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Synaptic Time Tunnel

A walk-through installation tracing 50 years of SIGGRAPH as a network of influence

August 2023 SIGGRAPH 2023 installationgenerative artimmersiveAI/ML
Synaptic Time Tunnel

Synaptic Time Tunnel is an immersive, interactive environment that invites you into a world where the past, present, and future converge into a dense, evolving network of information, artificial neurons, and synapses.

The evolving imagery and computer graphics milestones trace the propagation of influences and innovations across time. Drawing inspiration from historic milestones and groundbreaking work over the past 50 years, the Synaptic Time Tunnel celebrates SIGGRAPH’s influential past while beckoning audiences to unlock their own creative potential.

Leave the present and enter into the awe-inspiring history of computer graphics and interactive techniques and its profound impact on the world. With each step, you will conceptually traverse back in time while also progressing forward into the future.

Visitors queueing at the entrance of the Time Tunnel, beside a wall panel carrying the exhibition text and the Autodesk and SIGGRAPH 2023 logos
The entrance, LA Convention Center, 6–10 August 2023

The tunnel

A long LED wall running the length of the room, dense with drifting thumbnails and text, with coloured interactive patches projected onto the floor beside it
Overhead projectors put an interactive layer on the floor alongside the wall.
Visitors silhouetted against a wall of amber generative imagery threaded with paper titles from 2016The corridor seen end-on, LED walls on both sides, visitors photographing the imagery

Fifty years, as a database

The wall runs on SIGGRAPH’s own archive — decades of paper titles, teaser images, and the citations between them, laid out so the lineage of an idea is visible as you walk past it.

Thousands of paper teaser thumbnails tiled across the wall, with 2019 titles such as Sculpting Color Spaces and RTX Accelerated Ray Tracing floating over them
Each tile is a paper; the year drifts as you move along the corridor.
Two visitors holding handheld controllers, drawing bright filaments across a projected citation network
Handheld controllers let visitors pull at the network and follow a thread of influence.
A grid of conference attendee portraits on a screen near the entrance, with the SIGGRAPH 50th anniversary logo overhead

Credits

  • Interactive Visuals — Nefeli Manoudaki, Iason Paterakis, Graham Wakefield, Weihao Qiu, Kon Hyong (Kenny) Kim, Marcos Novak
  • Interactive Sound — Diarmid Flatley, Ryan Millett
  • Tracking — Diarmid Flatley, Ryan Millett
  • Database — Weihao Qiu
  • Floor Plan — Nefeli Manoudaki, Iason Paterakis
  • Production — Marcos Novak, Gustavo Rincon, Bonnie L Mitchell
  • Hardware Setup — Freeman
  • Sponsorship — Autodesk