Posted by Steve Dietz on September 25, 2004 12:05 AM
I heard David Em speak on a panel with Yoichiro Kawaguchi
at SIGGRAPH. It was a fascinating ramble through the corridors of various research labs before there was really such a thing as digital art. I took some awful pictures from the back of the lecture hall, but fortunately Em has put up what is essentially the website of his talk, and it is full of gems:
The words on the page don't really convey the "I'd seen the future" of Em's voice, but taking a year to draw a 3D bug gives you a sense of the obsession.
His story is also the story of Moore's Law, and he writes that in 1991, "it was clear to me that my days of depending on big labs to do my work would soon be history."
I'm unconvinced that access to cutting edge technology is ever important for most digital artists, and to the extent that we make the general case for art and technology an issue of innovation, we are making the weak case for art.
