokyo Arts Complex in Los Angeles; the Art, Design and Architecture Museum in Santa Barbara; Highways in Santa Monica; Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York; Baltimore Contemporary; Soap Factory, Minneapolis; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC; Haverford College; and many others.

“Needles and thread” is a 2-D hand-drawn animation. It is composited of three animation clips. The screen in the middle is a woman endlessly working with a sewing machine, and on the left screen is a close-up view of the woman’s hands. The screen on the right shows a woman walking on a runway as her clothing switches rapidly from one to another. This work is about the labor that is often hidden behind the fast fashion. This work interrupts the frenzy of digital graphics with a work that is done frame by frame, by hand. The work engages with the fast consumer culture of the display screens with the critique of the fast fashion.

Today’s urban landscapes are defined by a hyper-saturation. A visual cacophony projects an identity that is rarely derived from the resident community, but instead by dominant narratives as they are filtered through sanitized corporate lenses. My practice explores modes by which artists can interrupt this subjugation of populations under the spectacle of corporate placemaking. Another interest of mine is the ways that the output of LLM-based AI can reflect and highlight the banality of late capitalist aesthetics. The New Media Architectures exhibit in Denver, presented striking tactical possibilities in combining these interests. In particular, the integration of artworks into advertising streams was the perfect site to combine AI output with humor to subvert the ad site. I did this through the creation of video animations of Colorado-themed advertisements “dissolving” into pixelated glitch. This talk will explore the method used to make these videos and the video outcomes themselves.

“Anthropocene Daze” (2019 onward, with the artist /p) is a series of playful glitch video collaborations between the artists and the virtual fish-and-plastic-waste swarms of their generative artificial life artwork “Evolution of Fish,” originally developed as an interactive augmented reality installation. On a darker, more serious level, the artists see these works as visual evocations of the overwhelming disorientation and confusion that our plastic addiction is producing for these sea creatures, whose natural world and organic environment are increasingly being turned into a plastic nightmare. For those of us living on dry land, plastic waste is at the worst only visible out of site in plain view on the ground. The artists present these videos in public and private spaces to give viewers an emotional experience of what it is like to live completely surrounded by plastic.

Adam Hsieh’s presentation explores the artistic process behind his site-specific video projection ‘the cloud atlas’, displayed on the façade of the Daniels & Fisher Tower in Denver, Colorado. For this project, he drew from his ongoing archive of cloud images captured in Lutruwita/Tasmania to fine-tune a text-to-image AI model, generating a sequence of moving graphics that mimic the shifting skyscape of the Australian island. Presenting the final work in a significant public space, he was intrigued by the interplay between the real sky in Denver and the simulated sky inspired by the Tasmanian one, creating a dialogue between these two distinct places. As a digital artist, Hsieh considers image-making both a practice of place-making and life-shaping. By critically engaging with its ability to learn from existing situated experiences and imagine new ones, he suggests that customized generative AI models may unlock new creative approaches for us to navigate, interpret, and redefine place.

Reflecting the audio visual work “Acapopella” and “Tears of the Sky” premiered at SIGGRAPH projection show at Denver, the artist will share the narratives and inspirations of this series of “Concurrent” art experiments, which involves topics of generative AI, media implosion and parallel realities, resonating with our collective memories as concurrent beings in rituals media architecture. At the end of the presentation, the artist will further introduce upcoming projection show of this series.

In a dreamlike future Shangri-La, where the remnants of modern civilization lie in ruins, a vibrant new world emerges. Exotic cybernetic creatures and surreal flora flourish amidst bio-organic structures, creating a mesmerizing landscape. Humans live in floating bubbles, drifting weightlessly through the sky, experiencing a life that defies gravity and imagination. This utopian vision blends the ancient and the futuristic, where love and life find new expressions in a fantastical, ever-evolving paradise.

The Vancouver Mural Festival (VMF) celebrates ten years of public art, through murals that transform urban spaces into hubs for connection, gathering, creativity, and placemaking. This year, VMF and ACM SIGGRAPH are partnering through an initiative to foster connection and collaboration between VMF artists and electronic media artists. VMF Executive Director, Miriam Esquitín, as well as Co-Founder and Director of Partnerships & Engagement, Adrian Sinclair and, will announce the initiative and an open call for interactive and new media artists to submit expressions of interest. This joint initiative aims to connect artists in the development of site-specific works that blend digital art with public murals created over the last decade throughout Vancouver, highlighting how murals and digital art can reshape public spaces and engage communities. This project represents a special collaboration between the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community, VANCOUVER MURAL FESTIVAL for 2025, Vancouver, Canada.