In the second Art Gallery exhibition in Asia, an excellent collection of high-quality, cutting-edge artists working in digital art, fine art, and design is showcased. Yuko Oda, SIGGRAPH ASIA 2009 Art Gallery Chair takes us on a preview.
Our artists come from all over the world, representing Japan, USA, Germany, Taiwan, Austria, Russia, Korea, Hong Kong, China, France, to name a few. Most of the artists are visiting Japan and SIGGRAPH for the very first time, creating a brand new synergy of technology, art, and diverse perspectives in the digital media Mecca of Asia. In this year’s show, contemporary curators working in New York, Beijing, and Tokyo bring you a unique, never-seen-before adventure to SIGGRAPH Asia.
We live in a rapidly changing world of technological advances, environmental crisis and global shift of consciousness. Challenges lie ahead, and our ability to adapt to our environment has never been as crucial as it is today. In Adaptation, artists were invited to respond to this critical time in humanity’s evolutionary journey. We were excited to receive a diverse range of perspectives responding to our theme, presented in the most creative of ways. There are many art pieces that address climate change and energy consumption. Artists also present new ways of looking at architecture, clothing and food by adapting where we live, what we wear, and what we eat. Several artists used everyday objects in unexpected ways, subverting and surprising the audience’s perceptions of value. For example, Shih Chieh Huang, an artist representing Taiwan, uses found objects in unexpected ways to create immersive installations with robots that emit light, sound and movement that suggested bio-luminescent organisms.
There are several artworks that respond to our technological society using humor and play, as well as negative effects it has on human psychology through anxiety, fear and loss. In Yuliya Lanina’s film 'Mishka', viewers are confronted with conflicting emotions of childhood memory and adult fantasy with characters made of transformed children’s mechanical dolls. Instead of just including artwork that were driven by technology, the Art Gallery committee felt strongly about the message we wanted to convey and also extended our scope to include artworks that responded to our technological society in a conceptual way.
Along with the mediums usually represented in SIGGRAPH Art Galleries, this year’s show has an array of unique, innovative hybrids of mediums that bring to life the exhibition. Some hybrids worth mentioning are performances that generate energy to make plants grow, interactive installations using insects that are alive, augmented reality t-shirts that attendees can wear, and html code choreographed into dance. We are delighted to eat at 'Electronic Cuisine', where Jeremiah Teipen serves a variety of real foods like sandwiches and sushi with robotic and electrical components.
In this year’s Art Gallery, we are also honored to showcase special live performances scheduled throughout the conference. In the invited piece 'Quintessence', composer and musician George Hajdu directs a networked orchestra, connecting musicians live, performing simultaneously in Yokohama and Europe. We are also delighted to watch Ursula Endlicher bring a new dimension to internet sites by deconstructing html code of popular websites and choreographing it into a unique dance performance. In Open Reel Ensemble, Wada Ei fuses together magnetic audio recording devices, reel-to-reel analog tape recorders, singing, and digital technology such as iPhones, creating a fun, musical performance.
A group of international distinguished committee members made up of active curators, artists, art critics and educators from the US, China, Germany and Japan, came together to shape this exhibition by curating artists and participating in an extremely selective jury process. We were delighted to receive over 400 international online submissions, but it was a difficult task to select the top 4% that were accepted in the art gallery.
I would like to thank all of the artists, committee members, reviewers, my interns from New York Institute of Technology, the patient staff at Koelnmesse and Qltd., who have all worked together with herculean efforts to bring to life this ground-breaking exhibition. I would especially like to acknowledge the work of the Vice-Chair Mariko Tanaka and other committee members without which this show would not have been possible.
2009 is Yokohama’s 150th year of the opening of its ports to the world, and we are honored to celebrate this historical moment with the city. Please join us in welcoming and celebrating these incredible artists whose works will continue to inspire us as we face old and new challenges in our complex lives.
Sunday 15 November 2009 - 15:58PM
Lars Erik Holmquist
Lars Erik Holmquist described the Emerging Tech for Yokohama so well, I'm going to hand it across to him to give you a personal tour.
