There were a lot of stray arrows in the past few days. The keynotes and a number of the panel discussions in the main hall have been dominated by cultural and political issues, almost excluding any mention of electronic art/media art practice at all. At this point I wish I had been here for the Interactive City Summit which took place on Sunday and Monday, it certainly looks like it was a lot more engaging.
Yesterday was the most satisfying day for me. I enjoyed Mare Tralla’s presentation dealing with folk songs/representative songs, and the report on the Interactive City Summit. Unfortunately the panelists for that panel are not listed in the ISEA program.
In the afternoon there was a workshop to build your own FM transmitter, with kits conceived by Lotte Meijer.
As for the South Hall and other miscellaneous projects from the festival, I’ll let those thoughts brew for a few days.

Cutting edge, bleeding edge, leading edge. These are all familiar catch-phrases that suggest we are glimpsing the future of contemporary art, today. Edge Conditions, however, is most emphatically not about the “next new thing.” It presents works of art in a different context, at the intersection of creativity, choice, and what might be called “technology” but what is arguably the world we live in, whether it is devices such as pencils and chisels, or ubiquitous aspects of modern life such as electronics, phones, or computers and the Internet, technology is simply a set of tools that is more less familiar at any given time.

This ultimately boils down to a disclaimer that the work in this gallery is exactly the kind of thing you would expect to see in a museum. Creativity, choice, and technology, there is nothing surprising about this choice of intersection. Why even mention the idea “cutting edge”, if you are going to take it away? And what is all that stuff about pencils and chisels? It reads like a college admissions essay.
(There are terminals in the South Hall which can be coaxed into accessing the internet.)
The C5 Corporation, with their piece The Analogous Landscape (Mt. Shasta, Mt. Fuji), tells me that two volcanos are analogous to one another. Analogy: the comparison of simliarities between things that are otherwise dissimilar. An analogy between Mt. Fuji and a melted ice cream cone would have been more meaningful.

Upstairs at the museum is “Edge Conditions”. The centerpiece of this exhibition is Listening Post by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin. It is a technically impressive piece; a grid of 21×11 lcd displays hangs in the air, and the displays shift through five “movements”, displaying information based on statistical analysis of internet traffic. For such an impressive assembly, the work itself was ultimately just something to look at, there isn’t much to think about here, or any real irony.
The rest of “Edge Conditions” was muddled in the way that only a show at a large museum can be. The website tells you what it’s all about: “…explore the boundaries between human and machine, between intelligence and processing and between speech and language. New geographies of data, virtuality, and the imagination will be explored[.]” There is even a huge disclaimer at the entrance to the gallery, stating that this exhibit is not supposed to be cutting edge.
Well I’ve got to run to the morning session. So far this entry has cost me $10.50.

Events are scattered around downtown, with a shortage of bifolds and kiosks to direct you. I had to direct Lev Manvich to the main conference hall (the poster had fallen off of its easel).
Browsing through the ZeroOne program won’t tell you when the exhibits in the South Hall are open — today they opened at noon.
The information in the printed program pretty much matches the website, and it doesn’t look like anyone is in charge of updating the site.
A google map of events would be useful — though not of course to people like myself who don’t have a laptop/internet with which to browse such a map.
One place where poor information design is the most underwhelming is at the South Halll. The hall is arranged in aisles, with the titles of nearby projects printed on posters for each aisle. But there is no spatial correlation between the poster and the layout of each aisle, so what are the posters for? They only get you halfway there. Project placards are small, some are placed near the floor.

So I am in my hotel on an unpleasant system designed by LodgeNet. 640×480 windowless web browsing with a wireless keyboard. I even had to call the front desk so they could replace the corroded factory installed batteries in the LodgeNet keyboard. I don’t have a mouse or mouse pointer, and the arrow keys have dual modes, one to nativage text, the other to scroll the page/select links.

# FileSize.pl
# Movable Type plugin tag to print a file size
use strict;
use MT::Template::Context;
MT::Template::Context->add_container_tag('FileSize' => sub{&_hdlr_file_size;});
sub _hdlr_file_size {
  my ($ctx, $args, $cond) = @_;
  defined(my $text = $ctx->stash('builder')->build($ctx, $ctx->stash('tokens'), $cond)) || return $ctx->error($ctx->errstr);
  $text =~ s/^\s+//;
  if (-f $text) {
    return (stat($text))[7];
  } else {
    return "-1";
  }
}
1;

Now MT can generate an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures.

