ArcGIS CityEngine, is a 3D modeling software application developed by Esri R&D Center Zurich (formerly Procedural Inc.) and is specialized in the generation of three dimensional urban environments. With the procedural modeling approach, CityEngine enables the efficient creation of detailed large-scale 3D city models with merely a few clicks of the mouse instead of the time exhaustive & work intensive method of object creation & manual placement. CityEngine works with architectural object placement & arrangement in the same manner that VUE manages terrain, ecosystems & atmosphere mapping & is equally as diverse in its ability of object manipulation & environmantal conformity/harmony as its VUE counterpart. The recent acquisition of CityEngine by Esri is aiming to push the innovations in 3D GIS and Geodesign technology (from Wikipedia).

In 2008 I joined the ETH Zurich spin-off company Procedural Inc. as a software architect, and worked the general CityEngine software design, the real-time rendering core, and interactive 3D editing features.

CityEngine was quickly adopted by big players in different industry areas where fast 3D digital content creation is needed. Some examples are:

• Film: DreamWorks, Pixar, Weta Digital, Mr. X Inc., Fold7.
• Gaming: Blizzard Entertainment, Rockstar Games, Square Enix, THQ, Grasshopper Manufacture.
• Architecture and Urban Planning: Foster+Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects, SOM, Coop Himmelb(l)au.
• Government: Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority, Brisbane City.
• Education: MIT, Stanford University, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, ETH Zurich, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.
• Others: Microsoft, IBM, Nvidia, Samsung.

More information: https://www.esri.com/software/cityengine

Company: Procedural Inc.
Position: Software Architect
Period: 2008 - 2011

Edited by Randy Adams, Steve Gibson, Stefan Arisona, 2008

This volume collects selected papers from the past two instances of Digital Art Weeks (Zurich, Switzerland) and Interactive Futures (Victoria, BC, Canada), two parallel festivals of digital media art. The work represented in Transdisciplinary Digital Art is a confirmation of the vitality and breadth of the digital arts. Collecting essays that broadly encompass the digital arts, Transdisciplinary Digital Art gives a clear overview of the on-going strength of scientific, philosophical, aesthetic and artistic research that makes digital art perhaps the defining medium of the 21st Century.

Contents

1. Introduction: Why Tansdisciplinary Digital Art? - Steve Gibson

I Philosophies of the Digital

2. The Ethics of Aesthetics - Don Ritter

3. Ethical and Activist Considerations of the Technological Artwork - David Cecchetto

4. DIY: The Militant Embrace of Technology - Marcin Ramocki

5. Tuning in Rorschach Maps - Will Pappenheimer

6. Body Degree Zero: Anatomy of an Interactive Performance - Alan Dunning, Paul Woodrow

7. Artificial, Natural, Historical - Acoustic Ambiguities in Documentary Film - Julian Rohrhuber

8. The Colour of Time (God is a lobster and other forbidden bodies) - Johnny Golding

9. Behind the Screen: Installations from the Interactive Future - Ted Hiebert

II Digital Literacies

10. Transliteracy and New Media - Sue Thomas

11. Digital Archiving and “The New Screen” - John F. Barber

12. Digital Fiction: From the Page to the Screen - Kate Pullinger

13. The Present [Future] of Electronic Literature - Dene Grigar

14. Transient Passages: The Work of Peter Horvath - Celina Jeffery

III Multimedia Composition and Performance

15. Visceral Mobile Music Systems - Atau Tanaka

16. Designing a System for Supporting the Process of Making a Video Sequence - Shigeki Amitani, Ernest Edmonds

17. Video Game Audio Prototyping with Half-Life 2 - Leonard J. Paul

18. Computer-assisted Content Editing Techniques for Live Multimedia Performance - Stefan Arisona, Pascal Müller, Simon Schubiger-Banz, Matthias Specht

19. Computational Audiovisual Composition Using Lua - Wesley Smith, Graham Wakefield

20. Interrelation: Sound-Transformation and Re-Mixing in Real-Time - Hannes Raffaseder, Martin Parker

21. Functors for Music: The Rubato Composer System - Guerino Mazzola, Gerard Milmeister, Karim Morsy, Florian Thalmann

22. Inventing Malleable Scores: From Paper to Screen Based Scores - Arthur Clay

23. Glimmer: Creating New Connections - Jason Freeman

24. Variations on Variations - Daniel Peter Biro

IV Interfaces and Expression

25. Gestures, Interfaces and Other Secrets of the Stage - Eva Sjuve

26. Beyond the Threshold: The Dynamic Interface as Permeable Technology - Carolyn Guertin

27. CoPuppet: Collaborative Interaction in Virtual Puppetry - Paolo Bottoni, Stefano Faralli, Anna Labella, Alessio Malizia, Mario Pierro, Semi Ryu

