I finished my MFA in 1998. That summer I had some VRML work accepted for the VRML roundup at SIGGRAPH 98, which was being held in Orlando, Florida. I didn't receive the notification until less than a week before the conference, but I somehow found myself a plane ticket and someone with a hotel room to share, and I packed my lab coat and went to Florida. These were the days before blogs, so I don't have a written record of the conference, but it was big, it was big and loud and there was an art gallery right in the middle of the exhibition floor. I flubbed my VRML presentation and flew home the next morning.
(The first official SIGGRAPH website was built in 1995.)
SIGGRAPH 99 was in Los Angeles. I parked my car on a side street to save on parking, and walked several miles of convention center hallways over the course of three days. Rebecca Allen was showing Emergence, a project I did not work on while at UCLA. That fall, I bought a laptop and did a demo of The Dr. K--- Project at the AAAI Fall Symposium in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
SIGGRAPH 2000 was in New Orleans. I did not attend. My VRML work, however, was selected by the jury of the Festival of Electronic Language (F.I.L.E.) held in São Paulo, Brazil.
SIGGRAPH 2001 was in Los Angeles again. I parked my car in Koreatown and took the subway to the convention center. This was about the time when I started to turn away from digital art and started to explore traditional fine art, in particular woodblock printmaking.
SIGGRAPH 2002 was the fatal San Antonio conference, which followed on the tails of the 9/11 attack and the dot com crash. The show, so I have heard, was too expensive with too few attendees.
SIGGRAPH 2003 was a scaled back west coast show at the San Diego conference center. I drove down for a day.
You can dig around the site for my notes from the 2004 and 2005 shows, both in Los Angeles. 2006 was in Boston and 2007 was in San Diego.
Now it is SIGGRAPH 2008, and back in Los Angeles. I live about fifteen minutes away by bus from the convention center.
The exhibition is large, they have re-incorporated the art gallery and new technology (formerly Emerging Technology) into the main exhibit area so it is easier for people to flow through all the stuff. The Electronic Theater has morphed into the Computer Animation Festival, where there are hundreds of hours of computer animation to be viewed. Everything is being recorded and published on DVD, and the name badges even come with "anonymous" RFID tags.
Posted by B Rickman at August 13, 2008 12:14 AM