Isilon Systems make clustered storage starting in the 1.92 TB range.
At least three booths were shouting about being able to create Flash files in a few seconds.
e frontier (formerly Curious Labs) has released Poser 6. It boasts a “more efficient and feature-rich UI”.
Hm, I didn’t hear anyone shouting about realistic fur and hair. Some people had cloth simluations. Square-Enix didn’t have a booth at all.
The low point (for me) of the exhibition was the presence of a “gaming bunker”. Beats me why people need a place to play computer games in the middle of everything else.
Emerging Technologies:
Toshio Iwai is working with Yamaha to develop an LED matrix musical instrument. This would be exciting, had I not seen a local IDM artist using a similar custom built device only a few weeks ago. The most infuriating thing about Iwai’s music technology is the relentlessly saccharine sweetness of the computer tones. Such an instrument could, of course, be made to produce more sophisticated sounds, but Iwai’s music will still remain immature. Tenori-on
moo-pong is a handheld device that makes horrible noise. You look through the scope to see images that have been captured with some device. I don’t know?
The Briggita Zics installation of MIRROR_SPACE was incomprehensible.
Victoria Fang’s The Living Room was a fun interactive mystery. Three rolling displays have to be positioned correctly on the floor (using RFID sensors) to activate video sequences. This is a rare installation that successfully combines a sophisticated interface with cinematic content in a compelling way.
Misc
Thursday morning I went to the DART :
The Designer’s Augmented Reality Toolkit Birds of a Feather meeting. The ARToolkit is primarily designed for marker tracking — those little black and white squares or circles that look like weird bar codes — but the DART folks are more involved with InterSense trackers. They’ve made an “easy to use” Xtra for Director, with the goal of making it easier to produce augmented reality content, which is otherwise a cumbersome task, i.e. requires decent programmers to implement. Director users also need a minimum of programming skills, but it is a little more forgiving.
To Summarize
While not completely stale, the offerings of this year’s SIGGRAPH were a continued echo of previous conferences. Next year’s show is in Boston, so unless something momentous happens it will be two years until my next pilgrimage.

Wednesday morning, another art talk.
Thomas Briggs – A rather self-absorbed painter turned digital artist, who writes code to generate line-based images. While he is interested in computation, he intentionally doesn’t work with fractals or genetic algorithms or AI. Also does not “render” his images — the images are created by code, rather than by a rendering package. Briggs made a lot of statements about his work, but in the end I found little of interest in the images themselves.
Kate Chapman – An MFA student who produced a series of small sculptures, modelled in Maya and realized using rapid prototyping technology. The forms were figures moving through space, where the figure fills all of the space between, such as a body falling to the floor. The shapes were painted with a bronze patina, I guess to make them look like sculpted objects. Ultimately the work has more to say about using new technology than it does about our relationship with technology, which is disappointing.
Stephanie Owens – liquid_eden falls into the “projected images altered by people on the internet” genre. But why have two projected panels, and adjacent to one another?
Ansen Seale – Quote: “It’s a terrific show.” Panoramic images using a slit scan digital camera, producing time distored images where static areas are blurred and moving areas are clear. Horrific images of a model on a moving platform, creating abnormal creatures with multiple heads, limbs, and tattoos.
Lunch: I’d like to thank Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in London for the glossy flyer they left on my table, which made a handy ketchup plate.
More notes to come.

I think I’ll talk about the art gallery, officially titled SIGGRAPH 2005 Art Gallery: Threading Time. The gallery seeks to present “artwork that maps data or traces threads in time and space”. Linda Lauro-Lazin, the art gallery chair, invited six artists to contribute to the exhibit; their works are tagged “Chair’s Invitation”. These six artist are: Perry Hoberman, Jim Campbell, Jonh Gerrard, Shelly Eshkar and Paul Kaiser, and Camille Utterback.
First up we have Perry Hoberman, who has a whopping three pieces on display, only one of which has much to say about “mapping traces through time and space”. My Life In Space is a series of three digital prints, each displaying a collection of emails that have been photoshopped together in direct fashion. One day, one week, and one month’s worth of spam make up the three prints. That’s it.
Hoberman’s other pieces don’t seem provide much context for the exhibition, other than providing context for work by Perry Hoberman. Art Under Contract (End User License Agreement) is a suspiciously subversive piece, which essentially subverts itself. He has invested a lot of effort to tell us something about End User License Agreements, but it is lacking in irony.
Four works by Jim Campbell; custom electronic canvases made of an array of light emitting diodes (LEDs). Campbell shows how even a small, sparse collection of pixels can be used to create the illusion of an image. Television has been doing that for quite some time now, there are no particularly new ideas here.
John Gerrard has two computer generated heads on flatscreen displays. These change over time.
Shelly Eshkar and Paul Kaiser’s Arrival is presented here, in tabletop form. (This work was also presented at last year’s Bang the Machine in San Francisco.) The images are very dark, the surrounding walls are very white, and the soundtrack can only be heard through headphones, so this piece lacks the impact of last year’s presentation in a very dark room.
Finally, of the invited artists, Camille Utterback has an interactive floor. You walk on it and your path creates blobs on the projected screen. I’m going to create an Interactive Floor Registry, where we can keep track of all the tedious interactive floor installations out there. Each installation will be given a serial number and released back into the wild.
I can understand — to a degree — the urge to turn space into an interactive canvas, but so many artists have already realized this project, and few of them have said anything meaningful, meaningful beyond the interface itself.
There were some art talks in the morning.
Lee Arnold is a painter who seeks to create paintings that “could change over time”. I have to say I’m none too fond of Arnold’s sense of color, least of all the use of cyan.
Jan Pirbeck produced a series of prints based on GIS data and student perceptions of the urban landscape in Portland, Maine. The color here, too, is rather unpleasant. She is enamoured of Richard Florida’s idea of the “creative economy”. I’ll have to find a copy at the library to see what that’s all about.
Jon Meyer showed an odd collection of projects, followed by some wonderfully heartfelt babbling. He made the observation that we tend to believe older images are more honest, while newer images are viewed more skeptically.