What if artists were in charge of stimulating the economy as well as our minds? “Ready to Unveil” aims to launch a nationwide campaign for public art in America. “Ready to Unveil” takes one city—Newark, NJ—and re-imagine it as an art gallery. Ideas for public art in public spaces have been submitted and juried by leading public artists and art experts from Creative Capital, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and New Jersey Transit, Chakaia Booker, Willie Cole, Sean Elwood, Sheila McKoy and Tom Moran.

Fifteen artists are included in this exhibition: June Bisantz, Phillip Buehler, Nancy Ann Coyne, Lin Emery, Jerry Gant, Elizabeth Knowles, Ann LePore & Anibal Pella, Vera Manzi-Schacht, Gina Miccinilli, Beth Ann Morrison, Michael Reese, Mary Ellen Scherl, Laurinda, Stockwell, Tamas Szalczer and Kati Vilim.

The Water Projector in action!

The Heights make it into the studio tour!

Lynn Hershman Leeson 

(photos from Siggraph Digital Arts community)

Over in the Emerging Technologies area were a few pieces I really connected with:

A creepy but amazing innovation by Mark Bolas and the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies is the Interactive 360 3-D Display, also called HeadSPIN.  It doesn’t need 3-D glasses, but instead with a  high-speed projector, synchronized motor and spinning mirror, allows viewers to stand anywhere around it. Basically, it’s like a Max-Headroom style video-conferencing system, except that you can make eye contact with people. And not fake eye contact like the painting in my mother’s living room, but real eye contact where both people are looking directly into each other’s eyes. It sounds like a small detail, but it makes a huge difference about how connected you feel while talking to that person. After staring deeply into the eyes of the person on the other end (who was actually sitting at a booth behind me) I couldn’t help but crack up and look away.

eye contact03

What are Bloxels? glowing volumetric pixels, of course. These behave like a pulse-based information sensing system, sensing light pulses from the table below and passing that information up the chain to retain the color information of the block depending on its placement.

blockset3

Also notable was the Crystal Zoetrope

And the News Knitter

Today was spent mainly revisiting my favorite artworks and people and viewing just a few more animations before heading to the airport. I met Kai Pedersen and Dr. Sassi who create a lot of the Cineversity Tutorials for Cinema 4D. In fact, I saw a screening of an animated film called “JET” which stands for Junior Extra Terrestrial. The film itself is beautifully shot, animated and composited, but beleive it or not, Dr. Sassi created the entire production with future tutorial lessons in mind. He documented each step of his process for Cineversity as a reference for animated filmmaking. In fact, all the Maxon-related folks were generally spectacular, inviting me out to dinner along with Johnnymotion before they even realized I was there on my own in a professional capacity, for Ramapo’s Art and Technology concentration.  Paul Babb, Ceo and self-proclaimed “Janitor” of Maxon, USA and Josiah Hultgren, also from Maxon, arranged several great nights out for a large group of people, of whom I was lucky enough to be one.  What a great bunch. Thanks, Maxon!

Arthur Elsenaar, from Nottingham Trent University, did the Facial hacking videos which I had seen in the gallery. He showed and discussed performances that reminded me of a real-life version of Tim Hawkinson’s Emotor. I asked him if he could make new faces now as a result of the repeated muscle action created by the electric stimulator, even without it. He said that he could but seemed shy about showing off his new skills.

Philip Beesley, from the University of Waterloo, talked about his giant synthetic plant installation as if it were alive: “It stirs up the air, navigates its own relationship with you. At first the reactions are gentle, later it may view you as a food source.” He is an architect and describes architecture as a mediator for forming relationships with the physical environment.

Jenny Sabin of CabinStudio+, and Sabin+Jones LabStudio, is from the University of Pennsylvania. She believes in open collaborations- especially between architects and cell biologists. “These collaborations create new modes of thinking in design and bio-medicine.  To understand how genetic development and disease work, you need to know (and be able to visualize) how context and environment specify form.”

Gautam Rangan from UCLA presented his group’s installation, One. For this piece, the aesthetic had to be just right. The group was inspired by early microscope investigations as well as Eric Oh’s animation style seen here in “Symphony” which aslo screened at Siggraph ‘09.

Next, I had a date with Eric LaBlanc and MaryJo on the roof of the convention center to do a 360 with the Gigipan. GigaPan was developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics institute in collaboration with NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, with support from Google.  GINOURMOUS images to follow.

How to create your own 3D Scanner. It was fantastic!  For my students who may not know; 3D scanners analyze objects in real space so that the data collected can be used to re-create them in 3D software. The Digital Michelangelo project is a great example of this. Douglas Lanman and Gabriel Taubin from Brown University gave a course in how to use the software they’ve developed to make the multiple computations which allow you to creat your own 3D scanner with a media projector, webcam, foam core, a tape measure, a bright light, and a stick. amazing!

