Students Art Archive

In 2015, Bonnie Mitchell, BGSU Digital Arts Professor, and Jan Searleman, Clarkson University Computer Science Professor, realized there was a need to consolidate the artworks and related materials from the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) Conference Art Shows. Since its creation in the early 1980s, the SIGGRAPH Art Show has become the most prominent art exhibition of its kind. Over the years, thousands of artworks, as well as academic research papers and artist talks, have been created and presented using the digital technology of the day. Mitchell and Searleman understood the importance of this material to the research and creative community, and created an online database that enabled anyone to access these seminal works.

Through grants from ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH and BGSU’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship (CURS), Mitchell and Searleman hired a small team of students to develop and populate the online archive system. The team has evolved over the years as students graduate, but has consisted primarily of Digital Arts majors. The current Information Archivists, have entered over 4,000 unique pieces into the database, but still have nearly 4000 more to add. The original online infrastructure was first developed by a group of students: Joe Jadach (F 2017), Jasmine Bell (F 2016), Breeana Hinton (Sp 2017), Chris von Fahnestock (F 2016) and Troy Yarnell (Sp 2017) The current team (BGSU seniors), Amanda Glass, Megan Miazgowicz, and Jack Spenser, hope to present the project at the upcoming SIGGRAPH 2018 conference in August, in Vancouver, Canada. Altogether their contributions have created an online archive that is robust, and allows researchers and the community to view the archive entries in various ways.

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