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, research fellowship at UCSB, 2007 - 2008

Project Summary

The volume of digital media content has enormously grown in the recent years: Emerging internet-based applications, such as YouTube or MySpace, are media-rich, emphasise on content sharing, and attract huge communities. As the volume of content further expands, we see an increasing need for not only being able to annotate and retrieve content, but also to produce and edit content in a computer-assisted manner and by employing (semi-) automated methods. However, existing work so far does not satisfy these needs – both in terms of usable software instruments as well the underlying theoretical frameworks. This viewpoint is also acknowledged by upcoming European Union IST projects: The Framework Programme 7 (FP7) calls for projects addressing Intelligent Content and Semantics and targets at advanced authoring environments for interactive and expressive content [ICT Programme Committee, 2007, Objective ICT-2007.4.2].

This project aims at a systematic classification and implementation of novel content authoring techniques. By “mixed-media content authoring” we understand the interactive editing, or the ‘‘composition’’, of content for multiple modalities (e.g., auditory and visual). The project emphasises on applying computational methods in order to enable a high degree of automatisation of the authoring process. It further aims at techniques that are concerned with expressive human-computer interaction and those that need to operate in real-time, where needed.

Central to the project is the hypothesis that existing traditional composition techniques from individual domains (e.g., music, graphics, video) can be identified, classified, and then be generalised in a foundational framework of interactive media composition techniques that is applicable to automated authoring tasks. We claim that the implementation of these techniques will lead to more effective methods for simultaneous mixed-media authoring. The project starts out by establishing a catalogue of media composition techniques. This includes collecting and classifying existing techniques from specific modalities, identifying common methodologies, and also filling gaps and building bridges with new techniques where needed. Before actually implementing the composition techniques, an appropriate real-time content rendering infrastructure is required. Here, the project benefits from preliminary work carried out at the former Multimedia Laboratory of the University of Zurich and at the Computer Systems Institute of ETH Zurich. As its central part, the project implements relevant composition techniques as part of an interactive media authoring instrument. Special thoughts are given to a human-centred approach in order to prevent results that are stigmatised by software, and in order to provide the highest possible degree of expressiveness to content authors. At its final stage, the project empirically verifies the results by means of concrete application scenarios from media art and entertainment.

The project brings together elements from many different fields, primarily from software engineering, human-computer interaction, and the foundations of multimedia, but also from music composition, film editing theory, and aesthetics. The intellectual merit of the project is to provide systematic foundational work on mixed-media composition techniques by exploiting computational methods and to validate the practicability of the theory in terms of usable software instruments. Besides of dissemination of scientific findings, the broader impacts of the project are expected to be very significant for a wide range of applications that depend on computer-assisted and automated content creation techniques: Among others, example beneficiaries are the entertainment industry or commercial content providers who can benefit from novel expressive authoring instruments, or emerging services beyond IPTV, where automated content composition tasks help supporting whole communities. Collectively, the project aims at advancing the state of the art of interactive media content authoring to a new level.

Project: Post-doctoral research fellowship, fully funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (“Fellowship for Advanced Researchers”)
Location: Media Arts & Technology, University of California, Santa Barbara
Period: 2007 - 2008