'Welcome to the SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Emerging Technologies exhibition! This is the place where you get to experience the future of computer graphics and interactive techniques first-hand. Here, you will get a glimpse of future technology before anyone else - technology that will shape the way we live, work and play in the years to come.
You will see new forms of display technologies that put you right in the action, with realism, dimensions and sensations you have never experienced before. You will meet robots that one day could take the place in human conversations or perform complex tasks we only dream of today. You will see amusements and entertainment that are far beyond even the wildest examples available on today’s games consoles. You will see new forms of interaction that do not hide digital bits behind a glass screen, but put information literally on your fingertips, and you will see how new digital technology can enable new forms of creativity far beyond the computer as we know it today.
Himawari Plant Robot. Emerging Technologies is about presenting big ideas, but we are not satisfied with just a talk in a presentation room or an image on a screen. E-Tech demos are the real thing: demonstrations you can feel, touch, and experience. This is not easy - every E-Tech exhibit has to withstand the interaction with literally thousands of attendees over several days of non-stop demonstration. But this also makes for a unique connections between the presenters and the audience. You as conference attendee are welcome to not only try out the technology, but also offer your feedback, probe for more information and interact with the exhibitors in a very interactive fashion. I am very grateful to all the presenters who put in a lot of hard work and long hours to present today’s most exciting innovations on-site in Yokohama.
However, the fact that Emerging Technologies demonstrations are in their very nature transient and location-specific is also a problem, since the only way to gain access to them is to be physically present at a demonstration. This year at SIGGRAPH Asia, we have introduced two additional ways to document and put the spotlight on Emerging Technologies. The first is the Digital Experiences catalog that you hold in your hands, where every work is presented in words and pictures as a permanent record of the exhibition. The second is Emerging Technologies Talks, which allows all contributors to give a presentation of their innovations in a compact format, allowing for discussion and questions from the audience. I hope that this will make Emerging Technologies even more popular and prestigious, and help attendees get even more details on the amazing works on display.
Cocktail parties on screen at the Interaction Bar. Because Emerging Technologies is such a prestigious and important program, we wanted the selection process to be as fair and efficient as we could. There were a large number of people who worked very diligently to bring you the absolutely best program possible. To make the final selections from the 69 submitted works, a jury with some of the most prominent names in the field looked carefully at every single submission in order to make a balanced decision. The jury was supported by an excellent team of reviewers, who carefully scrutinized every submission, producing over 200 high-quality reviews. The final selection of 20 jury-selected works was complemented by another seven curated works, that were specifically invited to complete the show and reflect emerging technology trends. I am very grateful to the reviewers and jury for all the hard work that went into the selection of the final works.
Finally, on a personal note, I am extremely happy to have been part of the Emerging Technologies process for SIGGRAPH Asia 2009. Ever since my first SIGGRAPH visit, E-Tech has been my favorite part of the conference. I have participated many times as a contributor over the years, but this is the first time I have worked ”behind the scenes”. As a conference attendee, E-Tech has always felt like a magical place for me, a place where the most daring dreams and exciting technical breakthroughs are presented to the world for the very first time. I hope you too will feel the magic at this year’s exhibition - enjoy the show!
Lars Erik Holmquist SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Emerging Technologies Chair
Similar for each SIGGRAPH, this document contains up to the minute modifications and addendums for sessions, locations and the speakers.
With this PDF on your screen, set at 75% for instance, one can see the layout of each half day perfectly, making the selection of sessions and attractions incredibly easy. And, like every SIGGRAPH it makes the selection of which sessions one has to miss, to make sure one sees the one big attraction, just as easy.
Seventy peer-reviewed, world-class Technical Papers in physical simulation, animation control, real-time and photo-realistic rendering, geometric and urban modeling, hair capture and styling, texturing, image and video processing and resizing, GPU algorithms, and sound.
