Today Activity:
- Art Panels
- Featured Speaker
- Exhibition
- Special Session
Art Panel:
ISAST II: Artists Have Changed: Art, Science, Technology Interaction
Panelists
Roger Malina, Leonardo, The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology
Stephen Wilson, San Francisco State University
Eddie Shanken, Savannah College of Art and Design
Anna Ursyn, University of Northern Colorado
Michael Naimark, University of Southern California
In this Panel, Roger Malina introduced Leonardo/ISAST (International Society for Art, Science and Technology), which founded in 1968 in Paris. Leonardo provides a channel for artists and journalist to share their views regarding contemporary science and technology to the arts. Moreover, it established to a multi-purpose organization, which supports art projects, hosts awards programs, holds symposia, conferences and workshops and conducts collaborations.
Eddie Shanken has give a very fruitful and informative presentation. As an art historian, he made a wide range research on the development of media art. He categorize his data in seven thematic streams, and he briefly described his findings in the presentation. A lot of example that he gave were new to me, and I was glad that Microwave, Hong Kong is included in the list. You can visit http://artexetra.com/ for a lot more information. Once you browse on the site, you can see how detail and deep information have been consolidated.
Michael Naimark round up the Panel by throwing out some questions about technological influence to art creation. Eventually bring up a long discussion after the formal schedule. This Panel is very inspiring and lead me to jump into thought several time, and I missed some parts during the talk… that’s bad… Anyways, I finally ran in front of Eddie and Michael an introduce myself, and we will probably meet once again in LA. haha.
Featured Speaker:
Scott McCloud, Author and Graphic Novelist
Scott gave a very interesting speech, which almost like a comedian stand up show. This is natural because he is a best known cartoonist, graphic novelist and comics theorist. He used a very energetic way to perform his speech, and his powerpoint are just images but no words, nevertheless, communicated well. He briefly described his life in relation with comics. From learn to explore, to question, and to certainty. He mentioned e he one struggled what is the aura of comics, or what he housed in comics. Stories, beauty, expression and culture, etc… are what he thought of. However, at the end, he find out his main interest is in the form the comics art. So he start to play with it, explore the uniqueness of time and space of comics and more specifically, the comics frames and the viewing experience. Additionally, he make use of the “window” concept of the navigation of computer interface onto comics creation.
Exhibition:
Autodesk and Softimage booths, they are located foremost in the exhibition hall
Disney was showing 3D cinema
Another Disney booth for game promotions
Pixar showcases Ratatouille and RenderMan
Lucasfilm Showcasing Transformers
Nvidia brand new product can make final rendering of a complex scene in real-time. Even moving objects or cameras, the render view gives real-time respond.
This one is cool, called Total Immersion. Real-time 3D object virtually attached to real object. Like the 3D trees in this picture that stick on the book, and if the flip the book, the trees will follow the action. There is another example that attaching a dog nose to your nose. All of them are sensorless but webcam.
There were tons of mocap companies.
There were tons of 3D animation assistant tools. This one… virtually grab 3D object, but I cannot get use to it. I think I need some training, and when you touch somethings, it vibrate, kind of annoying…
Another wearable technology for virtual driving… quite scary for me.
Interactive projection, select a planet, and you are ready to rotate it
Hey, this is a studio in Taipei. They created a Animation short called Adventure in the NPM. The visual quality was impressive, but I think the story can be improved.
This one was great too, called Immersive Media. The ball in his hand is 360 degree all angle camera. Integrated with their software, we can get shoot images from any directions simultaneously.
Another interesting camera technology is from Point Gray Research, which shoot panorama images.
There are much more high end technologies stunning me. However, sigh that I lost some of the photos…
Special Session
Shrekology, The History of an Ogre
Skrek the third, Dreamworks has presented in this special section. They have shown their creative process of the production of Skrek the third. When one presenter re-tell the story by their storyboard, it was some interesting, and let us feel the energy of animator, additionally demonstrate how can we test a scene really work or not. There philosophy of creating animation is to respect pre-production and traditional animation workflow. They spend huge of time in hand drawing process, and highly believe in human creativity.
