ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art Jeffrey Shaw

2020 ACM SIGGRAPH Award

The 2020 ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art is awarded to Jeffrey Shaw, a singular visionary and pioneer in the creation of interactive and immersive media art.

Shaw has been a leading figure in new media art since its emergence from the performance, expanded cinema and installation paradigms of the 1960s to its present-day technology-informed and virtualized forms. In a prolific career of widely exhibited and critically acclaimed work, he has pioneered the creative use of digital media technologies in the fields of expanded cinema, virtual and augmented reality, immersive visualization environments, navigable cinematic systems and interactive narrative.

From 1962–1965, Shaw studied architecture and art history in Australia, Milan and the United Kingdom. He was a founding member of the Artist Placement Group in London (1966) and of the Eventstructure Research Group in Amsterdam (1969–1979). He was the director of the ZKM Institute for Visual Media Jeffrey Shaw (© City University Karlsruhe (1991–2002). In 1995, Shaw was appointed professor of media art at the Karlsruhe University of Hong Kong) of Arts and Design (HfG), Germany.

In the mid-1970s, Shaw began to pioneer new mixes of technology—multimedia—that anticipated later innovations in digital art such as Cloud (of Daytime Sky at Night) at the Stedelijk Museum (1970), which is one of many prescient examples of projection mapping, and the 270-degree wraparound screen for Diadrama (1974), which prefigured the advent of the VR CAVE. Perhaps his most well-known work of this time is the immersive installation of automated slide projection, light arrays and plastic inflatables that Shaw and Theo Botschuijver created for Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadwaytour (1975). Further remarkable innovations in this period lie in the area of augmented reality. Most notable here are Shaw’s early masterpiece Viewpoint (1975) as well as Virtual Sculpture (1981). In the former, through the use of front projection, events are staged within a virtual scene that are perceived to be continuous with real events in which the scene is embedded, creating a Magritte-like trompe l’oeil; in the latter, virtual objects are perceived in space, and the work incorporates all the functional components of what has become the “head-mounted display.”

In 2003, Shaw was awarded the esteemed Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship, and he returned to Australia to cofound and direct the UNSW iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research in Sydney (2003–2009). At iCinema he led a research program in immersive interactive postnarrative systems, which produced pioneering artistic and research works such as PLACE-Hampi and T_Visionarium.

In 2009, Shaw joined City University of Hong Kong as chair professor of media art and dean of the School of Creative Media. In 2010, with Shaw as executive director and Sarah Kenderdine as research director, he established a new research facility—the CityU Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALiVE)—at the Hong Kong Science Park. Shaw is currently Yeung Kin-man Endowed Chair Professor of Media Art and director of both the Centre for Applied Computing and Interactive Media (ACIM) at CityU Hong Kong and at the CityU Chengdu Research Institute “Arts and Innovation” lab in Chengdu. Professor Shaw is also currently visiting professor at the Digital Humanities Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland; the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College, London; and the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing. He is also a university distinguished professor at UNSW, Australia, and honorary professor at the Danube University Krems, Austria.

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-pdf/53/4/360/1881767/leon_e_01919.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Top row, from left: Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuijver, Sean Wellesley-Miller, Cloud (of Daytime Sky at Night), 1970; Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuijver, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, 1975; Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuijver, Virtual Sculpture, 1981. Second row, from left: Jeffrey Shaw, Walter Maioli, Inventer la Terre, 1986; Jeffrey Shaw, Dirk Groeneveld, Legible City, 1989; Jeffrey Shaw, Virtual Museum, 1991. Third row, from left: Jeffrey Shaw, EVE (Extended Virtual Environment), 1993; Jeffrey Shaw, Golden Calf, 1994; Jeffrey Shaw, PLACE - A User’s Manual, 1995. Fourth row, from left: Jeffrey Shaw, Agnes Hegedüs, Bernd Lintermann, Leslie Stuck, conFiguring the CAVE, 1997; Jeffrey Shaw, Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Matt McGinity, Peter Weibel, T_Visionarium II, 2006; Jeffrey Shaw, Sarah Kenderdine, Edwin Nadason Thumboo, The Infinite Line, 2014. (All photos © Jeffrey Shaw)

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Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-pdf/53/4/360/1881767/leon_e_01919.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Shaw’s numerous internationally exhibited and critically acclaimed artworks are milestones of technological and cultural innovation that have had a seminal impact on the theory, design and application of digital media in art, society and industry. His artistic achievements are among the most cited in new media literature. During his career his works have been presented at leading public galleries of museums including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthalle Bern; The Guggenheim, New York; and Hayward Gallery, London.

A distinctive aspect of Shaw’s practice is his deep cooperation with other artists, writers, composers, photographers and engineers. Besides his personal artistic research, Shaw has been proactive in conceiving, curating and producing major international exhibitions, publications and conferences. At the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, his seminal exhibitions were milestones in the history of new media art: Bitte Berühren—Please Touch (1992), NewFoundLand (1993), NewFoundLand II (1995), Current (1997), Surrogate (1998), Net_Condition (2000) and Future Cinema (2002). At CityU Shaw skillfully amalgamated digital cultural heritage with the practices of new media art in such internationally presented exhibitions as Giuseppe Castiglione: Lang Shining New Media Art Exhibition, 300 Years of Hakka Kung Fu and ANiMAL: Art Science Nature Society.

Professor Shaw’s numerous awards and honors include: L’Immagine Elettronica Prize, Ferrara, Italy, 1990; the Oribe Award, Gifu, Japan, 2005; Gold International Design Excellence Award (IDEA), Industrial Designers Society of America, 2009; Honorary Doctorate in Creative Media, Multimedia University, Malaysia; Lifetime Achievement Award, Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), Montreal, Canada, 2014; and Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Visionary Pioneers of Media Art, Linz, Austria, 2015.

Since the early 2000s, Shaw has undertaken an ambitious collaboration with Sarah Kenderdine to develop interactive and immersive technology for cultural heritage preservation and display. This work has resulted in a series of landmark works, including PLACE-Hampi (2006), which provides a 3D interactive immersive visualization of the fourteenth-century capital city of the Vijayanagara Empire in India; Pure Land 360 (2012), an interactive and augmented visualization of a Buddhist cave at the site of Dunhuang; and a series of projects on Chinese martial arts. With such new work as Fall Again, Fall Better (2012), The Infinite Line (2014) and Divine Comedy AR (2018), Shaw continues to research at the forefront of digital media art.

ACM SIGGRAPH is honored to recognize Jeffrey Shaw as a pioneer in the creation of interactive and immersive media art.

Sue Gollifer CHAIR ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art

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