Cutting Edge Art, Past and Present

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Siggraph Art Gallery Reception

Today was a day for a large amount of art, some which is cutting edge now and some which was cutting edge a century ago.

It started with the modern kind, at Siggraph.

Every year, the organizers of the art gallery host a reception.

The event is another chance to meet the artists and other art aficionados, and discuss the work.

Much of the discussion evolved around how the work was made and the ways it pushes the boundaries of existing techniques.

On one level, this type of exploration is the point of the conference gallery.

On another level, though, it’s a little frustrating.

Art in more traditional forums is about ideas, and how the art piece expresses those ideas.

I felt the heavy emphasis on technology got in the way of that (for a fantastic discussion on this subject, read Painting the Digital River by James Faure Walker.)





A typical example of this discussion was the work Oh!migas by Kuai Shen Auson.

He has made several pieces based on ants.

Ants form a self-organizing society of individually acting members, which the artist sees as a metaphor for human civilization.

His artistic practice explores the similarities and differences between the two.





For this piece, he set up an art farm, attached some webcams, and then used computer vision techniques to analyze their patterns.

The data was sent to another system that spun scratchy turntables based on the ant data.

The final result was a work where the sounds it generated depended on ant movement.

To show how far this work pushed the technology, he could not get permission from Canadian customs to bring the ant farm to Siggraph.

He left it home in his own lab, and sent the data through the internet!

The technical aspects of this work are brilliant.

I could not understand the aesthetic side, even after the artist talk.

He mentioned the turntables as symbolic of hip hop and culture created by artists outside the mainstream culture, but I couldn’t see how this connected to the ant behavior.

Emerging Technologies Lab

After the art reception, I went next door to the Emerging Technologies lab.

As the name states, this area is all about new graphics interfaces.





One group of researchers created a way of projecting computer graphics on a pool of water based on water temperature, Mark Mine, Dustin Barnard and Bei Yang.

Readers may have seen an electronic touch sensitive screen used as a table top, where moving hands around the top produces effects on the screen.

This project does something similar, except people activate the effects by pouring water in the bowl.

It has temperature sensors built in the bowl, and colors the water to match.

They set it up as a type of temple, where pouring water created different light effects on the surface.

Cool project.





Walt Disney theme parks, of all people, also had a project.

They developed a prototype of a system to project 3-D images without needing glasses, using a vibrating mirror.

The ultimate plan is to incorporate the technology into rides like the Haunted Mansion.

Imagine what it will be like when the ghosts react to patrons being there!





For people who like graphics, the lab was an interesting place to spend a few hours.

Some of the projects had the feel of showing how clever people can be with interface design (touch sensitive stuffed animals!) but the rest seriously examine how humans and computers interact.

I hope some ultimately make it into commercial products.

Vancouver Art Gallery

After soaking up Siggraph for the day, I had a more traditional art experience at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

It is the largest art museum in Vancouver.

My guidebook calls it a hit or miss affair.

The permanent collection is rather dull, but the museum mounts some really important temporary shows which will make or break the visit.

I figured today was a good day to take the risk, because they have free admission tonight.

Unfortunately, much of Vancouver feels the same way, so I had a long wait to get in.





Two of the shows were well worth the wait.

The first was a retrospective on surrealism.

Based on the writings of Freud, this art movement tried to create art as a projection of the subconscious.

Its most famous member, so famous that other members formally kicked him out, was Salvador Dali (see The City of Sunshine).





The show attempts to recreate the atmosphere of seeing these works for the first time.

For starters, all the walls in the gallery are painted grey and black.

All art museums normally have white walls (in fact, the “white walled box” is a cliché for a place to display art).

The first room recreates one of the most famous surrealist shows, First Papers of Surrealism from 1942, where Marcel Duchamp filled a gallery with red string.

The room, in fact, is covered in string along with pictures of the original show.





From there, the show goes through the movement.

It describes surrealism in terms of its total output, not just the paintings and sculptures that most art historians focus on.

Surrealist artists worked in all kinds of media, from graphic art to film.

One artist, Hans Bellmer, (WARNING: May be offensive) who has mostly faded to history, only produced etchings and photographs (his graphic subject matter probably helped with his relative obscurity).





One very unusual room held rarely seen sketching “games” called Cadavre Exquis.

Many surrealist artists got together to share work regularly, in an effort to avoid repeating existing artistic conventions.

One artist would sketch something on part of a paper, fold it over, and pass it to someone else.

The new artist extended the scene, folded the paper again, and passed it along.

The final result was considered a collective artwork.

The room held many examples, including an actual game board where a different artist did each square.





Another rare room held a frank discussion of sexuality in Surrealist art works.

Most exhibitions of the movement downplay the subject, if they discuss it at all.

A sign at the door warned that many of the pictures are highly disturbing.

Surrealists used disturbing imagery as a way of accessing and exploring emotion, including physical desires.

These paintings were the stuff that nightmares are made of.

I give the museum staff credit for including them with warnings to patrons instead of pretending they don’t exist.





The last part of the show talked about Surrealism and British Columbia.

Even though the area produced no artists of note in the movement, the displays claimed Vancouver still had a large effect.

Several early members of the movement, such as Andre Bretton, visited the area.

They bought and brought home examples of Native American (First Nation to Canadians) artwork.

This was common practice for Surrealist artists, who saw non-European art as an important source of inspiration.

The display then tries to draw parallels between native art and what later appeared in the Surrealist movement.

Personally, I think the museum is trying too hard.

Unlike cubism, which was directly influenced by certain types of West African art, surrealism is far too diverse to definitively state what influenced particular artists.





The other show was on Vancouver artist Ken Lum.

Born in Vancouver to Chinese parents, he started out as a photographer, branching out from there.

His work broadly addresses the theme of identity.

What does it mean to be the child of immigrants, trying to function in one culture with a heritage from another?

How much of someone’s identity is really a construct of that broader culture?

How does the influence work?

In one series, he took pictures of dual language signs in Vancouver’s Chinatown, the largest in Canada.

He shot pictures of Canada’s iconic Mounties with members of various ethnic groups.

In a recent series, he took pictures of street signs in ethnically mixed East Vancouver, and then added witty comments with Photoshop.

For example, one sign declares “Canada’s premiere electronics chain” with a store closing notice over it.

The comment is “Screw you, Canada!”





Even better are a series of mirror works.

In all them, he has etched words into the mirrors.

When viewers look at the work, they see their own reflections with the words over them.

The viewers thus become an integral part of the work.

Most of the etchings comment on identity in one form or another.





Mirrors also form the basic material of what I consider his most spectacular work, Mirror Maze with Signs of Depression.

In the mid 1990s, Ken Lum suffered a severe bout of depression, for which he was hospitalized.

After he recovered, he created a work that attempted to show people what that experience was like.

He created a maze entirely out of mirrors.

Walking through is an incredibly disorientating experience, as literally everything looks the same and the path could be anywhere.

Other viewers’ images pop out in random places, just adding to the confusion.

Some of the mirrors have etchings on them describing the major signs of depression.

I finally found my way through by feeling the walls for gaps.





I enjoyed my time at the museum, as a break from the necessary heavy technology of the conference.

Tomorrow begins enough technical analysis to make my brain melt.

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