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Rust Belt Chic: City of Destiny Blog
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- At 6:36pm on October 21, 2008,
Tea Pittsburgh said… - I told you I would let you know about my friend, Robert Bruce McDiffett's, dream. SIGGRAPH is the Special Intrest Group on computer GRAPHics and interactive techniques , a part of the ACM or Association of Computing Machinery. Think of SIGGRAPH as Pod Camps, world wide, grand parent. Here is Bruce's dream in his words as he tries to lead SIGGRAPH:
What we do in the future can't be about just doing what we've already done but better, or cheaper, or faster, or more widely. What we do next has to be about taking what we do and using it to discover something totally new. I can't tell you all of what our new vision should be, because our vision needs to come from all of us, the way pixels make up a picture. But I can tell you what it looks like to me.
I don't think we spent 33 years simply building graphics, and then just to build even more graphics for another 33. Looking at it only as graphics sees all the activity, but misses the deeper meaning.
We spent 33 years creating for humankind a new language, and this new language can let us express anything.
This is a new kind of language as well, one that doesn't separate speaker and listener through a subject-verb-object cognitive structure. The experience of using this new language is of direct connection. And the perceptual state is like quantum entanglement, where the consciousness is not just one of separate beings, it's the intentional synthesis of an entirely new kind of consciousness that's an exponential expansion of them all.
This is as fundamental a change in human experience as has ever occurred in human history.
Graphical expression has always been about communicating, and communicating is about the experience of being connected. Pictures have no reason to exist other than as fulfillment of the desire to connect the creator and receiver. And we spent all of our collective life working to create for the world that ability. Connecting people must have been really important to us.
This is where we begin to see the deeper meaning of the other half of our name, the part about "Interactive Techniques." For ages the phrase "Interactive Techniques" has been formally carried around in the SIGGRAPH name, but it was almost always treated like baggage, an anachronistic coding sequence in the SIGGRAPH DNA. Everyone talks about "graphics," almost no one talks about "interactive techniques." We didn't even put it in our acronym.
It's only now that we've completed enough of the first half of our name that the second half can start to switch on. "Interactive Techniques" doesn't refer to just interacting with computers. The deeper meaning is the interaction of people when they're connected - connected using this new language.
Our entire future has been written in our name from the very beginning!
And in a world immersed in images, if we begin to consciously explore the interaction of people when they're connected this way, people will begin to experience themselves no longer as separate and struggling to understand each other, but as always connected and part of a whole.
At the literal level we are, and still want to be, the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. But if we can see our future with these new eyes, we unite our two halves to become something absolutely new. We unite humanity. We bring to the Earth a new soul.
The first time we got to change the world.
This time we get to change what it means to be human.
Does it mean we change much about what we do right away? Not really. We still have the conference, the ongoing research, the chapters, the educational programs, everything we created to this point. We created those things for a reason. What changes is how we look at what we do and why.
It's no coincidence that the most recent conference keynote address (by Joe Rohde) spoke to us about how to take all the things one has collected over time and create from them a thematically meaningful whole. And the single difference between a collection of stuff and a coherent, meaningful whole is a thematic framework within which all the decisions get made. Made within a theme, the outcomes of the decisions reinforce each other. Without an enclosing theme, the exact same choices lead to subtly different outcomes that destroy the coherence of the whole.
So my goal as Director at Large is to straddle the worlds, and make sure all our decisions and activities are seen within our new theme - within our new dream - and to move that way of seeing into enough of SIGGRAPH that by the time my term ends SIGGRAPH naturally sees its world that way all the time. We'll start to see SIGGRAPH not as a technical half and an artistic half, or as an executive committee and members, or as an organization separate from others, but as connected to ourselves and to others. We’ll attract all kinds of new people, who will see us as connected to them, too. And we'll even be able to plan for the eventual ending of the conference as we know it, because we'll have finally learned how to have what we always wanted anyway, which is the experience we love about SIGGRAPH all the time, everywhere, with everyone.
The theme of last year's conference was "Interaction:Interface," and this year's is "Face Tomorrow." They're not separate, and neither are we.
This isn't the end of our journey. It's just where we had to come to begin the next part.
Thank you, and thank you for all the ways you care about SIGGRAPH.
Let's find a new dream.
- At 11:07pm on October 19, 2008,
Chad Warren said… - Thank you for your amazing wealth of knowledge which you shared with me and everyone else at PCPGH3! You are one amazingly dedicated guy!!
- At 12:41pm on June 24, 2008,
Dan Knauss said… - Have you hooked up with people at gluespace.org and the Pittsburgh GLUE? There might be other groups in PA too.
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