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Boris Vitázek was born in Trenčín and is a very active new media artist based in Bratislava, Slovakia. According to his website, he creates projection mapping, interactive installation, VR, sound design, game design and theater scenography.

His works range from small scale  installations that are designed to be experienced by a single person to large scale mappings that interact with public space and architecture. He often combines visuals and sound to create a immersive atmosphere that fuses the boradry between reality and the digital world to creates impressive "magic show".

Themes often revolve around privacy issues and social media, religion, science. There are also pure exploration of sound and visual in relation to the audience and its interaction with the artwork.

Example of his works:
1. Second Litany – Biela Noc 2018, Kapitulska street, Bratislava Slovakia.
2. Second Litany – List I Ljosi 2019, Seydisfjordur, Icenland.
3. Subjective Future

Quote from his interview:
Q; What is the role of nature in your art?
A: Nature is the subject for the best tool that humans ever devised - science. It shows everywhere - from generative code producing various types of noise inspired by nature, or in design of installations, featuring concepts like simulations of animal food chains. I love exploring nature with code, on one hand its mind blowing how complex structure arises from a simple set of rules and humbling seeing the complexity and intertwined nature of big systems.

There is of course a problem of my type of art is demanding on manufacturing of complex equipment and using lots of electricity, but I try to spend time on ecologic themes as well use recycled technology if its fitting for the theme of my artwork. I also do believe we could choose things that are worth investing in, and do not rely on mass production of waste - like good art.

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Tim Walker is a British fashion photographer, who works for first-line fashion magazines, such as Vogue, W and Harper's Bazaar. Tim Walker is a "Story Teller", a photographer who tells stories. He shoots fashion blockbusters with extraordinary imagination, dreamy and romantic use of colors and strange characters. The fashion blockbusters he shoots are famous for the flowing photography style of light and shadow. Tim Walker likes the production of large-scale works, pursues perfection in details and light perception, and likes the change of space and the interspersed with different scenes. He turns the most dreamy scenes we can imagine in mind into reality. There are gardens, castles, pink clouds, white horses and all the gorgeous and lush decorations in his photos. His shooting is also the process of making a fairy tale dream come true.

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Pak is an anonymous artist whose artworks differentiate from other artists due to his creative and innovative combination of arts and technologies, like coding. His art practices feature an anonymity form because he wants to divert people's attention to the works and the concepts rather than the identities of artists. His recent experiments and explorations focus on the crypto art and NFT art. The artwork called merge has achieved significant success and set a new record in sales. The artwork was sold in limited time and for an unlimited amount. Even though every owner’s artwork is presented as a digital ball, they can not know about the look until the sale ends. At the end, every buyer owns artwork in different sizes and colors according to their ranking among all buyers. The ball will change accordingly as the buyers sell or buy balls from other buyers. This art practice includes all the buyers to be the participants. The state of the artwork is changing all the time.

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12- 14 April 2021 | A novel collection of digital art redefining our understanding of value

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Qing Tian's Research: Interactive Light Painting

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Qing Tian's Research: Interactive Light Painting

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Here is the link to Jie Qi's "interactive light painting": https://vimeo.com/40904471

I would like to introduce this brilliant work, which deeply touched me when I first saw it in one of my classes last semester. Jie Qi built a very complex circuit beneath a Chinese ancient painting "Pu Gong Ying Tu" ("Dandelion"). The circuit linked yellow and white LEDs.

Through a piece of paper drawing flower branches, those gathering yellow and white lights looked like flowers and dandelions.

When you blow on the white lights, the circuit can sense it and the white lights would disperse like a real dandelion. I really like her idea that gives beautiful and elegant meanings to technologies.

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Interactive Light Painting: Pu Gong Ying Tu (Dandelion Painting)

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Pu Gong Ying Tu is an interactive painting of a dandelion field. When you blow on the white puffs, the seeds disperse and generate new flowers. These flowers begin as yellow dandelions, but after a few moments bloom into responsive white seed puffs.

