Some quick notes and personal highlights from the Banff 'Living
Architectures' Summit Sept 22-24 2000
(http://www.banffcentre.ab.ca/nmi/agendas/2000/livarchitecturesagenda.html)

1 - the banff centre itself - in the middle of the rockies, snowing the
day we arrived, glorious sunshine and crisp, clean air for the the rest
of the week. being in a dark room looking at screens all day is easier
to cope with if you step outside to an amazing vista of snow-capped
mountains…

2 - a leaflet in the hotel, next to the room service menu, saying
"WARNING! Elk-Mating season is currently in progress. DO NOT attempt to
approach either male or female elks. if you are approached, hide behind
a tree or similar large object"

3 - seeing scott paterson from plumbdesign (and rhizome contributor)
again. Scott showed Thinkmap from Plumbdesign and his own projects,
which, for my money, were more interesting: http://www.sgp-7.net/

4 - patrick lichty briefly presenting his series of 'anti-ebay' projects
(http://www.voyd.com/ebay/part3.htm) before carrying on to talk about
'ubiquitous technologies' - in particular the very funny 'talking hat'
(http://www.voyd.com/banff)

5 - warren sack from berkeley presenting a really cool app that uses
linguistic analyis to represent thread and semantic connections in mail-
lists (http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~sack and conversation map -
http://www.media.mit.edu/~wsack/CM) the current version is presented
entirely in 'command-line green', with very limited visualisation, which
made it work faster and also provided an antidote to the overdose of
visualisation stuff from the various CG lab professors and SGI reps
there.

6 - cameron mcnall (http://www.cm2a.com - but nothing there yet) from
UCLA - excellent presentation using clips from various old films,
including 'Get Smart!', an old jacques tati film that i've not seen
before but looked gorgeous, and a 50's version of '1984' that looked
like 'eraserhead'. He mentioned 'The Matrix', of course, but was one of
only three to do so, which was pretty surprising considering the 'living
architectures' theme of reality and VR. i had a whole 'matrix' drinking
game planned…

7 - scott snibbe's voronoi diagram art installations
(http://www.snibbe.com/) that dynamically trace the personal spaces of
groups of people. great videos of installations in japan and europe that
show how we treat personal space culturally.

8 - jean claude guedon from the university of montreal
(http://www.fas.umontreal.ca/LITTCO/employes/GUEDONJean-Claude.html - in
french) who presented a whole theory about the human subject and
cultural production after napster, gnutella and freenet - the 'phonemic'
subject versus the 'atomic' subject. i also liked him cos he had a
wicked sense of humour, and was a suave, grey-haired frenchman with
serge gainsbourg's accent.

9 - bill tomlinson (http://badger.www.media.mit.edu/people/badger/) and
robert burke from MIT's synthetic characters group
(http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/characters/) presenting their work
on sheep, wolves and AI. I can never decide if I think MIT is incredibly
scary or the most fantastic place on earth…

10 - karen wong from champlibre (http://www.champlibre.com) showing
archived material from their urban video/mulitmedia installations in
montreal. really nice work, with some similarities to what we're
planning at TEST, so hopefully we'll have some potential for
collaboration in the future.

11 - thecla shiphorst showing her installations of projection and
materials - probably one of the best examples of a theme that ran
through the event - the development of haptic interfaces or TUIs -
Tangible User Interfaces (see also ehud sharlin's work -
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ehud/tangible.htm)

12 - paul kaiser (http://www.riverbed.com/) presenting his dance/CG
stuff with merce cunningham and bill t jones, and his current project
'pedestrian' - a cool projection installation sited in streetlamps in
NYC (actually replacing the lamps with projectors - very nice).

14 - dolce and james lane from squidsoup (http://www.squidsoup.com/),
presenting alt.zero - a multiuser interactive soundtoy that i had
already seen at an ARTEC multimedia lab, but has since developed a lot,
with the addition of a fly-through VR environment, mulituser and chat
facility. Incidentally, through all the presentations it was apparent
that web VR is much more efficiently done as a kludge in shockwave than
in VRML. (scott paterson excepted, of course ;-)

15 - seeing bill seaman and his world generator project - work that i've
seen once before, but is still quite breathtaking in its scope -
http://www.cda.ucla.edu/faculty/seaman/

16 - listening to char davies and john harrison discuss the development
of 'osmose' and 'ephemere' (http://www.immersence.com/) and come up with
the quote that, in a poetic way, kinda summed up the event - "we were
not trying to reproduce the surfaces of the world"….

in conclusion, a lot of really interesting people and work, and one of
those conferences when you know you'll be spending the next couple of
months parsing all the information… There was slightly too many
presentations on visualisation and the more esoteric challenges of vr
for my liking, and less on the more gritty, urban problems of networked
architectural spaces. Still, quite stunning, both visually (for the
scenery) and intellectually. if you get a chance to go to banff, do it.