What does it all mean?    SIGGRAPH is an acronym and stands for Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference.  This has been the largest and most beautifully organized conference I’ve ever been to. If that were not enough, this year Siggraph presented, for the first time a Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art to Roman Verostko & 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!