Then another Birds of a Feather session, this one focusing on 3D printing for Art and Visualization: industrial prototyping for scientific, medical, and engineering visualization.

There were about 4 artists, a lot of people from the medical community and several people working with Shapeways.com, Yumetech.com, zcorp.com. 3D printing is used to display medical models that aide in problem solveing, by Disney Imagineers, by Nike to create new show sole designs, for production and assembly (like cell phone parts that need to fit together), and for the movie Coreline, where 5,000 faces, each with different expressions were printed out.  Most 3D printing units are still very expensive but there is one, the Candyfab 4000,(about $500) that prints using sugar instead of expensive resins.

Then I went upstairs to play with the 3D printers in the Siggraph Studio but there was a line of people waiting to have their tiny models be born out of resin. This is where I first met the Gigipan and MaryJo from Carnegie Mellon Labs. (More on that later.)

The second and third floors of our enormous convention center also held galleries; BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life was a juried art gallery exhibition exploring the flux of natural and technological forces.

Artifacts from a Parallel Universe: Tentative Architecture of Other Earth_Coastline Inhabitants
Xárene Eskandar
Artifacts from a Parallel Universe is a garment that “breathes”. It is a chunky knit sweater with tubular protrusions that look like coral. Using sensors and shape-memory alloys embedded in the wool, the sweater tubes open or close to retain heat or to vent, based on the wearer’s temperature.
Biological Instrumentation
Nina Tommasi
This is an installation of mimosa plants, which close when touched. They are connected to an air compressor and other electronic equipment. Tiny speakers near them give off sounds as if they were coming from the plants themselves. When timed blasts of air are released, the plants contract.  As one wanders betweent eh planters it is easy to imagine that the plants are whispering to you, drawing you in, until the compressors discharge, startling people and plants alike.
Face Shift
Arthur Elsenaar,
Arthur describes his Facial-Hacking as post-neural exploration of facial display, a choreography, if you will. Electric Eigen-Portraits and Face Shift are original performances of algorithmic facial choreography exhibited as two video works.He believes the human face is under-utilized by the neural brain.
Growth Rendering Device
David Bowen
Growth Rendering Device is a “System [that] provides light and food in the form of a hydroponic solution for the plant. The plant reacts by growing. The device in -turn reacts to the plant by providing an inkjet drawing of the plant every twenty-four hours, After a new drawing is produced the system scrolls the roll of paper so a new drawing can be produced during the next cycle.” 
Hylozoic Soil
Philip Beesley,
Hylozoic Soil is a visually striking and multifaceted installation. Made up of a network of micro-controllers, proximity sensors, and shape-memory alloy actuators, this interactive environment draws the viewer into its startlingly aware environment. The viewer is at once drawn in by and then repelled by the changing mood of this electronic flora.

One
Yoon Chung Han,Gautam Rangan, Erick Oh, Mubbasir Kapadia.  One is an interactive piece consisting of a single drop of ink in a suspended Petri dish and a large projection of the same drop. Viewer interaction with the suspended dish is the means of evolution for the animated ink blot. The interactivity works with micropone, Piezo, and photo-sensors, but it is the immediate reaction of the sprites, and the animation that brings this piece to life.

TRANSDUCERS
Verena Friedrich,
TRANSDUCERS is an installation composed of several glass tubes, each encasing a single human hair collected from different individuals. Triggered by the machinery, the human hair is stimulated to react, and the reaction is transduced into an audible output. Every audible result provides a technological interpretation of identity.

Shiloh T. McClean talked about ways that she has been able to give young creatives access to Australia’s digital effects and film industry. Via a call for competition, she selects 5 people each year for a six-month training program where they are placed alongside a senior person in the industry and are prepared for work in their field, like the coal miner from New South Wales who is now working in the affects industry.  All residents of New South Wales are eligible to apply to this program.

Rhythm & Hues which has over 700 employees is now partnering with colleges and universities to educate faculty about their specific pipeline. The Fac Ed program which started in 2007 is a 4-day seminar in LA where faculty get to see what R&H likes to see in a reel, and learn how to transition young people from student to professional. You can bet I’ll be signing up.

Dreamworks and Texas A&M University’s Department of Visualization partnered to create a summer industry class for students who are serious about the business of animation. For 10 weeks, 5 days a week, the students worked with Dreamworks as their “client”. Students woring in teams would be given a deadline, a storyboard, animatic and key character to start with. They had to produce a 30 second piece which had to be shown to the client for approval at the end of every step in the production pipeline.  Needless to say, the students were blown away by the tight deadline, but still managed to create very professional shorts. This is something I’d love to implement at Ramapo. Possibly with volunteers from Perception, Charlex, or Blue Sky.

