Old notes

I attended the Siggraph conference in New Orleans in August. Siggraph is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques. The conference has been at the heart of the computer graphics industry since 1967, so I figured it was a good place to go to figure out if I should be a computer graphics professional. (I shouldn't.) The long-and-short of it is that the art galleries presented by MIT's Leonardo society jazzed me much more than any of the technical demos. The galleries set-up by the Leonardo society were entitled, "BioLogic : A natural history of digital life". The title suggests cellular automata, such as Conway's Game of Life. The pieces in the exhibit did not deal with this directly, but rather dealt with bio-mimicry stylistically. There were several stand-out pieces:

• A piece entitled "One" by Yoon Chung Han imagines a drop of ink as a microcosm/planetoid. Here's a video:

One (2009) from Yoon Chung Han on Vimeo.

• Philip Beesley's "Hylozoic Soil" depicts an environment of micro-machines much like a coral reef:

• The best piece in a gallery of generative art was a lantern by this guy:

• Here's a conference Uncle Bruce did on generative art. (Link.)

I didn't see the coolest technical demo until I was home from the conference. I spotted this on a Blender news site. (Link.)