Report from
SIGGRAPH 2000
by Alex
Galloway
from RHIZOME DIGEST: August 4, 2000 (http://rhizome.org)
What's the bigger spectacle? New
Orleans, with its Bourbon Street booty 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."
Related Links:
http://www.siggraph.org/s2000/
http://www.glasbead.com
http://www.fargo.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~camille/textrain.html
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