The Illusionist Table at the Scitech Awards

Is it the Addams family or is it our table at the Scitech Awards?

This picture was taken so long ago that David Coons is still married to Carlye.   There is very little light in that room and I am morally opposed to flash units, so that explains the use of the candles to try and add a little illumination.

Besides David Coons and Carlye, we have Rick Sayre, Nicki Kaiser, Josh Pines in the center, Stu Moscowitz (sp) and his lovely girlfriend.  I am inquiring the names of the other people there and about when this happened.

Nikki points out that the candles and the tuxedos make it look like a meeting of illusionists, perhaps earlier last century or even before.

Jeff Kleiser and Coco Conn at the Hotel Figueroa

At a SIGGRAPH long ago, Jeff and Coco discuss something very important.   Between Jeff and Coco we have the two most important social/party organizers of the LA computer animation community in the 1980s.

Jeff is of course partner in the Kleiser/Walczak Construction Company and Coco was the force behind SIGKIDS at SIGGRAPH for many years.

The Ancient Past of Early Computer Animation (draft)

This is all just going to be rewritten.

A friend of mine, Terrance Masson, hosted an event at SIGGRAPH 2014 to tell some of the stories behind the early work in computer animation.   I was invited because it is thought that I know quite a few of these stories, and I do.  But instead I wrote up some notes as to why it is very difficult for people to look at the early work in computer animation and make much sense of it or know why these projects are important, if indeed they are.

Although I am going to try and explain some of the factors behind these projects.  But it may still be very hard to understand.   

I may say that I walked through the snow five miles each day to go to school and you may believe me.  I may say that if we wanted to do computer animation we had to build our own computer and you may believe me.  I may tell you that the electronics for a 512x512 frame buffer (graphics display) without the monitor might cost you about $30K.   Or that a major production studio had about 1/2 gigabyte of disk total.

It is extremely difficult to look into the past and really understand what people were thinking and why they did what they did.  If you are going to understand history, even the history of people still living, then you are going to have to realize how recent certain things really are, how much smaller the community was, how much less money was involved, and how much of this was essentially an outsider activity.

The projects I am referring to were created and premiered, generally at SIGGRAPH, between the years 1995 - 1993 or so.   By 1995 at the latest, it was a completely different world.

So here are some things to consider when viewing an early computer animation project (in no particular order):

1. The further back you go in time, the more likely it is that they wrote their own software or someone on the team was writing software.   What!  Write one's own software!?  How technical!  Yes, thats right, to do computer animation you had to know what a computer was.

2. As far as we know, no one in authority thought this was really going to work. No mainstream entertainment organization believed that they were going to be making movies with computer, that 3D animation would take over from 2D to a large degree, that visual effects would use synthetic imagery, etc.

3. With the exception of Lucas and possibly Disney, so far as I know none of the major studios paid for any of this technology until it was all proven to work and make them money.

4. Some people were being paid to do the projects you know about, some were not.  Those who were paid were often expected to do a real job as well, or in some cases their management permitted people to work on the project you are looking at rather than their real job.

5. Computers were unbelievably slower and more expensive.  A 12 bit 512x512 frame buffer (e.g. color display) cost about $30K in 1976 dollars.  Note that is 12 bits, e.g. 4 bits each R, G and B.

6. Some of the best motion graphics was done between 1976 and 1978.

7. All of the projects that we are talking about here were labors of love.

8. Attending the "film" show was an intellectual activity, as my friend Andy Kopra has pointed out.  It was the ideas being demonstrated that made the project important.  If you did not know what those ideas were then you would not be able to understand the piece.  So for example, imho, "Luxo, Jr" by Pixar was about demonstrating that a character could be brought to life in classic Disney character animation terms using 3D graphics.  The film was about proving that such a thing was possible, and only secondarily about a lamp playing ball with another lamp.

9. Although there were people who were interested in the commercial applications to the entertainment industry, there were also many people who were interested in abstract filmmaking, electronic and video synthesis and other, completely non-commercial uses in the visual arts.

... to be continued

Rashomon (1950) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042876/

Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report

The recent suicide of Robin Williams has led to a flurry of articles expressing concern about "suicide contagion" or the phenomenon of people committing suicide after someone famous or someone they know commits suicide.   I have read some of these articles and it is probably a real phenomenon although it is of course mixed in with the more complicated topic of why people commit suicide in the first place and what would be involved in helping them so that they did not see the necessity to do so.

But this post is not about that.  It is about a particular newsletter that is issued weekly:  the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Its all about death on a weekly basis, but God forbid you should use that word.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/

Anti-Social and Criminal Behavior in Social Media

What to do when people attack you on the Internet?   There are many techniques possible including revenge, laughter, threats of violence (which are illegal by the way) and so forth.  

One solution is to help your enemies by telling them what has already been tried so that they do not waste your time.   That is the technique of Ms. Fitzpatrick who has written a letter to her attackers describing what has already been tried and what effect it had.  

The kind of behavior that she is responding to is amazingly bad.  We are talking juvenile, delusional, psycho-pathological, paranoid, vindictive, violent, anti-social, hateful, racist, sexist, vicious, obsessive and criminal.

Just an average day on the Internet, I suppose.

Here are the first three paragraphs of her post:

      Did you come to my blog because you saw something I wrote on an Internet forum or Twitter 

      which you didn't like?

      Are you now frantically Googling my name and trying to "come up with something on me" so 

      you can try to discredit my ideas along with me?

      Let me help. Save yourself some time, and realize that you don't have to spend hours 

      Googling and drilling needlessly on the Wayback Machine, because there's no scandal here.
      If you're trying to silence my legitimate speech and criticism by trying to "come up with 

      something" on me, give it up. Use words, if you have an argument against my blogs, and don't

      try to harass me with "doxing," vilification, smearing, etc. It's not going to work.

