What's the bigger spectacle? New Orleans, with its Bourbon Street titty
bars, voodoo rites and walk-through daiquiri counters–or SIGGRAPH 2000,
the 27th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive
Techniques held this year in our sweaty, Southern city of sin? Last week
25,000 people descended on New Orleans to witness the Academy Awards of
computer animation. They came bearing gizmos, and easily filled the
Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, a mammoth structure twelve city
blocks long and three stories tall which has hosted the Republican
National Convention and other high profile shindigs.
Each year SIGGRAPH highlights the latest graphics technology through an
exposition floor, art gallery, instructional courses, and panel series.
Buoyed by increased demand for special effects in movies, computing, and
gaming–this year the $7.4 billion dollar gaming industry will surpass
even Hollywood as the highest grossing entertainment industry–SIGGRAPH
is a major player in the world of new media.
Many new technologies are unveiled during the exposition. On the menu
this year were 3D printing, motion capture, haptic interfaces, broadband
and wireless. Some vendors hawked stereoscopic displays that allow the
viewer to see three-dimensional images without the aid of specially-
polarized glasses. Panels and courses ran all day every day, offering
SIGGRAPHers an informal context for learning these new technologies.
"We have over 40 courses this year, covering a wide range of topics, at
levels ranging from beginner to advanced," said Anselmo Lastra, SIGGRAPH
2000 Courses Chair. "A good example is the Digital Cinema course, which
prepares practitioners for the transition from traditional film to
electronic media for cinema." In addition to digital cinema, there were
courses on "3D Photography," "The Art and Technology of Disney's
'Dinosaur,'" and my personal fav, "Interactive Walkthroughs of Large
Geometric Datasets."
The "Web3D Roundup" featured a high-paced gladiator event where young
talents were each given three minutes to present their internet-ready 3D
wares before 3,000 rowdy onlookers. A project was presented, then the
audience decided its fate by screaming thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Showers
of ping-pong balls where hurled at the less fortunate.
Enduring this trial by fire (and winning a "Golden Lasso" award for his
troubles), was John Klima's 3D web piece "glasbead"
(http://www.glasbead.com). Glasbead is a multi-user musical instrument.
As many as twenty people may log on at once to play glasbead by
uploading their own wave files and manipulating the spherical
application.
What was it like on stage during the Roundup? "I thought I might pass
out," Klima writes. "3,000 people in the audience, inebriated and armed,
with me on the stage and but two minutes to present made the Web3D
Roundup just about the most terrifying experience of my life. I'd do it
again in an instant."
Klima's project received positive feedback from many festival goers.
Mark Tribe writes, "What amazes me about 'glasbead' is that it is not
only beautiful, but also functionally intuitive and conceptually
elegant. It has an almost inevitable quality that is remarkable given
the other-worldly strangeness of its design."
While often playing technological catch-up to their dot-com brothers and
sisters, the artists in the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery painted a different
picture of a technologized future. Using the same machines and
techniques featured by the industry giants, the gallery artists add
emotional content and narrative to gee-wiz computer tricks.
During the Art Gallery opening–a mob scene complete with fog machine
and rock star lighting effects–visitors were mesmerized by Camille
Utterback and Romy Achituv's "Text Rain," a computer-aided video
installation where letters and words appear to drizzle down over the
heads and shoulders of passers-by
(http://fargo.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~camille/textrain.html).
Also a crowd pleaser, Daniel Rozin's "Wooden Mirror" used tiny wooden
tiles to "reflect" the image of anyone standing before it. A video
camera captures the activity in front of the mirror, then the video
image is converted into pixels and mapped back onto each wooden tile.
Over 70 art works were featured in the Art Gallery. Asked about the
atmosphere in the Gallery and its relationship to the 350 commercial
vendors on the exposition floor, Mark Tribe commented: "it exposes the
work of 'fine artists' to an audience of computer graphic geeks who–I
assume–rarely see what we do." The strong presence of the Art Gallery
within SIGGRAPH as a whole is a testiment to the growing acceptance of
digital art by both the art world and computer industry alike. "The work
is no longer seen as a gimmick, but as hard-hitting content," says
SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Chair Diane Gromala. "It ranges from the
aesthetically sophisticated and delightful to stinging social
commentary. We have a mature show. Many of the strongest works will find
their way into museums and galleries around the world."
