Waterloo students’ art shines bright at Lumen Festival

This past September, the City of Waterloo lit up with the annual Lumen Festival, which explores the interplay of light, art and technology.

Hosted by the City of Waterloo’s Arts and Creative Industries team (Create Waterloo), this event invites tech giants, community leaders, local and international artists to push the boundaries of human curiosity. It featured more than 30 installations, ranging from performances to new media, including Pixellation, which featured artwork from CS/FINE 383: Computational Digital Art Studio, a third-year interdisciplinary course at Waterloo.

Dr. Daniel Vogel, a computer science professor who taught the course this past winter, explains that it is simultaneously a fine arts studio art course and a technical computer science course.

“For example, I give a seminar on artists and theories related to generative art in one class, then in the next class I run a hands-on coding workshop showing how to create generative artwork,” he says. “Not only do students produce creative works that stand on their own as art, but they get experience using applied computer science techniques.”

The course culminates into an interactive art exhibit, with the latest version taking place in early April.

Three Computer Science students, Georgia Berg, Hannah Choi, and Rayhan Moidu (BCS ’24) completed the course and exhibited their work, which was then showcased during Lumen as part of the Department of Fine Arts’ Student Art Innovation Lab (S.A.I. L). Contained within a 1975 Airstream trailer, S.A.I.L. provides free community outreach programs while spotlighting Waterloo art.

“This year marked the seventh year that S.A.I.L. has partnered with the City of Waterloo and Lumen, but it's the first time we've featured work from the Computational Digital Art Studio course,” says Fine Arts professor Dr. Tara Cooper and S.A.I.L.’s director. “When I attended the April’s CS/FINE 383 exhibit, I immediately considered showcasing the students’ work at Lumen. Their use of light, projection, interactivity and scale that inhabits both architecture and the body was strong — not only from a technical standpoint, but also conceptually and experientially. It was the perfect fit for Lumen.”

The students’ vibrant yet serene pieces attracted more than 3,000 attendees, making it the most-attended event in S.A.I.L.’s history.

For example, Choi created Goodbye, where attendees were able to design an abstract artwork that dynamically changes and evolves. However, it slowly disappears, leaving them with a black screen.  

To create this effect, Choi developed a distributed system that tracks and converts real-time touch patterns on a mouse into a generative 3D model, which is projected on a screen in front of the attendee.

Attendees are invited to draw something on a laptop. They can see the design take shape, but it will slowly disappear into a black screen.

“In a world where people are so focused on the destination, we often miss the joy of the journey. This mindset prevents us from embracing the unfamiliar, which truly ignites the flames of creativity,” Choi says. She hopes Goodbye teaches people to appreciate the process, by forcing them to bid farewell to their drawings.

Recent computer science alum Moidu, who designed Fractal Dreams using computer simulation, generative agents and real-time animation, showed an ever-looping scene of a young girl standing before a tree, as she stares at a lone observer. Notably, the piece is soundless and static, where the only moving elements are the protagonist’s hair and the leaves. “This work reflects the fractal relationship between our world and a higher dimensional space. I wanted the audience to feel enticed, engrossed and in wonder at the peculiar realm that unfolds before them,” Moidu says.

This eerie piece explores the fractal relationship between our world and a higher-dimensional space.

Berg, who developed Postmodern Baptism using generative agents and deep learning models, explains that the piece invites attendees to be cleansed by the “people’s wash.”  The video opens with spinning neon bristles that are slowly approaching the audience, then bright and black hues drip down the screen with bubbles emerging afterwards. It ends with bright sunlight and the words “Go in Peace,” symbolizing the viewer is now ‘blessed.’

“Postmodern Baptism is my answer to what a secularized baptism ritual might be,” Berg says. She created Postmodern Baptism for one of the course’s assignments, not the exhibit. “Car washes are a uniform experience across the continent, which makes it the perfect metaphor for a religious ritual.”

During the People Wash, the viewers are cleansed with neon coloured brushes (left). The next scene opens with bright and dark colours dripping down the screen (right).

“Being able to show my work at this festival was great because it was a full circle moment,” she adds. “After leaving last year’s festival, I wanted to get involved, but I didn’t have the faintest idea of where I could start. I had no visual art experience or technical skills. When I took CS/Fine 383, I realized I had these skills from coding. I solved various interesting problems, ones that I don’t usually get to work with in class.”

Courses like this shows Waterloo’s unique approach to teaching, where the University blends different fields to equip students with new and rich skills. Students at the University of Waterloo excel because of this unique environment that integrates experiential education with disciplinary and interdisciplinary research.