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UK-based artist Elizabeth Edwards has already begun to master the art of painting and sculpting with light in a way many are still struggling to grasp. Edwards is a 3D character artist at Creative Assembly. What Edwards has managed to do, that many others haven't, is shed a part of her traditional art training to embrace the new frontier of creating eye-tricking color and light spectrums while working "inside" the screen that many digital artists are still using as a 2D windows into 3D.

The blog of Elizabeth Edwards:
https://lizedwardsvr.artstation.com/blog
The exhibition of her work:
https://lizedwards.artstation.com/
Some of her work below attached in this interview:
https://mashable.com/article/virtual-reality-art-oculus-vive-tilt-brush-medium

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Upon Salvador Dali's death in 1989, the world was reminded of his unique ability to render "the unreal world with such extreme realism that its truth and validity could no longer be questioned."

The art critic responsible for that description, the late James Thrall Soby, could not have imagined that we'd one day reach a moment when Dali's melting clocks and impossibly alien landscapes would become places we could actually visit. But now, at the dawn of commercial virtual reality, that's exactly what we're doing, and a new class of artist is beginning to emerge to help us navigate this new plane of surreality.

After weeks immersed in the new, user-created worlds of Medium for VR sculpting and Quill for VR painting, both made for the Oculus Rift, I've watched as many artists -- professional and amateur -- have enthusiastically embraced the new tools.

However, during my deepest dives in the rapidly growing, but mostly unnoticed VR communities, one particularly prolific artist stood out, piercing the head-mounted fog of pixels with a distinct visual language that feels native to the new canvas of VR.

UK-based artist Elizabeth Edwards has already begun to master the art of painting and sculpting with light in a way many are still struggling to grasp. Her background may have something to do with that. Edwards is a 3D character artist at Creative Assembly and recently worked on the game Total War: Warhammer.

"I started working in 3D seven or so years ago at university where I was taking a Computer Games Art course," says Edwards. "I mostly use 3DS Max and ZBrush."

That grounding in 3D software might sound like a natural advantage, but it's not quite that simple. Since 2015, I've been closely watching some of the most talented professional artists trying their hand at VR art using tools like Tilt Brush, for the HTC Vive, with colorful but less than extraordinary results. What Edwards has managed to do, that many others haven't, is shed a part of her traditional art training to embrace the new frontier of creating eye-tricking color and light spectrums while working "inside" the screen that many digital artists are still using as a 2D windows into 3D.

"It's difficult to get across just how much of a difference it makes to look at a 3D thing you're making in stereoscopic 3D -- as close to how we see things in the real world as we can get," says Edwards. "You're able to comprehend scale and depth very naturally and automatically relate the virtual object to your own body and space -- especially since, with Touch or Vive controllers, you are physically manipulating the object with your hands in real space."

But her perspective isn't limited to the amateur VR doodler. From her vantage point, VR tools like Medium could change how our game and film characters are designed.

"In ZBrush and 3DS Max, you're making a 3D thing on a 2D screen," says Edwards. "It's easy to misjudge the proportions for a whole bunch of reasons -- perspective differences between a photo reference and your viewport, for example. That kind of mistake is harder to do in VR."

The burgeoning impact of these new tools is immediately apparent to those facilitating the sharing of work from Edwards' and others.

"We live in a 3D world, and until now we've mostly expressed ourselves with 2D mediums (drawing, photography, video) except for sculpture or 3D software, which requires advanced skills and training," says Alban Denoyel, co-founder and CEO of Sketchfab, one of the largest platforms for sharing 3D art online.

"With the new VR creation tools, anybody can express himself in 3D space, which is the natural way to convey a concept or an emotion. What blows my mind is to see 5-year-old kids posting 3D drawings on Sketchfab. When you think about it, drawing a house in 3D is even more intuitive than on a 2D sheet of paper, just because the house is in 3D in the real world."

Edwards agrees.

"Medium is the most accessible 3D software I've ever used," says Edwards. "All traditional 3D software -- long before you get to make any art at all -- comes with a steep learning curve, even switching between comparable software like 3DS Max and Maya."

But whether this new VR palette will be embraced by most artists, old and new, will be central to how far VR art grows.

"Looking at the work Gio Nakpil has been doing in Medium -- work that really pushes the boundaries and rivals what is possible in ZBrush in terms of quality -- I'm super excited to see how it changes the workflow of 3D artists in the future," says Edwards.