28. Experiments in Digital Puppetry: Video Hybrids in Apples Quartz Composer - Ian Grant

29. Formalized and Non-Formalized Expression in Musical Interfaces - Cornelius Poepel

V Digital Space: Design, Movement, and Robotics

30. Interactive Spaces - Jeffrey Huang, Muriel Waldvogel

31. From Electric Devices to Electronic Behaviour - Stijn Ossevoort

32. Scentsory Design: Scent Whisper and Fashion Fluidics - Jennifer Tillotson

33. Advances in Expressive Animation in the Interactive Performance of a Butoh Dance - Jürg Gutknecht, Irena Kulka, Paul Lucowicz, Tom Stricker

34. Anthropocentrism and the Staging of Robots - Louis-Philippe Demers, Jana Horakova

VI Digital Performance in Urban Spaces

35. Imaging Place: Globalization and Immersive Media - John Craig Freeman

36. About… Software, Surveillance, Scariness, Subjectivity (and SVEN) - Amy Alexander

37. The NOVA Display System - Simon Schubiger-Banz, Martina Eberle

38. Four Wheel Drift - Petra Watson, Julie Andreyev

Publication Information

Collection: Digital Art Weeks and Interactive Futures 2006/2007, Zürich, Switzerland and Victoria, BC, Canada, Selected Papers
Publisher: Springer, Berlin Heidelberg
Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science , Vol. 7
Editors: Adams, Randy; Gibson, Steve; Arisona, Stefan (Eds.)
Year: 2008
ISBN: 978-3-540-79485-1
Link: https://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-540-79485-1

I am co-founder and scientific director of ETH Zurich’s Digital Art Weeks. The Digital Art Weeks, an annually recurring festival, are concerned with the application of digital technology in the arts. Consisting of a symposium, workshops and performances, the program offers insight into current research and innovations in art and technology as well as illustrating resulting synergies in a series of performances, making artists aware of impulses in technology and scientists aware of the possibilities of the application of technology in the arts. In 2008 and 2010, a very successful version of Digital Art Weeks took place in Shanghai and Xi’an, China, and currently DAW'13 (early 2013) in Singapore is preparation…

https://www.digitalartweeks.ethz.ch/

One of my personal highlights of the series of past Digital Art Weeks was the special opening day and the keynote of Joseph Weizenbaum (1923-2008) in 2007, as I have always admired his ambivalent position towards computer and information technology. At DAW07, we also screened the documentary ‘Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work.’ by Peter Haas and Silvia Holzinger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_LCLjqCTXs

Festival History

• 2013 - Singapore
• 2011 - Victoria, BC, Canada
• 2010 - Xi’an, China
• 2008 - Shanghai, China
• 2007 - Zurich, Switzerland
• 2006 - Zurich, Switzerland
• 2005 - Zurich, Switzerland

Permanent Exhibition Ars Electronica Center, 2009 - 2012

Procedural City is an interactive media installation which has incorporated the generative modeling features of CityEngine along with a biometric fingerprint scanner. It enables the user to create his/her own personal city according to their fingerprint.

To interact with this installation the user scans his fingertip and subsequently the data is imported into CityEngine for processing. The fingerprint is analyzed to the point where CityEngine can generate street networks according to the pattern of the strongest lines. Once the streets are generated the buildings are ready to be modeled and this happens right in front of the users eyes. Finally a simple touch interface with navigation controls (actually an iPod) allows the user to explore the personalized city from all angles and perspectives.

The installation has been developed by Procedural Inc in collaboration with the Ars Electronica Futurelab, and is part of the GeoCity exhibition at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC) in Linz, Austria.

https://youtu.be/w8Gx0fxGH68

For more information on the foundation technology used, refer to the CityEngine page or to Esri’s CityEngine home page: https://www.esri.com/software/cityengine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMmsQ3KbQLI

Permanent Exhibition: Ars Electronica Center, Linz, Austria (16.6.2009 - 1.4.2012).
Additional exhibitions: Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, Xi’an, China (July 02 – 16 2010). Maison D’Ailleurs, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland (March 11 - December 09 2012), supported by the Game Culture Initiative of Pro Helvetia / Swiss Arts Council. Seoul National University Museum of Arts (October 10 - December 20 2014).
Concept, programming and realisation: Simon Schubiger and Stefan Arisona of Procedural Inc, AEC edition in collaboration with the AEC Futurelab.

