Where the Mona Lisa Meets the Motherboard

Real Keith sits quietly near the back of the room and watches Virtual Keith misbehave. A battered TV set welded to the frame of a mechanized wheelchair careens through a confused crowd of convention-goers, its screen flickering with images of a skinny young man, dancing and wearing a green wig, as if trapped inside. A half-dozen startled attendees at SIGGRAPH, a massive annual convention that melds the passionate and disparate arms of the digital art world, move out of Virtual Keith’s way.

One man stares down the TV set, touches what looks like an on-screen menu, trying to control the thing. “People think it’s some advanced supercomputer with A.I. and sensors,” says Real Keith, actually an assistant professor of design from Florida State University named Keith Roberson, just the kind of man you’d expect to find in the back corner of this conference, “and they’re so disappointed to see it’s a guy with a remote control.”

His $500 contraption, made with parts pulled from Dumpsters or found at Radio Shack, may be the most low-tech item on display at this notoriously fast-forward-minded conference, where big-boy Hollywood graphics and far-fetched ideas about The Future mix easily with experimental art, and Real Keith likes it that way. “Virtual Keith is almost a reaction to all these other things here,” he says of the Los Angeles Convention Center, packed this week with gee-whiz software and multimillion-dollar art installations.

Usually pronounced “see graph” and short for Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques, the hard-to-define SIGGRAPH draws a hot mix of about 40,000 Hollywood techies, ambitious eggheads, artists, futurists and the just plain curious. “Everybody comes here,” says Harry Mott, head of the digital media department at L.A.’s Otis College of Art and Design, leading a breakneck tour of SIGGRAPH’s main exhibit hall, geared more toward graphic arts pros than playful professors and their robot avatars. The room looks, at first, like any big computer conference, with huge signs for Intel and Pixar and slogans telling us to “focus on the new.”

As a professional digital artist, this is where Mott catches up, picking up software tips. He zips down the aisles, one hand gripping his cane, the other usually shaking somebody else’s hand, asking former students and software pitchmen, “What have you seen that’s cool?”--the only way to digest the whole thing. “The majority of people are into sharing what they know,” Mott says. “If you say, ‘Oooh, that’s neat. How’d you do that?’ they want to tell you.”

Down the hall, the crowd takes a sharp turn away from the practical and commercial at the exhibit of “emerging technologies,” a playroom of well-funded ideas. Here, among velvet couches, soft indirect lighting and strategically placed bamboo, signs encourage you to “hack your wetware” (read: body) by practicing a kind of wired meditation. Nearby, a monitor depicts Mona Lisa’s face being pulled apart by human hands, and men with giant computers strapped to their backs walk slowly through an invisible grid.

“This place draws a lot of people who are doing things on the edges,” says Steve Harrison, who first attended SIGGRAPH in the mid-’70s and now works for an experimental arm of Xerox where he thinks about the future of reading. His group is interested not only in new reading devices but whole new ways of using written language that have nothing to do with words strung from left to right. He points to a table lit up with a little digital rolling ball and the names of languages. Grabbing and tilting the device, as one might with a pinball table, sends the ball careening toward English or Greek or Klingon, which triggers an appropriate translation for the word “peace.” In a project like this, Harrison sees reading becoming a social activity, as it was in ancient Rome when people gathered to take in writings carved into walls.

If there is a current running through SIGGRAPH, from Virtual Keith to the better, faster software sought by Harry Mott, it may be the attempt to render and re-imagine, in greater detail and from any perspective, the very things around us. That means graphing stock market data as pulsating cones or, as students from MIT demonstrate in the mesmerizing Alpha Wolf, creating a biologically sound simulation of a wolf’s lifecycle among the pack, to be played as a video game. A nearby consortium of academics shows off a database archive of photo-realistic 3D insect bodies, assembled so entomologists don’t have to travel to, say, Malaysia to study the underside of a Leaf Beetle.

The passionate here at SIGGRAPH would like to see Earth and everything on it digitized, says Dan Corr, who works for a four-man research group called FakeSpace Labs. “You can’t make a movie now without fake wind, fake water, fake hazy air,” he says. The same strict adherence to science that makes the fatty parts of a summer-movie dinosaur jiggle can be used to graph, interpret and understand massive amounts of real-world data. “Nuclear physicists now can get into a room, on a subatomic level, and push a quark over here,” he says, describing a recent project, “just to see what happens.”

The strange logic of SIGGRAPH finds, directly next to Corr and the bug enthusiasts, Lars Erik Holmquist using the same principles to create art--or, rather, Art. He offers a digital screen that looks like the simple red, blue and yellow block paintings of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian but is actually a weather map, the colors and square sizes determined by real-time information from the Internet. You can’t divine the exact temperature in Los Angeles, nor can you tell time on the array of Warholian soup cans that Holmquist swears is a clock, but the data is in there somewhere. That’s what makes it interesting. “Humans love complex information,” says Bruce Schena, who works for one of the big companies in the main hall but is mesmerized by the clock and weather map, their interpretation of the world. “This taps into the interconnectedness of everything.”

The practical fabric of SIGGRAPH wears even thinner in the N-Space exhibit, where artists trade earnest e-dogma for commentary, things like a darkened closet space filled with piles of shoes and the sounds of children talking about the Web in Portuguese. Among the more engaging is Eunmi Yang, who traveled from Korea to spend the week running a vacuum over the image of a cityscape imprinted with an e.e. cummings poem. As each word is “sucked” up, it disappears and a flower pops up over the urban landscape. “I am vacuuming the city to return to nature,” she explains, an effect similar to that which poetry has on the human brain, she says, the words bringing us closer to “our real nature.”

Her poetry vacuum and Virtual Keith and the nearby simulated guillotine strike a strange balance against the gloss of entertainment applied to almost every level of work and science on display here, a harsh commentary of, it might seem, SIGGRAPH itself. But is the idea that poetry can change your outlook much different than saying that goggles hooked up to a computer can? Is a roaming TV with your head on the screen more or less meaningful than a TV commercial with animated crackers?

The only clear truth at SIGGRAPH might be this: The magnet water is cool. No exhibit has better word of mouth here than what is essentially a lava lamp made from a shiny, black magnetic liquid, a dark pool of fluid between two discs that suddenly ripples, breaks out into spikey cones and then leaps skyward. It’s as gorgeous as it is useless, as foreign here at the conference as it is as home.

“How come nobody ground up magnets and made a fluid out of it before? That’s nowhere near the cutting edge,” says Real Keith, running his crude robot around the room, in awe of the magnet water, unimpressed with the kids from Brazil, the database of bugs, the rest of it. “So much attention is focused on the cutting edge, but the simplest things take the most insight.”