Siggraph

If you hurry (you have until 2 p.m. today) down to the bowels of the San Diego Convention Center (rooms 15 and 16 on the Mezzanine Level), you can still enjoy the Guerilla Studio experience, make some art, meet some collaborators, or just goof around.

With Gibson guitars wailing in the background, I discovered artists, students, and curiosity seekers “playing with lots of cool toys,” as one of them described it. Down there earlier, I watched a young man get his face scanned using a Polhemus handheld scanner so that he could “play with myself,” so to speak, using animation software. I also watched artists sketching on Wacom tablets, people animating stacks of colorful teacups, folks printing out all sorts of CG drawings, sketches, and previsualizations, and I listened in as artists hotly debated new ways to animate organic shapes to do all sorts of “reverse engineering,” whatever that is. In other words, this is the colorful, expressive, and free little corner of Siggraph where anything goes.

Thanks to sponsors Intel, Dell (some 60 Xeon Precision worktations) and Adobe, certain art schools, and several private donors, some extremely high-end technology is available for use at Guerilla Studio free of charge for participants who just want to make art, learn a few things, and have some fun. It’s the Studio’s 12th year at Siggraph, and it has grown so large that, finally, the technology and programs available are “fully funded,” according to Rebecca Strzelec, Guerilla Studio Chair and a professor at Penn State University. Thus, at next year’s Siggraph, the term “Guerilla” be dropped and it will be the Siggraph Studio. But the concept will remain unchanged: free high-end technology and guidance to work on art projects, network, and collaborate throughout the show.

So, don’t worry–if you don’t get to check out Guerilla Studio today before Siggraph winds down, you’ll get another chance next year.

In a little while, we’ll upload a portion of my conversation with Rebecca to the blog page to give you a detailed podcast explaining the history, activities, goals, and future of the Guerilla Studio. Watch this space for that to appear shortly.

Meanwhile, congratulations to Rebecca. She’s getting married next week and, for some reason connected, apparently, to her loved of baseball, she’ll be honeymooning in … Pittsburgh.

See you next year at Guerilla Studios.

–Michael Goldman