Explorations

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Today was a day dedicated to Siggraph.

It started with a donut shop.

I asked the front desk people at my hotel where I could find Canadian food in Vancouver.

Thanks to the domination of food trends from elsewhere, this is surprisingly difficult.

They directed me to Tim Horton’s, which is basically the Canadian Dunkin Donuts.

I know the name from seeing their ads in Canadian hockey rinks during NHL games.

Almost a quarter of their donuts are made with some form of maple syrup.

They taste great.




After breakfast, I am rather annoyed at one aspect of the convention center.

Like most, this one has food vendors inside the building.

Like most, their prices are noticeably higher than anything else in the vicinity.

The reason I am annoyed about this is that the Tim Horton’s is located in a food court in the basement of the Waterfront Centre office building, directly across the street!

The price differential still exists even though the two locations are less than five minutes apart.

How the convention businesses can price things the way they do and stay in business I’ll never know.

Needless to say, judging by the number of badges I saw at the food court, I was not the only person to think this way.

I ended up eating a large number of my meals here.




Over breakfast, I read over the local free art weekly.

It had an article on Siggraph.

This is worth noting because most computer science conferences get no press coverage at all outside trade journals.

The article focused on why someone who likes art instead of computers should see the conference, such as the animation production sessions, the studio program, and the emerging technologies gallery.

Animation got the most coverage, which I should have expected.

Cory Doctorow and Copyright

At the conference, my first item was the keynote speech by Cory Doctorow.

He edits the popular Boing Boing news site, writes science fiction, and works on copyright issues.

He is also a native Canadian 😊

His speech focused on copyright and the way current law gets it wrong.

Most speeches of this type focus on consumers, but his focused on creators.

Current law makes it illegal to bypass any sort of electronic copy control (what some call “copy prevention control”).

The bypass is illegal even if the actual copying would be legal!

The end result is that the law really protects the vendors of Digital Rights Management software, not the people who created the underlying works.

In an oft cited example, Apple applies DRM to songs sold through its music store.

If an artist wants to move to another vendor, they can’t, because Apple will not remove the DRM from existing songs.

Fans either need to rebuy every song from a new vendor or the artist needs to stick with Apple.

In effect, Apple has a monopoly simply because they made the DRM.




While the speech was heavy on descriptions of problems, it was lighter on possible solutions.

The one discussed the most is something called a “blanket license”.

When someone buys an item that can be used for copying, part of the price is a fee for a license to make copies of copyrighted work using that item.

Very importantly, the fees apply even if the item is never actually used for this purpose.

For example, all CDRs sold in Canada have this fee attached.

In Cory’s proposal, the blanket license would be included in the cost of internet access.

Many people hate these licenses, because they feel they are paying for permission to do things they will never need.

Cory’s point is that they are far better off than the alternative, having to use computers that basically spy on their owners to ensure they are following the rules (of which the infamous Sony music CDs bundled with a rootkit are the cause célèbre).

Siggraph Studio

After the keynote, I went to the studio.

I like to work on software I find interesting, otherwise coding is just an exercise in manipulating abstract numbers.

I used the studio to explore different areas of graphics.

I discovered that I like 2-D graphics software quite a bit, rather than the 3-D that dominates much bleeding edge functionality.

2-D graphics resembles the artwork I love.




The studio has its own courses program.

For all of them, an instructor takes people through software packages, showing the latest functionality.

Most of the instructors either work for the companies involved or are working artists.

Adobe sponsored several sessions.

Photoshop, for example, has grown far beyond just being a picture editor.

It has practically become a paint program by this point.

One session was run by the manager for new features, who talked about balancing feature requests to avoid being overwhelmed by them.

The job is really tough, since every group of users has some new functionality they are just dying to have.

Siggraph Art Gallery

My last major item for the day was the art gallery.

Siggraph has a long tradition of inviting artists to show work created with cutting edge graphics techniques.

Many of them are also programmers, although this is lessening as technology for art purposes becomes more widely available.

The gallery sponsors a series of artist talks, and I went to several of them.




The theme for this show was “Tracing Home”.

Like any contemporary art show, the work varied all over the place.

Much of it was highly conceptual.

I tend to dislike this type of artwork, because the only way I can understand its message is by reading long labels.

Sometimes incomprehensibility and multiple meanings is the point of the work, but not for most of this gallery.

It contains a type of work that appeals to art theorists more than the general public.




One piece that worked for me was a large video screen covered in what looked like an animated cartoon, The Garden of Error and Decay by Michael Bielicky and Kamila Richter.

It was filled with skulls, skeletons, flames, and guns, all against a light blue background.

Word balloons float by regularly.

Read the balloons to realize that they are actually Twitter feeds from several Middle Eastern countries.

The type and density of the animation depends on the frequency of words related to war and death within the feeds.

The cartoon is actually a highly stylized visualization of Middle Eastern psychology.




A more subtle piece was an installation that looked like a 3-D outline of a house, Open House by Jack Stenner and Patrick LeMieux.

Walk inside, and scenes from a living room are projected on the walls.

Open and close the doors on the outline, and the matching features of the living room video move to match.

The work is a telepresence work, which artists have used for several years now as a way of linking, projecting, or taking over particular spaces.

In this case, the living room belongs to a house in Florida that was seized in foreclosure.

The statement talked about how foreclosure is an abstract force that removed the house from the fabric of the community, and how the piece is an abstract force to counteract it, but making the house part of the Siggraph community.




The other end of the spectrum is represented by a piece that is basically a fake anthropological display, Travel Stones by Jacquelyn Martino.

Vancouver has one of the best anthropology museums in North America, which focuses on the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest.

This artist created a completely fake display for the museum.

It talked about rocks decorated with highly symbolic patterns that a non-existent tribe used to signal where home was.

The artist specializes in algorithmic art, where a computer is given a set of instructions that are used to generate a work (for anyone that has seen Sol LeWitt’s line drawing series, think of something similar with a computer instead of assistants doing the work).

They designed the stones by changing particular algorithms until they got what they wanted aesthetically.

While the method of production is amazing, the conceptual framework around these stones is obscure to the point of being incomprehensible.

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