SIGGRAPH 2009 is over. Tra­di­tion­ally renowned as a graph­ics geek fest, with a focus on 3D and ani­ma­tion, I was not sur­prised to hear “GPU” in every sec­ond over­heard sen­tence. But there is also the other side of SIGGRAPH: the art exhi­bi­tions, the emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies exhi­bi­tion and the freshly intro­duced infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics pro­gram with talks, a panel and an exhi­bi­tion. I was present there with the well-formed.eigenfactor project and also had the chance to give a lit­tle talk.

The exhi­bi­tion – well curated by Vic­to­ria Szabo – fea­tured a nice selec­tion of a broad range of works, both from the usual sus­pects like sta­men and Boris Müller, but also quite some works I was not yet famil­iar with. I espe­cially enjoyed newsknit­ter, c-loc, the fab­u­lous syn­chro­nous objects and Rhythm Analy­sis: A Tem­po­ral Stere­op­sis of Urban Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion Data Topog­ra­phy.

I had a short pre­sen­ta­tion (slides) on Mon­day morn­ing in front of roughly 70 peo­ple. I pre­sented some of the process and ratio­nale behind the well-formed.eigenfactor project, gave an overview of the data analy­sis and ended with some “out­takes” of dis­con­tin­ued approaches and my favorite bug screen­shots, as I get a lot of inspi­ra­tion out of bad code. Thanks to Nicole Cole­man for the good orga­ni­za­tion and moderation!

The project talks were fol­lowed by a panel in the after­noon, where I was delighted to see, among oth­ers, Andrew Vande Moere and Ken­nth Huff talk about their work and per­spec­tive on infos­thet­ics. Over­all, how­ever, the panel was very broad in topic and in sum, lack­ing a cen­tral ques­tion or some red lines. For the years to come, it might be an idea to tie pan­els, talks and exhi­bi­tions closer together.

The days flew by and it was a great expe­ri­ence to be at SIGGRAPH and the Big Easy – New Orleans. Jazz and Blues every­where and a real good vibe. Made some new friends, learned a lot, and the scotch and music in the dba were not shabby either.