Stefan Arisona and Steve Gibson, since 2006

Introduction

EPI Redux is re-imagining of the psychedelic classic The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, created by Andy Warhol with the Velvet Underground in the late 1960s. Rather than literally interpreting the original Warhol event, EPI Redux seeks to update psychedelia for the new millennium. Using an excess of technology the project immerses viewers in an overload of the senses and in a Gesamtkunstwerk where sound, vision, space and time coincide.

The core concept behind EPI Redux resides in both its communal nature and in its long-form. The piece has been performed by as few as two performers and as many as eleven. As all the performers are expert in their mediums this reconfiguration allows for considerable amount of spontaneity, while at the same time calling on them to apply their analytical skills in real-time. The modularity of the piece similarly allows it to take several forms and keeps the content both loose and ever-evolving. In this way the Redux is similar to the Warhol original, even as it veers dramatically from the sound and visual world of the late 60s.

Synopsis of Work (by Luc Meier, Swissnex San Francisco)

Switzerland’s Stefan Arisona and Victoria, BC’s Steve Gibson are media artists who have established a strong footing in academia while keeping their fingers on the throbbing pulse of the club scene, DJ-ing and VJ-ing underground. Grounded in the history of audiovisual tinkering, they take creative hints from illustrious forebearers to push multimedia environments into the next realm.

Arisona and Gibson joined forces in 2006 to create a digital-age reenactment of The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the boundary-breaking multimedia show conceived in the 1960’s by Andy Warhol with the complicity of Lou Reed and his cult rock act The Velvet Underground.

A full-blown sensorium featuring giant projections of Warhol’s films, The Velvet Underground at their most dazzlingly abrasive, and dancers let loose from Warhol’s New-Yorker Factory, the original Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966-1967) was, while it lasted, the most unique and effective discotheque environment prior to the advent of venues such as the Fillmore in San Francisco. In many ways, it remains a benchmark for all subsequent immersive multimedia shows.

Originated under the auspices of ETH Zurich’s “Digital Art Weeks” and Victoria’s “Interactive Futures”, Arisona and Gibson’s take on Warhol’s circus makes full use of digital technology and the free-flowing, associative thinking of the techno age. Armed with multiple projectors, a barrage of laptop computers and additional data-churning devices, the pair have already performed in Zurich, Victoria, Chicago, Vancouver and Shanghai.

Using custom software, live vocals, keyboards and live video processing risona and Gibson create an immersive audio-visual experience which mimics the psychedelic atmosphere of the original EPI event, while at the same time updating the audio-visual language to the 21st Century.

Resources

Photos, videos and sounds at the Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable site: https://www.telebody.ws/Exploding/

Initiators and main artists: Stefan Arisona & Steve Gibson
Guest artists: Jackson 2bears, Randy Adams, Agitpop, babel, Dyz, I send data live, Tom Kuo, Love&Olson, Marcellus, Nuthre, Scheinwerfer, Sho-b, Adam Tindale

Event History

• Oct 20 2016 - Rolex Center, EPFL, Switzerland
• Mar 17 2012 - Velvet Underground, Zouk Club, Singapore
• Nov 12 2011 - NeOn Festival Closing Party, The Reading Rooms, Dundee, UK
• Sep 5-8 2010 - DRHA 2010, Brunel University, London, UK
• Jul 3, 2010 - Digital Art Weeks 2010, Xian, China
• Nov 17 and 19, 2009 - Phoenix Square Film & Digital Media Centre, Launch Events, Leicester, UK
• Oct 17 2009 - The Institute for Converging Arts and Sciences, Launch Event, Greenwich University, London, UK
• May 29 2009 - Computational Aesthetics at the Delta Ocean Pointe Hotel, Victoria, Canada
• May 12 2009 - Cantos Society, Calgary, Canada
• Sep 18 2008 - Santa Barbara Nights Closing Party, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
• Aug 21, 2008 - Transdisciplinary Digital Art Canadian Book Launch, Open Space, Victoria, Canada
• Aug 1, 2008 - Swissnex San Francisco, Swiss National Day Celebrations, San Francisco, CA, USA
• May 31 2008 - ELO Visionary Landscapes Conference, Northbank Artists Gallery, Vancouver, WA, USA
• May 22 2008 - Digital Art Weeks +, Shelter Club Shanghai, Shanghai, China
• Apr 24 2008 - Conaway Centre, Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
• Nov 17 2007 - Interactive Futures, Open Space, Victoria, Canada.
• Jul 14 2007 - Digital Art Weeks, Zurich, Switzerland
• Oct 21 2006 - Open Space, Victoria, Canada