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CHI 2012 Digital Arts Featured Community

A list of all communities can be found on the Communities page.

Important Dates

Message from the Digital Arts Community chairs

The Digital Arts Community brings together researchers, practitioners, and artists whose work is informed by the digital arts. We recognize that many of these individuals are hybrids between HCI and other disciplines, which include digital arts, design, computer science, performance, music, education, arts administration, and science museum exhibition development. The digital arts intersect with traditional CHI topics such as screen-based interaction, embodied interaction, virtual and augmented environments, games, and data visualization.

The digital arts have been consistently represented in the CHI program for the past decade. Many of these activities are integrated within a larger international and interdisciplinary digital arts movement. The goals of the Digital Arts Community include supporting this work within CHI, building connections between this work and work in other subdomains of CHI, and networking to communities and resources currently outside of the CHI community. The hope is that through this exposure, CHI researchers will gain alternative insights into the interactive process. By participating in academic conferences such as CHI, digital artists gain access to an audience familiar with their technologies. Through CHI, artists can learn of technological advances and engage in discourse about these technologies. By providing a platform for digital arts at CHI, we can facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and technologists, and additional insights can be gained in turn.

For more information on the goals and perspectives of the CHI Digital Arts Community, please see our community proposal.

David England and Jill Fantauzzacoffin
digital-arts@chi2012.acm.org

Types of Submissions

Submissions featuring digital arts would be welcome in any of the CHI forums. Paper topics could include:

  • long papers illustrating digital arts projects and their contribution to CHI discourse, with concrete results that add to knowledge and understanding about interaction with computational devices
  • long papers illustrating digital arts and evaluation methodologies, with evaluations carried out and results reported
  • short papers (Notes) describing novel interactions in digital arts projects, contextualized within CHI discourse
  • papers discussing the theoretical underpinnings of digital arts and the implications for design in HCI, particularly papers using concrete examples to support their argument.

For the difference between Papers and Notes, please see Papers versus Notes.

CHI discourse is typically of a scientific nature. For that reason, most papers include measurable empirical results. This presents a challenge to authors working in the arts, which typically evaluates work through verbal or textual critiques that discuss concept, craft, and/or the relationship of the piece to larger societal or cultural discourse. If you are unfamiliar with the field of human-computer interaction and would like your work to contribute to the advancement and understanding of ways that people interact with computing devices, we recommend that you read recent CHI papers from the ACM Digital Library to understand the type of work which is valued. It would also be helpful to familiarize yourself with papers featuring technologies that you are using in your work. The Digital Arts community is hosting a discussion blog to discuss paperwriting challenges that may arise due to this difference in epistemologies and values.

We encourage submission of interactive digital arts projects to the Interactivity exhibition. A short paper and video documenting the project is required in addition to exhibiting the piece at CHI.

Case studies illustrate specific projects and discuss broader implications of some aspect of that project. For example, a case study may:

  • illustrate innovative techniques used in digital arts projects that may be of interest to the HCI community, particularly when contextualized within current HCI state-of-the-art
  • describe how HCI techniques or methodologies were applied in a digital arts project and the results
  • report on design iterations informed by the development / exhibition cycles of an art piece.

Works-in-progress are a good forum to present on-going work in the digital arts that is part of a larger research program which has not yet completed.

We also encourage Workshop organization and participation from the Digital Arts Community. Workshops offer organizers an opportunity to explore issues in the digital arts and HCI in depth with an interdisciplinary group. Participation in workshops enables knowledge and understandings from the arts to contribute to discourse in human-computer interaction in a more informal yet interpersonal setting. Many workshops evolve into larger collaborative projects.

Alt.chi provides a forum for trying out new ideas. Previous alt.chi papers have presented unusual methodologies, addressed atypical domains, and presented new theoretical platforms. Keep in mind that these ideas must contribute to the CHI community in some way. As is often the case with new ideas, the contribution may need to be made explicit.

Any submission can be helped by video documentation. In many digital arts pieces, video of the interaction provides evidence of its value. The Video Showcase is a CHI 2012 forum of its own, where the video provides a complete narrative describing the piece and its contribution.

For more tips on creating effective CHI submissions, see the contributor guides as well as the Digital Arts Community discussion blog. In general, you should state clearly what you have done with your work, how it relates to previous work, what your unique contribution is, and verification of the contribution. It is helpful to consider what the audience will learn from your submission, how they will find it useful, and how they can that trust the results are truly useful.

Preparing Your Submission

You must prepare your submission in the format that is required for each type, i.e. archival format, extended abstracts format, video, etc. Please refer to the pages on this web site that describe the various forums. Please use the term "digital arts" in the author's keywords to help us route your submission to qualified reviewers. When submitting using the online system, you will have an opportunity to select the Digital Arts Community as a relevant reviewing community. You can contact us at digital-arts@chi2012.acm.org if you have questions about submissions. We encourage you to check the due dates, read the requirements for your contribution, and start early in order to develop a quality submission.