Today I am happily ensconced attending technical talks on the first day of the annual SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Vancouver, along with several thousand other like-minded people. There is nothing else quite like this event — the sheer number of great ideas, the combination of advanced mathematical and computational techniques in service of passionate artistic goals. I love the vast diversity to be found here. Some of the presented work aims for perfect realism, while other work creates artistic tools for far more impressionistic results.
What it all has in common is a perfect confluence of aesthetic expressiveness as a goal and top-notch mathematical engineering as a means. Talks are filled with technical terms like Principal Component Analysis, Single Value Decomposition and Hidden Markov Models, while the images one sees are of rays of light streaming through clouds, ocean waves at sunset, gracefully dancing figures, mysterious forests filled with dappled trees, and digital artworks that look like the marble sculptures, evocative pencil sketches, soft watercolors and sombre oil paintings of old masters.
It’s a bit of an arcane world — this use of shared mathematical language and computational expertise to describe the creation of things of aesthetic beauty — and it is a wonderful world, filled with passionate true believers.
Best of all, this year it is in the beautiful city of Vancouver, where the mountains meet the ocean, and the world itself seems made to inspire art.
I’m currently reading James Gleick’s Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Your description of the SIGGRAPH community’s “perfect confluence of aesthetic expressiveness as a goal and top-notch mathematical engineering as a means” makes me think of an analogy with a physicist’s experience of physics as described in the book. Theoretical physicists live in a world of sophisticated mathematics and scientific theories, which are ultimately trying to describe and predict phenomena in the natural world (filled with rays of light streaming through clouds, ocean waves at sunset, etc.). The SIGGRAPH people are creating their worlds and the laws and technologies on which they are built, while the physicists are perhaps trying more to discover than invent, but somehow the mixture of aesthetics and technology seems similar.
Yes, I definitely see — and agree with — the connection!