Hudson Valley Muddy Waters makes visible the microscopic life that is key to the health of our forests and streams. The work demonstrates how Augmented Reality and creative imaging can expand the role of the artist in facilitating deeper public connections with the material of science and the macro/microscopic environment. The artist reverses the usual AR relationship of "real" to "aesthetically mediated" by presenting a painterly digital image as point of departure onto which "reality" is layered, rather than the other way around. Using the app Aurasma, the viewer is prompted to experience the thrill of discovering microscopic life in water via short videos of an actual stream and video micro-captures from the same site.

The artists developed an interactive work based on the imaginary story of an actual 13th century illuminated Bible, investigating the many levels of meaning of the Manuscript: as a beautiful artifact, as a work of art reflecting the convergence of cultures in medieval Spain, and as a text which tells stories which themselves are layered in meanings. Transforming their own photographs and sound samples with digital media, the creative process challenged the artists to incorporate traditional Jewish cultural motifs in a work intended to appeal to contemporary general audiences. Juxtaposition, reinterpretation, and hybrid formats as artistic approach parallel the essential nature of Jewish culture, as well that of other historically nomadic peoples.

We apply simple techniques from traditional artistic composition to the art-based rendering of interactive 3D scenes. A human scene-modeler makes choices about composition in a scene and our sys-tem dynamically adjusts the rendering attributes of objects in the scene to achieve the desired effects for a given view. We can selec-tively group scene elements through shared tone, color, and outline, so as to simplify and structure an image. This can be used, together with controlled level of detail, to emphasize important objects. Fi-nally, we show a technique for adaptively changing color or other attributes to control the contrast of adjacent elements in the pic-ture. We also briefly discuss ideas about larger-scale compositional issues.