I met with a networking group, Birds of a Feather, that focused on Motion Graphics where I saw a great commercial produced for Weeds created using Cinema 4D. and saw some great Aftereffects plugins demonstrated by Gil at Conoa.com

Some great Art Papers were presented; Experimental Interaction Unit was presented by by Anuradha Vikram, an art historian investigating surveillance. She covered the work of EIU artist Eric Pallos who worked with Mark Puline’s SRL group and who also was in contact with the Yes Men and E-Toy. She focused on the ideas behind bartering of personal informaiton for goods and services in this and other interactive work. Very engaging!  http://www.eiu.org/

Jurgen Scheible deomnstrated his new piece, Mobi-Spray where with an inexpensive media projector, moble phone with an accelerometer, and a laptop can be combined to create large-scale projected non-destructive graffitti. Now you KNOW I like that. Very similar to GRL’s Laser Tag, but this one has color, though a much more blunt “brush” which makes it hard for the user to create anything but fat stripes or dots.

Camille Scherrer presented her recent work, Souvenirs du Monde des Montagnes which she built with  Julien Pilet, Vincent Lepetit and Pascal Fua. It is a storybook-driven interactive installation which consists of an illustrated book, a lamp, desk and monitor. The lamp “Reads” the images on the book and then adds to them , showing on the monitor the book page in real time, with its illustration (and possibly the viewer’s hand, if it is resting on the page), and  an animation overlayed onto the illustration which further brings it to life, enacting the story.  This was  a beautiful and succesful melding of digital and analog because it happened so seamlessly. Imagine reading a novel on the couch and looking up at the television screen to see just that scene from your current page being displayed, as if your imagination were now broadcast directly to the monitor.

Tsutomu Miyashita described a touch screen built recently for the Louvre to demonstrate links in symbolism and imagery to museumgoers. The aesthetic of the interface was rich and beautifully presented, but museumgoers did not tend to engage in it long enough to understand the links between multiple paintings as semantic elements.

click on the image below to see the list of animation teams and their work:

The work is tough and the groups need to stay focused and motivated. That’s why at any time during the conference, you might see student volunteers wandering the halls with furry vests, viking helmets and cardboard swords and shields, growling and yelling Fjorg! I know the furry vest is supposed to be big this fall, but I was determined to get one of those helmets. To recieve my viking chapeau, this is what I had to do. In support of the teams, of course:Fjorg!

The Animation in Education panel preseted a computer science class in Second Life at RIT, a collaborative animation class at the University of Central Florida where the music professors compose original scores for the class animation, and computer science and engineering students who create animations and scene graphs with an emphasis on computational complexity at the University of Pittsburgh. The showcasing of these programs and the students’ resulting work gave me some ideas, but also made me very proud of the work of our Ramapo College animation students. Good work!

Next, I went to the Making It Move Talk where our friends at Electronic Arts Canada explained how they create their physics-driven animation for Fight Night 4. It starts with motion capture tied to a dual rig with joint limits and without, and then physics systems which are tied to the soft body simulations of the models (so the jaw flaps when punched) which sit on top of the rigid body.  Particle systems are then tied to the physics systems (so the spittle and blood fly…)  I was the most impressed by the simplicity of how EA created varieties of scale of muscle tension ont he characters. This was created with shader blending between two surface maps: one of map of bare muscle structure and the other of the basic body shader.

Terran Boylan, the FX Animator and Character Technical Director at Dreamworks also demonstrated the complicated BOB character from Monsters VS Aliens which was part particle, part softbody rig and also had to come apart into sections. He showed the components of B.O.B.’s character rig and the overall design approach. There were a lot of  technical challenges in order to animate and render a high-resolution warped polygonal mesh with a topology that changed in every frame.

I went to the Maxon booth and talked to some of the folks who create plugins, make tutorials and do demos with the software we use at Ramapo, Cinema 4D. I also met a charming robot interface designed by the students in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon: Quasi. He’ll explain:

This project proposes to lay the foundation establishing RPI as a premiere institution for the synthesis of emerging biotechnological research and media art practice. The BioArt Initiative is a collaborative research project between Rensselaer’s Arts Department and the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) . This project proposes to lay the foundation establishing RPI as a premiere institution for the synthesis of emerging biotechnological research and media art practice. The potential for creating a mutually supportive and critically engaged culture between art, engineering and science exists at RPI to a degree that is possible in only a select few universities worldwide. The initiative brings together RPI’s cutting-edge biotechnology resources with its world-class electronic arts community.

Recently, Ramapo College’s graduating Visual Arts students held their Thesis Exhibition titled triskadekaphilia.