Smartly back (day 306)

Well, the blog wagon and I have become separated it seems.  Always better to just hop back on like nothing happened.

After coming back from the residency I had to prepare a talk for Smart Graphics.  I had been thinking about it for months and had a working title ("Mobs and Choirs") but needed to spend some uninterrupted hours taking notes and figuring out a structure.   This, and answering email, exhausted all the writing energy I had, hence the neglected blog.

The Smart Graphics conference itself was wonderful.  There were about 50 people that attended from around the world: Japan, Spain, Korea, Australia, UK, US, and probably other places I'm forgetting.  All were, appropriately, smart.  And all were delightful.  The sessions were interesting and had enough time in between to foster discussion.  It included a great art exhibit/performance night which really rounded out the technical papers. It was perhaps the best conference I've been to.  This and Interactive Futures are a close tie.  But the setting of Smart Graphics  (Banff, AB) tips it over to 'best' I think.  I didn't expect to feel so nostalgic for the place but there it was brought on by the smells, the trails, the familiar haunts.  I may be going back in August for Interactive Screen.  I wonder if the nostalgia will be dampened by then.

Some highlights from the conference:

• John Bowers keynote - a wonderful stroll through a free mind's creations.  I had the delight of having many conversations with John, each one more entertaining than the next.  I'll forever be making up new units of measurements in my head now.  The best one he had was the 'Sting' which is a unit measuring how long you would walk to press a button that would discreetly get rid of a person you don't like.  Named according to the subject of its standardized unit.  I would call mine the 'Bono'. 
• Tracy Hammond, Manoj Prasad, Daniel Dixon - Art101, a tool to teach drawing.  At first I found the very idea of this tool offensive but after seeing it in action and understanding where they were coming from (a way into drawing, as opposed to a replacement for free sketching), I started to appreciate the work.  They had many people try it and held a contest at the end (I was half the jury!).  It was really interesting to see what people had managed to draw.
• Ji-Sun Kim, Denis Gracanin, Kresimir Matkovic, Francis Quek - Finger Walking as a means to navigate through virtual space.  An interesting approach that looks like fun.
• Tom Schofield - Sticking point, a visualization of the word frequency in the world's constitutions, specifically sections pertaining to human rights.  Really interesting information emerges out of this infographic.  He is currently working on an interactive version.  The one he showed was a large print (3mx1m).
• Jeffrey Ventrella - all around interesting person.  Lots of little sketches on his web site that are worth spending time with.  The work he showed was self-portraits built from a genetic algorithm based on the mandelbrot set.
• Luca Chittaro , Lucio Ieronutti , Roberto Ranon - VEX-CMS a tool that helps curators built virtual gallery tours.
• Robyn Taylor, Guy Schofield, John Shearer, Pierre Boulanger, Jayne Wallace, Patrick Olivier - Humanaquarium.  Interactive box with live musicians and projection.  Touching the box changes the effects put on the voice of the singer.  Was great to see it live!
• Qiong Wu, Maryia Kazakevich, Robyn Taylor, Pierre Boulanger, Janice Annett - Trickster at the Intersection, an interactive virtual reality piece that ran in the CAVE at Banff.  The trickster was a figure in a fantastical garden which mimicked the movements of anyone entering the CAVE.   Extremely effective at generating playfulness.   We found out later in the evening that the trickster was a real person who was observing in another room trough a webcam link.  She was motion captured as she mimicked the movements, and the data was used to drive the movements of the virtual trickster. 
• Youngmi Kim, Jongsoo Choi - Stroking a Cymbidium, a gorgeous interactive piece where stroking a Cymbidium (a plant) produces a drawing on screen.  Unfortunately the piece got damaged during shipping so wasn't actually working during the conference but I mention it here because the documentation they showed was amazing.
• Greg Pintilie, Peter Heppel , Janet Echelman - An interactive tool for Janet Echelman to build her net sculptures!
• Roberto Theron , Laura Casares - visualization of basketball game and stats.  I mention this here not so much because I found the topic interesting but because of the generated images he showed were beautiful.
• Kairi Mashio, Kenichi Yoshida, Shigeo Takahashi, Masato Okada - mixing of camera views in one image (cubist style).  I found the results really intriguing.  Would be interesting to push this to its limits and see what can be generated.  Unfortunately I couldn't find any images to link to.  Hopefully the publication makes it online.
• Ben Clayton - wonderful organizer with the BNMI.  Cheerful, funny, talented, and interesting.  He didn't present but he deserves a big honourable mention.

As you can tell by the number of highlights it's really hard to pick them out.  Just one of those moments where you're surrounded by greatness and have no idea how it happened.

Going back home was a bit sad but life goes on.  The Centre of Stereoscopic 3D needs building and this is the bulk of what I did when I got back.  Now I'm off on vacation for the next 3 weeks.  First to Bainbridge and then the Okanagan to pick some fruit.

bacterial update:  This is the season of fresh fruit and I've been making smoothies with my kombucha.  The best so far is the rose pu-erh kombucha with strawberries and mango, sweetened with a bit of steevia.  It is so delicious and fresh.  I start my meal with it and it's easily followed by a kale/beet/asparagus salad.

A song for this post.

Gravity of time (day 124)

I saw my friend Yutai today.  He was visiting from San Francisco with his girlfriend.  Many of us met at a pub to see him.  Looking around the table it struck me how we are all aging.  That's what happens when you only see people every few years.  It's as if the context of the friendship stays frozen and the realization of change is a cosmic joke tinged with sadness. 

Sitting around the table looking at everyone and hearing the plans everyone has to say goodbye to the decade, I remembered how ten years ago saying goodbye to the decade had been a much more even mixture of hello and goodbye.   True it's hard to compete with a new millenium but this year has also had quite a lot of bad news on a global level.  Who could blame us for not being super positive about the year ahead and for not wanting to think in ten year terms.  Not one person asked about New Year's resolutions.

Yutai claims this year has been 42% less fun.  Surely that's reason for hope for next year and a reason to look for ways to brighten someone's day.

A nostalgic song for this post.

Guestbook nostalgia (day 52)

I took some time today and fixed the broken link to the Digital Guest Book that I made for the IDS opening.  For reasons related to mySQL versions, I had stored it on a server other than my own and eventually that server was no more.  I've now migrated everything over but in so doing I've lost the timestamps for the signatures which is a little sad.  I'll see if I can recover them from the signature files themselves, stored on my tablet.

Looking at it now after almost 3 years it feels nice to see some of the comments.  I recognize some of my friends and even some I didn't even had come or signed.  If I have a bit more time (maybe Christmas break?), I'd like to change the animation to be a bit smoother.

Anyway, take a look and sign if you'd like (during the opening, it was displayed on a tablet so it was easier to sign).  The signature won't be stored but you'll see it animated while the app runs.

A song for this post.