Close to 30 Courses on animation production, computer-human interaction, gaming, rendering techniques, computational geometry, and mobile devices. Educators Program packed with paper presentations, talks, and workshops by top names like Filmakademie and SEGA on methods of teaching and integration of computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Sketches (short illustrated talks) on computer graphics and interactive techniques in art, cinema, advertising, design, science, and engineering, including two production sketches from the studios that created 'Up' and 'Astro Boy'.
In the Art Gallery, leading names in media art and fine art presenting unique, inspiring networked performances, edible robots, a wearable LED kimono, and interactive installations that generate alternative energies.
Emerging Technologies that provide an engaging experience through various forms of haptic interfaces, high-dynamic-range imaging, futuristic display technologies, and hands-on interaction with robots. Experience three full days of animation and visual effects, inspiring studio content, mind-altering animation, real-time graphics, and narrative shorts in the SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Computer Animation Festival.
Any SIGGRAPH Technical Papers presentation is the nuts-and-bolts of the research in CG and can feature areas of physical simulation, animation control, real-time and photo-realistic rendering, geometric and urban modeling, hair capture and styling, texturing, image and video processing and resizing, GPU algorithms, even sound.
For the first time in SIGGRAPH history there will be one session of four papers presented in Japanese as well as English. This year at Yokohama, Professor Nelson Max is the program Chair. Nelson Max received a PhD in Mathematics in 1967 from Harvard University, and is currently a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Professor Max was happy to see that there was a relatively high acceptance rate of 25.5% of submitted papers. “In previewing the videos to make this selection, I realized that this conference has a very exciting selection of accepted papers, particularly in the areas of simulation and animation,” he said.
The Technical Papers program received 274 submissions and these papers were reviewed and selected by a technical papers committee of 35 members, including Technical Papers chairs Tony DeRose for SIGGRAPH 2010, George Drettakis, for SIGGRAPH Asia 2010, and Kurt Akeley, for SIGGRAPH Asia 2008, and also Danny Cohen-Or, Hughes Hoppe, Ming Lin, Dinesh Manocha, Ravi Ramamoorthy, and Peter Shirley.
“I made a special effort to accept qualified young volunteers with little previous experience as papers committee members,” explains Nelson Max. “Then in the paper sort, if we could not assign a more experienced member as one of the two committee member reviewers, we assigned one instead as a coordinator, to bring past SIGGRAPH experience to the review process. I feel that this allowed each paper to get a fair review, while bringing ‘new blood’ into the papers committee.”
Professor Max has worked in Japan for three and a half years as co-director of two Omnimax (hemisphere screen) stereo films for international expositions, showing the molecular basis of life. His computer animation has won numerous awards, and he is the recipient of the 2007 ACM Coons Award for Lifetime Achievement in Computer Graphics. His research interests are in the areas of scientific visualization, volume and flow rendering, computer animation, molecular graphics, and realistic computer rendering, including shadow and radiosity effects.
SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Technical Papers Program highlights include:
Aggregate Dynamics for Dense Crowd Simulations Rahul Narain and Abhinav Golas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Sean Curtis, Walt Disney Animation Studios; Ming Lin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Saturday, 19 December | 11:00 AM - 12:45 PM | Room 301/302 Shadow Art Niloy J. Mitra, IIT Delhi / KAUST; Mark Pauly, ETH Zürich
Dynamic Shape Capture Daniel Vlasic, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Pieter Peers, University of Southern California; Ilya Baran, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Paul Debevec, University of Southern California, Institute for Creative Technologies; Jovan Popović, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Adobe Systems Incorporated, University of Washington; Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Princeton University; Wojciech Matusik, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage Tao Chen & Ming-Ming Cheng, Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology; Ping Tan, National University of Singapore; Ariel Shamir, Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, The Interdisciplinary Center; Shi-Min Hu, Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology
Friday, 18 December | 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM | Room 301/302
Leo Hourvitz is a technical art director, speaker, manager, programmer, effects artist and system designer with a long background in computer graphics and related systems. In his current role as Vice President of Technology at Polygon Pictures Inc., a medium-sized CG studio in Tokyo, he manages the technical pipeline development team with a secondary focus on overseas business development.