" Oculus Touch controllers revolutionized the Rift for sure ... I firmly believe that 3D art should be made in a true 3D space, not a flat screen, and Medium and those like it have a huge future."

A trip this week to a few Best Buy stores in New York City, which have dedicated Oculus Rift displays, revealed that both the headset and controllers are sold out, just days before Christmas. A supply problem, or a hint at legions of VR artists to come? We're likely to find out in the coming months.

"I absolutely do think this will encourage more artists to take up digital 3D," says Edwards.

"The biggest barrier to entry at the moment is the cost of the headsets, but in a few years, when headsets are more accessible, software like these will put 3D art in a lot of hands."

Related Video: We built a VR-ready computer for less than $800 (and you can too)

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The artist blowing people's minds in virtual reality

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Upon Salvador Dali's death in 1989, the world was reminded of his unique ability to render "the unreal world with such extreme realism that its truth and validity could no longer be questioned."

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Place: The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (AGO)
Artist: Alex Mayhew

In July 2017, the AGO worked with digital artist Alex Mayhew to create an AR installation called ReBlink.

Mayhew reimagined scenarios for some paintings to make them align with the 21st-century context, and brought them alive.

Visitors could use phones or tablets to access the new version of artworks. For example, some characters were holding cell phones in their hands to take selfies.

By creating the app, Mayhew wanted to turn technology into engaging rather than distracting for audiences. And in fact, visitors reported that they looked up for more time and felt more engaged by using the app.

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Leqi's Research on The Treachery of sanctuary

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Leqi's Research on The Treachery of sanctuary

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Currently, there are many performers who rely on technology to make the most out of their shows. One of the most impressive artists of this type is undoubtedly Chris Milk, a man whose pantomime-like performances have been astounding audiences for years. Chris Milk as a pioneer of interactive experiences;

The Treachery of sanctuary is a large-scale interactive triptych: a story of birth, death, and transfiguration that uses projections of the participants’ own bodies to unlock a new artistic language. Both art and technology define and represent the process of creative perception.

The Treachery of Sanctuary is a perfect example of art and technology mix through digital art and explore the inner world of human beings. The usage of technology as a creative medium, which offers an untouched ground to explore, to discover and to challenge the traditional art form. The work consists of three 30-foot-high white panel frames suspended from the ceiling on which digitally captured shadows are reprojected. A shallow reflecting pool sits between the viewers and the screens.

The first panel: your body disintegrate into the birds that represent the initial moment of perception.

The second panel: your purest expression picked apart by thousand angry birds, which is the representative of critical response either by people’s self-doubt outside critical forces or the impossibilities

The third panel – “transfiguration”: it used the video tracking, to track your motion where you sprout the giant wings, which present the feeling of self-freedom.

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Photo by Bryan Derballa.

Moving to the second panel, the flock above you is larger and more menacing than the last. When you enter, the birds begin to swoop down, attacking your shadow and taking away chunks of it in their claws. The onslaught continues until you've been almost completely devoured and all that remains is a pair of stubby legs.

Entering the third panel, your silhouette has returned. Upon swinging your arms up, you are bestowed with a massive pair of wings. Your wings follow your gestures, swaying with the movement of your arms.

The implementation of Treachery stitched together several different technologies. We needed a way to visualize the viewers as silhouettes in front of the display so that we could augment their shadows, selectively removing parts or attaching wings. This meant we needed both the outline of the viewers, as well as data points describing their actual posture in terms of torsos, arms, and legs.
Screenshots from the custom software built for the installation.
In order to create a flock of birds, we needed a way of efficiently animating hundreds of 3D models flying together and interacting directly with the silhouettes.

We chose to use both a 3D game development environment called Unity and a creative coding platform called openFrameworks. openFrameworks was used to access a Kinect camera sensing the presence of people, which was passed to the game engine to show silhouettes interacting with the bird flocks.

