Kevin Duggan
This year at SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics gathering, I took
my shoes off and hopped onto an old rope swing suspended above a creek.
As I moved in a gentle parabola, blue and green ripples undulated below
me, seemingly tracing my path. Rotating in the subdued light and watching
the glowing colors flow beneath me, I enjoyed a rare meditative moment
amid the SIGGRAPH din. But others were waiting to take their turn, so
I jumped off and into the water.
Since this was SIGGRAPH, I didn't get wet at all: the pool was a synthesized
video that ebbed and flowed according to information gathered by sensing
devices that followed my arc from somewhere high above. Plasm: In the
Breeze was interactive art without a computer, keyboard, or monitor
in sight; and it was just plain fun. The pleasure principle is not something
we usually associate with the serious business of technology. But cuddly
computers, tactile surfaces, game-playing, and even whimsy were much in
evidence in the art and installations I saw at the most recent SIGGRAPH.
Whether the result of curatorial fiat, a side-effect of our feel-good
economy, or the influence of host-city New Orleans and its let-the-good-times-roll
ambiance, the spirit of playfulness was welcome.
SIGGRAPH (also known more officially as the 27th International Conference
on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) was held this past
July and attracted over 25,000 attendees from over 74 countries, including
artists, educators, researchers, animators, and any number of new and
old media industry-types. SIGGRAPH offers a nearly overwhelming number
of inducements for anyone interested in computer-generated images and
interactivity, including a massive trade show; courses, lectures, and
panels; a studio full of the latest computers and printers for artists
to experiment with; and exhibitions and screenings. New Orleans also offered
plenty of opportunities for good food, urban spectacle, and faded elegance
as a backdrop for the endless parties for which SIGGRAPH is notorious.
The conference lasts an exhausting week, so I attend SIGGRAPH with one
main objective: to see as much work as possible by contemporary artists
using current technology. And SIGGRAPH, in particular the Art Gallery,
always offers a generous amount to see, hear—and play with.
The Art Gallery is a professionally mounted, juried show (chaired
this year by Diane Gromala from the Georgia Institute of Technology) that
presents a generous amount of work (over 70 pieces this time), including
2D pieces, installations, Net art, animation, and even artists' books.
As with all "survey" exhibitions, quality varies greatly; but there is
no question that SIGGRAPH provides the viewer with a representative slice
of work being made with today's technology.
Art at SIGGRAPH has always had to struggle to be seen and heard—both
metaphorically and, in the years in which the Trade Show is next door,
literally. For many, perhaps most, visitors, the Trade Show is the main
event. SIGGRAPH began as a little village, a congress of academic exchange.
But as technology has become central to the US economy, the village has
become a battlefield for the armies of commercial enterprise who descend
on the conference to launch new products and announce technological breakthroughs.
And they do so in a style that is pure carny: amplified barkers, women
in motion-capture suits dancing on platforms, and loads of corporate swag
such as posters, tote bags, and T-shirts.
Despite this, the Art Gallery has persisted, and for the past
several years has even had pride of place—right in the center of
the conference hall. It has also forged a provocative relationship with
its next door neighbor, an exhibition dubbed Emerging Technologies
which features tools, toys, and technologies coming from the research
and development community (such as MIT Media Lab, NYU's Center for Advanced
Technology, Lucent Bell-Labs, and Interval Research Corporation). This
pairing makes it clear that some artists are great at R&D, and some scientists
are artists at heart. Plasm: In the Breeze, for example, was made
by moonlighting technologists from Silicon Alley and could easily have
been shown in the Art Gallery rather than Emerging Technologies.
Like Plasm, the most compelling work in both the Art Gallery
and Emerging Technologies exhibitions also had the lightest touch.
The two most notable of these (and clearly most popular, judging by the
crowds they collected) came from artists affiliated with NYU's Interactive
Telecommunications Program. Text Rain is an installation by Camille
Utterback and Romy Achituv in which participants stand in front of a large
screen while their video images, in life-size black and white, are projected
facing them as if in a mirror. Slowly, letters start falling from the
top of the screen, like a colorful snowfall or rain, and move down the
screen until they encounter an arm, head, or shoulder. Participants can
allow them to come to rest, push them up or sweep them aside, or collect
them—in almost complete sentences—on outstretched arms (the
text comes from a poem relating bodies and language). It is hard to explain
the giddy joy this work brought out in viewers. Perhaps it is because
of a delightful reversal that occurs: we become black and white, insubstantial,
as if we have been flattened on the page of huge book, while the usually
passive text has become animated and colorful.
Daniel Rozin's Wooden Mirror really is a mirror, but an opaque
one. This "mirror" consists of 830 wooden chips inside a large, heavy
octagonal rosewood frame. When a person stands or walks before it, the
chips flutter around (like the old railway signs) and change value (darker
wood for shadows, lighter for highlights) to roughly "reflect" whatever
is before it—somewhat like enlarged pixels or a Chuck Close portrait.
The change is almost instantaneous, and is the result of hundreds of tiny
motors receiving information from a video camera. With the hardware hidden,
it is almost as if a breeze had come along and serendipitously traced
your picture.
One important question that was asked at SIGGRAPH was whether or not
video games—which, after all, seem to covet a largely male, teenage
audience—have any relevance to serious artists. According to Fiction
2001, a panel organized by Gromala and NYU's Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the
answer is a fairly emphatic "yes." While the panel included both gentle
skeptics and true believers, a remarkably sanguine consensus appeared
to emerge that videogames will be the frontier of interactive fiction.
The ascendancy of video games as a medium to contend with was also underscored
by the Best of Show Award to Onimusha at SIGGRAPH's Computer Animation
Festival. Animation is screened throughout the conference, but SIGGRAPH's
hottest ticket is the prestigious Electronic Theater where the top computer
animation—as selected by a jury with a distinct Hollywood bias—is
shown. Onimusha is a short animated film that depicts a furious
samurai battle. It was created as a preamble to a Playstation2 game set
in 16th-century Japan that pits warlords against one another. The press
release from SIGGRAPH hailed Onimusha's admittedly impressive use
of motion capture, which uses data taken from actual actors' bodies in
motion to create realistic movement for animated characters. But I strongly
suspect that the jury was also sending a message that this upstart form
was coming into its own as a mature medium, and attention must be paid.
Advertising assures us on a daily basis that technology is a contemporary
miracle, transforming and enriching our lives. And yet our usual experience
of technology is often frustration with how little it delivers, and when
it does serve a purpose, how intrusive it is. The best work at SIGGRAPH
demonstrates that through imagination, simplicity of concept, technological
transparency, and an innovative use of materials, artists can coax a meaningful
magic from technology. Like many at SIGGRAPH, I made a daily pilgrimage
to see Text Rain and Wooden Mirror, and was rewarded each
time. If only the same sort of reward awaited us each time we booted up
our computers or logged on to the Web.
The following is a list of links with more information about SIGGRAPH
and some of the work cited in this article:
Kevin Duggan is an independent consultant on arts and technology,
working for a range of organizations, including NYFA.