Prior to that, he was a Technical Art Director with Maxis/Electronic Arts, where he helped build the art team and the pipeline for 'The Sims 2' and other Sims products. He previously worked at Pixar Animation Studios, where he was supervising technical director on the Oscar-winning animated short film 'Geri's Game' as well as effects technical artist on several feature films, including 'A Bug's Life' and 'Toy Story 2'. He holds a masters of science degree in visual studies from MIT.
Lindsey Olivares' short 'Anchored' won best of show and Digic Pictures' 'Assassin's Creed 2' won the best technical award at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Computer Animation Festival.
"While working on my film I tried to push boundaries and innovate ways to use technology to create a film that felt like a moving painting," said Olivares, who is from the Ringling College of Art and Design. "SIGGRAPH Asia exemplifies this idea of pushing the limits of technology and creativity. I'm very excited to hear my film was accepted into the Computer Animation Festival and also chosen as the Best of Show piece."
Assassin's Creed 2, a trailer for the game, was produced by Alex Sandor Rabb, and the clip showed the festival a mastery of 3D CG production.
"We are proud of our Assassin?s Creed 2 cinematic trailer, which reflects our relentless pursuit of excellence and commitment to push all boundaries of CG animation," said Rabb. "This award truly belongs to everyone at Digic Pictures who have contributed to the film, outdoing themselves on a daily basis."
"We were blown away by the number and quality of pieces submitted for this year's show, " says Leo Hourvitz, "Animations came in from dozens of countries and we had over 600 pieces to look through, so we used a two-stage volunteer-driven process across two weekends. The first weekend I invited about 20 local jurors to come in and watch the submitted animations in teams of three. The second weekend our international jury assembled here in Tokyo and watched all the pieces that came out of the first weekend together. Then we had a long (and bilingual!) discussion about exactly which pieces should go into the show. My huge thanks to all the jurors who persevered through the long hours in a dark room to make the selections.
As has been true the last several years, we were all especially impressed by the quantity of excellent student work going on around the world. Our Best of Show winner, 'Anchored,' was actually a student piece, even though we didn't pick it for that reason.
I'm really happy with how the Electronic Theater came together. The jury focused on just selecting the best pieces we saw, but the result is a show that has a real Asian feel and yet represents work from all over the world. That's an ever-growing list of countries, by the way -- our winner for Best Technical, 'Assassin's Creed 2,' was produced in Hungary. The ET includes humor, drama, and commentary drawn from movies, TV shows, and shorts, so it covers a lot of ground, but I think with all the material that was submitted by contributors and the jury's selection work, everyone will enjoy the whole show.
We also brought back one of my favorite pieces of the Electronic Theater, the Papers Preview video. Hopefully it'll motivate folks with a not-completely-serious look at what's happening in the technical community even if they're not frequent papers attendees.
And, since two hours of animation isn't nearly enough, we have another three or so hours of fantastic animation showing in the Animation Theater as well. We break the material up into half-hour show so people can come and go, but you really should try and catch it all.
Of course, now we're in the editorial phase. We've gotten all the pieces here in Tokyo and we're rushing to actually prepare all the titles and edit the show together with perfect timing and quality control. I'm lucky to have a committee of volunteers here in Japan that are helping out. If you haven't seen the Computer Animation Festival trailer they put together yet, it's definitely fun to watch.
The thing I'm most looking forward to is getting to introduce lots of other people to the great pieces our contributors sent in! It's such a treat for me to have been able to sit and watch all this animation, I'm really happy a lot of other folks will be able to enjoy it too. I want to share the award-winning pieces, since they so richly deserve it, and one thing I'm definitely looking forward to is seeing how people react to the Japanese-style humor of the piece called "Peeping Life". I hope all your readers can come join us in Yokohama!"
The Electronic Theater participants for the Computer Animation Festival at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 has been listed on the SIGGRAPH site.
The team led by Leo Hourvitz searched the world and called for participants early, to select the eclectic and impressive range of works being shown at Yokohama in December.
