fritzz@net1.UCSD.EDU (john) (08/27/86)
I'm sorry that I didn't reply to everybody's mail complaining about my truncated posting, it has just been reposted as three separate articles to net.sources. everything should be intact (including susie). (I don't know why there is such a demand, but there is.) Anyway, i didn't have a chance to go to siggraph, being just a hobbyist, but I get to go next year (see ya in anaheim.) I have had a chance to see some of the old siggraph stuff, and in the coming week or so will have a chance to see some of the newer stuff at a computer animation festival. I did manage to get my greedy little paws on some of the course notes from the ray tracing lectures. from what few conventions there are, it doesn't seem that my program follows many of them. (this was the first reading I had done at all on any of this, and I'm realizing just how good some of this stuff really is.) Anyway- now that graphics has become an art form, should we be trying to make it real art, or should we be content with stuff that looks pretty. (i know, I'm one to talk. after all, what can you do with just balls?) f
jon@amdahl.UUCP (Jonathan Leech) (08/28/86)
In article <250@net1.UCSD.EDU>, fritzz@net1.UCSD.EDU (john) writes: > Anyway- now that graphics has become an art form, should we be trying to > make it real art, or should we be content with stuff that looks pretty. > (i know, I'm one to talk. after all, what can you do with just balls?) One of the essays in the SIGGRAPH Art Show booklet this year said something like "computer graphics is obviously unsuited for representational art". Perhaps this explains why I don't understand or like 95+% of computer graphics ``art'' (i.e. the stuff this looks like random numbers were driving a plotter). The graphics group at Caltech interacts with students from the Pasadena Art Center College of Design on occasion; they teach industrial design art. Sometimes when particularly horrible errors occur in our rendering programs the ACCD students comment on how wonderful it looks. There is an obvious and probably impassable gap between the researchers who are trying to attain realism of form, motion, and rendering, and the artists who have no use for it. -- Jon Leech (...seismo!amdahl!jon) UTS Products / Amdahl Corporation __@/