Ms. Fitzpatrick's advice to her enemies is very long but worth reading if you have the time.

I come from the period of early online communities. I remember programs like Talkomatic on Plato, and I have used various text based MUDS or whatever they were called.  I participated in early email lists on the ARPAnet like everyone else until I got tired of the flames and the time it took to participate.  I helped test an early version of the Warner Bros multi-person online game "The Palace".   I sponsored and helped implement one of the early versions of a networked-multiperson game, Mazewar. I screwed around with Second Life and once had a very pleasant makeout session with a beautiful virtual woman. Unfortunately my browser got caught in some sort of infinite loop while we were smooching and nothing ever came of it.

It all seemed to me to be playful, entertaining and certainly not harmful beyond the usual problems of distracting young people from their homework or household chores.

But obviously the world has changed and from the slime pits of online social networking we have real-world groups such as Wikileaks, Anonymous and the delusional and narcissistic actions of would-be freedom fighters who work to destroy their country on behalf of the most oppressive governments of the world.  (1)

In fact most of the attacks on Fitzpatrick stem from her non-politically-correct opinions about Snowden and his collaborators.

You may also wish to examine the case of the XX Committee and the actions taken to destroy the reputation and career of its author because of his very literate and compelling posts on the Snowden Operation.   The link for that is also at the end of the post.

This shit isn't funny anymore.

Advice to Google Witch Hunters

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/google_witch_hunters.html

In Solidarity with John Schindler @20Committee

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2014/06/in-solidarity-with-john-schindler-20committee.html

__________________________________________

1. This is just reality, kids.  You may not like it, but nothing Snowden or Greenwald has exposed was against American law.   You may disagree with the policies that led to those activities that were exposed, and if so I recommend you elect different representatives to Washington.   All of it, and I mean all of it, was under control of the President, the national security apparatus and the courts.   It was thus all under the control of your legally elected representatives.  If you believe in changing our government by illegal means,  Snowden and Greenwald may have value.   They have certainly collaborated with foreign, hostile intelligence services, independent of whether or not those services sponsored and controlled their activities from the beginning. They are certainly in the service of foreign intelligence today.    Do not think for one moment that the activities of Snowden and Greenwald was legitimate whistle blowing because it wasn't.  They are pursuing a radical political agenda of their own and using illegal means.   There is another discussion that one can have about whether illegal means are legitimate in the context of such events as the Bush coup d'etat of 2000, but that is a separate discussion and even if we decide that they are legitimate, and I do not necessarily do so, I still would not agree with or approve of the Snowden Operation.

Jon Snoddy in New York City

One of the reasons I started with photography again after many years was because I noticed I seemed to have a large number of interesting friends, and that pictures of them as time went by would be entertaining.

Perhaps one of the inspirations for this was that famous black photographer of Harlem clubs, whose name I have forgotten, who took photographs of the people who came to play at clubs he hung out at and who eventually ended up with a photographic record of the history of jazz and blues in this country.

This is Jon Snoddy visiting me in New York City.  I think we are at a cafe on Columbus Ave in the Upper West Side.  I forget if he was working for Walt Disney Imagineering at the time or if this was during one of his entrepreneurial activities, perhaps Gameworks.

Jon is now back at Imagineering and has the misfortune of being rather senior in the Imagineering R&D organization.   We all make mistakes.

Hannes Leopoldseder of the Prix Ars Electronica

Hannes was the founder of Prix Ars Electronica as I understand it and one of the people who ran it along with my friends Christina Schoepf, Gerfried Stocker and others.

The Prix Ars Electronica was and probably still is one of the leading and most prestigious prizes in the electronic arts.   There will be many more pictures from my 3 or so visits to Linz on this website.

One of his jobs was to work with the various investors in industry in Linz, Austria, as well as the civic leaders in order to develop the contributions necessary to run the prize.   Here is at work during one of the jury periods of the Prix at some very pleasant Linz restaurant.

Hannes is the one in the middle.

Prix Ars Electronica
http://www.aec.at/prix/en

Carly Archibeque Reflective

Carly Archibeque at some social event.   Formerly married to a good friend of mine, and now very distant, perhaps to create a clean beginning after their divorce.  Carly was extraordinarily courteous to me when she worked at the Academy in Rich Miller's office and I lived in New York.  I suspect that was just her being professional and courteous to everyone but still it was very nice and very appreciated.  It made me feel as though I had a friend "inside", as it were.

Judson Rosebush on the Hudson

Judson Rosebush is a pioneer of computer animation who was partner in one of the earliest computer animation production companies, Digital Effects in New York City.   In this picture, shot available light, he is navigating his boat on the Hudson river and we are passing close to the Intrepid aircraft carrier.

At one point, about a decade ago, Judson ran an office out of Carnegie hall that was doing dozens of interactive media CD-ROMs for various publishers.   I was very impressed as well with Judson's research into the history of the Manhattan project in Manhattan as well as visiting the site of the Trinity test.  He is the only person I know who has in his possession a piece of Trinitite.

I need to track him down and see how he is doing.

Head of a Griffin at the Metropolitan

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is this head of a Griffin sitting in a case.  I believe that they give an approximate date but very little other information.  What was its provenance.  Where on earth did this come from?  A tomb?  Was it designed to be mounted on a staff?  

I had an opportunity in New York City to hear a lecture by Adrienne Mayor, an art historian from Princeton at the time, about her theory of the origin of the Griffin.   First mentioned by Herodotus who said that the story was spread by nomads and traders on the silk road, Ms Mayor observed that on one portion of the silk road one finds large fields of fossils exposed to the air.  One of the most common would look like the skeleton of a very large, four footed beast with the head of a bird.

Griffin on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin

Adrienne Mayor on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Mayor