Both the environments have unique strengths that made them work well together. openFrameworks has powerful libraries for processing data from cameras, which made it easy to interface with the Kinect cameras (we used the Kinect for Windows SDK, since it provides the most advanced pose tracking out there). For displaying the visuals, Unity 3D worked well as it's made for working with lots of animated models.

Video Tracking
The system begins when a viewer steps in front of the screen. The Kinect camera discreetly built into the wall behind them recognizes the outline of the person and infers their posture. The raw image from the Kinect camera is quite noisy and requires several image filtering techniques to smooth its edges before it's displayed as a shadow.

We attempted several techniques to produce cleaner shadows, including Delaunay triangulation, contour finding, and edge detection. While many of those techniques generated interesting effects, they didn't result in the pure shadow look we were after. The solution we settled on used an erosion pass to remove small pixel glitches, followed by a dilation pass to fill any holes, and finally a median blur to smooth things out. We averaged consecutive frames in time together to further stabilize the silhouette edges and remove noise.

Unity and openFrameworks integration
Since the data from the Kinect was received and processed in openFrameworks, we needed a way to visualize the interaction in the game engine Unity. In the past, we had used OSC network communication to connect the two applications, but that was way too slow for this installation. We decided to experiment with the more direct approach of a native C++ plugin for Unity.

A plugin opened up the option of low level shared memory access between the openFrameworks and Unity processes. That way both applications could share the actual RAM location where the skeletons and shadows were stored. This was super fast.

Silhouette Masking Magic Trick
Once the silhouettes and skeletons were visible in Unity, we needed a way to make them dynamic and interactive. The design for the first two panels required us to be able to progressively hide each viewer's silhouette as they interacted with the birds. To accomplish this we built a "particle suit" of small images and attached it to the skeleton data per viewer. The particles were not visualized directly but served as a reveal mask to let the silhouette image show. As the birds would emerge or rip apart the silhouette, the particles were progressively removed and those parts of the body would disappear. Because the particles were attached to the Kinect's skeleton data, it didn't matter where you waved your arm, if it had been ripped off it was gone!
Photo by Bryan Derballa.
Bird Animation and Flocking
Birds moved through the scenes using a custom flocking algorithm simulating bird flight. Flocking works by applying the same simple set of movement rules to each bird in the flock. The rules sound like "move towards the average center of all the birds" and "head in the same direction as the birds near you," or "move away from the birds if they are too close."

By applying these simple rules to all birds, organic flocking animations emerge in the entire group. In order to have fine control of where the flocks swarmed we positioned a series of invisible points around the 3D scene. The birds were assigned points to fly towards, which let us create paths for the flocks to follow.

The birds were created in Maya, a program for 3D animation traditionally used to create films and video games. Each bird had a series of animations done by hand as short loops or gestures, such as a peck, a flutter, or a dive bomb. By mixing code-based animations like the flocking with hand-done animations, we achieved a dynamic and scriptable yet still organic-looking behavior.

But like any good artistic experience, the magic isn't in the technology, but in the way people interact with it. Once all the elements are in place, the technology can sink into the background and let a seamless, more emotional experience emerge.

Watch the behind-the-scenes documentary on Treachery of Sanctuary with interviews from Chris Milk, Ben Tricklebank, and the tech team to find out more about the project.

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How It Works: Chris Milk's The Treachery Of Sanctuary

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Photo by Bryan Derballa. Moving to the second panel, the flock above you is larger and more menacing than the last. When you enter, the birds begin to swoop down, attacking your shadow and taking away chunks of it in their claws.

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Min's research: A multimedia artist, Cao Fei

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Min's research: A multimedia artist, Cao Fei

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Cao Fei is a notable Chinese contemporary artist. She works in multimedia — film, video, photography, virtual reality, and installation — and is known for her surreal depictions of the everyday human repercussions of China’s fast-growing, hyper-industrialized economy.

Her 2007 work RMB City: A Second Life City Planning by China Tracy (aka Cao Fei) depicts a fictional, digitally constructed Chinese city that imagines alternative possibilities for art, architecture, politics, and economics.

In a subsequent project, Live in RMB City(2009), Ms. Cao created her avatar, China Tracy, and spent hours each day creating a life (even a love life) for her character. She later turned this experience into a film.