As Vice President of Technology at Polygon Pictures Inc., a medium-sized CG studio in Tokyo, Leo Hourvitz manages the technical pipeline development team with a secondary focus on overseas business development.
The Computer Animation Festival Chair's career streams through many genres including a time as Technical Art Director at Maxis/Electronic Arts, where he helped build the pipeline for The Sims 2 projects. His career is landmarked by the work he did with Pixar Animation Studios, as supervising Technical Director on 'Geri's Game' and effect artist on 'A Bug's Life' and 'Toy Story 2'. In a week, I hope to have an interview with Leo, but to bide the time, here is the Electronic Theater Trailer for SIGGRAPH Asia 2009.
Masa Inakage - Chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Yokohama
Sunday 20 September 2009 - 19:40PM
Paul Hellard
In the lead up to SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, the Chair of the Yokohama conference talks to CGSociety about the great expectations for the first SIGGRAPH in Japan.
SIGGRAPH Asia When the SIGGRAPH Committee decided to launch the new arm of the annual conference in Asia, SIGGRAPH learned a lot. In coming to Asia, ACM SIGGRAPH is learning more and more about how to communicate with the Asian community. "This is really good for SIGGRAPH because as an international conference, it will make itself even more international," says Masa Inakage, a Dean and Professor in the Graduate School of Media Design at Keio University.
Japan "I believe the Yokohama conference will be much bigger [than the Singapore conference], and also there will be many experiments that are not happening here in the North American conference this year. Japan has been very strong in CG for many, many years. For example we are bringing in simultaneous translation into and from the Japanese language. There will also be more robotics, digital signage, games and anime all these additional things not part of the SIGG core community right now, but SIGG Asia, especially Japan has these strong areas of interest. So SIGGRAPH Asia will evolve into something similar to SIGGRAPH from North America but also something unique and distinguishable. Attendees would have to come to Japan this December to experience something that you would not necessarily experience in North America.
"The Japanese are the third largest contingent of SIGGRAPH attendees. First comes the Americans, then Canadians, then the Japanese," explains Inakage. "So the general CG community in Japan are well aware of the SIGGRAPH conference here in the US. Of course with the conference always (until now) being in the States, not every university could send their people. Now, this unique opportunity to have the SIGGRAPH over in Yokohama, I believe that there will be many, many Japanese people making their way to the local conference. I really do believe there will be a very, very big crowd attending. In addition, the surrounding countries will come over in high numbers also. Korea, Taiwan, China and Singapore, Australia, India and Russia."
Yokohama 150 years "When we put in the bid to have Yokohama as the host for the second SIGGRAPH Asia, we had some very enthusiastic help from Yokohama itself," adds Inakage. "2009 is the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Port of Yokohama for international trade. After many hundreds of years of Japan being very closed, this anniversary means many things to Japan. They are welcoming many international cultures, businesses and academia to celebrate this 150 year anniversary. In fact, SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 is listed is one of the key conferences taking part in this anniversary celebration. Yokohama brands itself as the creative city, so the digital cutting edge being shown at SIGGRAPH Asia in December is a perfect fit to the mission to both SIGGRAPH and Yokohama."
The Wave of Innovation Japan is always advancing technology and experimenting with new ideas in creative arts, design and new business models. SIGGRAPH is at the cutting edge of this digital media industry and SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 is not only about CG, but it also incorporates digital media and digital content in general. Being at the forefront of the field, SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 means that there is a big wave of innovation coming to Japan.
The Chairs "I am very fortunate to have a very strong field of Chairs for Yokohama," Inakage confirms. "They're from academia, from industry, from Asia and beyond. The team is built to look at very many areas of the community and each program is bringing in their very unique ideas about having SIGGRAPH in Japan. Many of the programs have some highlight focuses about Japan. We are also looking at the unique Japanese flavors that would interest those coming to Japan. Even if you have been attending SIGGRAPH for many many years, I think this is a very unique opportunity to experience a very different SIGGRAPH."
