Presence/absence: the 2005 ACM Multimedia Interactive Art Exhibition

Multimedia computing is a technical field with strong and pervasive connections to contemporary art. Arguably, multimedia has been an artistic medium since its beginnings; many of the most technical fields of multimedia are about delivery of creative content, and artists have always been quick to harness the expressive potential of all kinds of multimedia technology. For its second year, the ACM Multimedia Interactive Arts Program provided an explicit forum for the presentation of technical multimedia art papers that describe novel multimedia tools, applications, and artwork. The arts program, in addition to the conference track in which long and short papers are presented, included an exhibition of multimedia artwork. As in 2004, the exhibition was organized in a gallery space to run concurrently with the conference, this time around the theme of presence/absence.