In addition, her 2004 series “COSplayers” uses photography and video to document the alienated, disaffected young people who escape reality through the world of online gaming.（Photography）

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video(shot and edited by Irena) on the Drifter exhibition

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(Irena)Xinyi's research on Studio DRIFT's artwork: DRIFTER

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(Irena)Xinyi's research on Studio DRIFT's artwork: DRIFTER

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The artists I research on is Studio DRIFT established by Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn (1980) and Ralph Nauta (1978). DRIFT manifests the phenomena and hidden properties of nature with the use of technology in order to figure out the Earth’s underlying mechanisms and to re-establish human's connection to it. DRIFT's artworks are rich in meaning with conciseness. They illuminate the similarities between artificial and natural structures through a process of deconstruction, interaction and innovation. The underlying questions are what life is and what the future will be in a positive perspective.

Studio DRIFT is dedicated to experiential sculpture, installation and performance. I went to the Shed and enjoyed the magnificent scenes presented through their artwork named Drifter on the Shed in New York in 2021. The huge concrete-like installation can move and "flow" freely in the air empowered by drones inside.

Drifter advocates on rethinking our relationship with the natural environment which is usually considered to be static and inactive. It creates tension between chaos and order, human technology and nature, and darkness and lightness and generates possibility, doubt and contemplation.

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exhibition at the Shed (photo taken by Irena)

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(Irena)Xinyi's research on Studio DRIFT's artwork: EGO

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(Irena)Xinyi's research on Studio DRIFT's artwork: EGO

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EGO is a movable sculpture that is connected by Nylon strings and transparent lights. The motion is controlled by the strings, leading to the sculpture transformed in different dimensions. It is artificial but also gentle for the slow motion while providing different perspectives for audience standing at different positions. In the consecutive actions the installation take, the audience can see the relation embedded in the transformation as well as the fragile instability in this artwork.

This installation was at first developed for the opera Monteverdi’s Opera L’Orfeo (1608). The ancient and classical opera is performed with the modern cutting-edge technology. The combination of the classical forms of art and art with technology undoubtedly provide a new form of art and innovative insight for us.

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Artist: teamLab Borderless
Piece: Forest of Resonating Lamps

teamLab is a Japanese art and tech studio team. I visited their digital art museum in Tokyo in 2019 and was in awe of all of their exhibitions but one that stood out in particular was the Forest of Resonating Lamps. The lamps change color as people move closer or farther away from them. The result is a dynamic arrangement of color that ebbs and flows throughout the space. teamLab’s work is always interactive and involves shifting color or images.

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Forest of Resonating Lamps - One Stroke, Snow

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Forest of Resonating Lamps - One Stroke, Snow | teamLab Borderless Tokyo Official Site :MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM

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teamLab, 2019, Interactive Installation, Murano Glass, LED, Endless, Sound: Hideaki Takahashi

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Artist: Neil Mendoza
Project: Mechanical Masterpiece

Neil created this for The Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.

This work allows viewers to interactive with masterpieces. Especially providing children who are unable to focus on a still painting for too long time a chance to observe these masterpieces closely.

Children can poke, switch, disco and inflate the masterpieces. Masterpieces will make responses to children's motions.

The techniques Neil used: Engineering, Coding, Image editing

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Mechanical Masterpieces is a collection of paintings reimagined for the 21st century. Optimized for short attention spans, it allows viewers to poke, switch, disco, inflate and water paintings to their heart’s content. The installation was created for The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh as part of their Tough Art Residency.

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Artist: Neil Mendoza
Project: Anti-vanity Mirror

This mirror will never allow people to look at themselves.

Neil reflected on the phenomenons in this digital age, such as people overly care about their appearance,  the influencers on Internet and social media.

This work is fun for viewers to interact with, it is also very meaningful and reflective.

The techniques Neil used: Engineering, Coding, Motion sensory

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The Antivanity Mirror is a robotic mirror that won’t let you look at yourself. A perfect gift for the influencer in your life. The piece was originally created entirely from trash while an artist in residence at Recology SF and was updated for Telfair Museum.

The piece was awarded first prize at San Luis Obispo Art Museum’s Digital Art Salon.