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“TEATIME at Boston ACM
SIGGRAPH 2006”
By Jen Grey (aka JEN ZEN)
Vice-Chair, Fine Art
Subcommittee,
Los Angeles ACM SIGGRAPH
SIGGRAPH 2006 presented The Teapot as
Object and Icon “to showcase the long association of the teapot with the
worlds of computer graphics, art, and our host city of Boston.” The exhibition
features juried and curated work by artists, crafts persons and scientists who
create fascinating 2D and 3D teapots using computer graphic technologies or
interactive techniques. Inspired dually by the Boston Tea Party and the R(evolutionary)
Boston SIGGRAPH 1989, the exhibition program
is the brainchild of veteran
ceramicist Marc J. Barr, SIGGRAPH 2006 Teapot Exhibit Chair, Middle Tennessee
State University and his team Sonny Kamm, Kamm Teapot Foundation and Guanping
Zheng, Middle Tennessee State University.
The magnificent teapot exhibition was
underscored by three terrific events:
Teapot through the Ages,
a fascinating talk by Peter Shirley, University of Utah, about the research and
development of the iconic teapot modeled by Martin Newell at the University of
Utah more than 30 years ago.
Enjoying the World’s most Popular Beverage,
a wonderful exposition on the nature, history, manufacture and enjoyment of tea
by Frank Sanchez of Upton Tea Imports.
Teatime with Dr. Martin Newell,
Adobe Fellow and Inventor of the Utah Teapot, sipped tea with friends and
guests including Jim Blinn, both answering questions and making quips about
historic achievements… while signing free, limited edition ceramic
teapots
generously donated by the Upton Tea Company.
The Teapot as Object and Icon (The Teapot Exhibition)
Reading the Artist’s Technical
and Esthetic statements for the Teapot Exhibition is a “must do” for a quick
lesson in the evolving history of benchmark teapots featured at the SIGGRAPH
conventions since 1976. There’s enough material to write a fascinating book,
and settle a few esthetic arguments about the seamless marriage of form vs.
function, information vs. esthetics, art vs. science. Guy Godin provides
perhaps the oldest precedent in the show by tracking ray tracing to the model
for catoptrical anamorphic images originally invented in 1630, the year Boston
was founded.
The complete, original table setting for the
iconic Utah teapot designed by Martin Newell is featured together with the
Aluminum Utah Teapot by Gershon Elber and the Plastic Utah Teapot by Steve Sady,
all historic benchmarks specially fabricated for this show by Ann Torrence,
University of Utah. From Digital to Analog, or the Rebirth of a Teapot
by Sebastien Dion further honors the evolving model originally developed by
Martin Newell and Jim Blinn, using heat-resistant molds and advanced
rapid-prototyping to process 3D digital files.
“Where better to foment a
revolution in a teapot than Boston!” touts Stephen Barrass. Totally invisible,
his revolutionary Air-Teapot is rendered interactively using
computer-generated touch and sound. You can feel and hear it when you tap it
with a teaspoon, but you just can’t see it! Whether programmed in C++ basic,
scratched into metal or inspired by Victorian embroidery, each teapot in the
show is uniquely beautiful, embodying the vision and imagination of its maker.
Paul Desai uses “very simple concepts to create elaborate and expressive”
teapot in Raku fired clay. Scott Rench “fuses today's technology with one of
the oldest traditions” in creating his delightfully anthropomorphic ceramic
teapot Head Full of Dreams. Hi-tech and lo-tech creations coexist
gracefully, unified by a sense of history and visionary spirit.
Humor based on
illusion is an undeniable unifying force in the show. Robert Engle playfully
points out that his
TEAPOT: The Movie Teaser
“plays homage to the trailer originally produced for the film Alien
and, of course, to the Utah teapot… in space, no one can hear you steam…. the
sound effects were sampled from a gas stove and a whistling tea kettle.”
Combining function and fantasy, the playfully surreal fur-and-feather creature
designed by John van der Zalm doubles as a teapot reminiscent of Man Ray’s fur
lined teacup turned inside out. Gene Gregor generated
Boston Skyline, Rendered With
Teapots using a
mosaic of 466,000+ tiny teapots, his tribute to the city as a double entendre.
The amazing
Wuyi Mountains by Julian Landa are subtley enhanced to metamorphose as
teapots steaming in the mist. Nothing is as it first appears. The art of the
double take is vital to human engagement and intrigue.
Finding a universal language is
what the show is all about… whether it is the linkage between ancient Japanese
tradition and mathematical multi-vertex constraint equations in Tomiro Tachi’s
2D Origami Teapot… or the connection between Nature and particle
primitives set in motion by Andy Lomas to generate artificial life in The
Aggregated Teapot. The balance of innovation and stability in evolving
structures for global communication is not taken for granted. In Homage to
Typography, David Ross builds a history of teapots based on a
scholarly and compelling use of archetypal fonts. Copper Frances Giloth
exploits computer graphics vocabulary in Alphabet Word Gestures, culled
from professional glossaries generally used for SIGGRAPH technical and art
journals from 1977 through 2005.
Ultimately, the art exhibition
reveals the teapot as a ubiquitous symbol of civilization itself, politically
correct in diffusing boundaries between gender, culture, art and science. No
wonder that tea has been enjoyed for at least four and a half thousand years,
with no sign of diminishing popularity.
Apart from water, tea is the most popular
beverage in the world.
As
Jesse Miele confidently affirms in
The Common World of Tea,
“Tea provides distinctive ways for cultures to connect to other cultures.” What
better way to intertwingle individual people, companies, and nations in
the spirit of SIGGRAPH than with this special celebration of the teapot!
Teapot through the Ages and Teatime with
Dr. Martin Newell
Legendary, Historic, Pioneering, Canonical,
Iconic… the infamous teapot created by Martin Newell has been sliced, shot,
shattered and rendered by the best in the business. The bunny couldn’t beat it,
underwater caustics didn’t destroy it, and the Buddha will want to challenge it
again. Out of the thirty of fifty most famous papers written in the first
twelve years of its inception, the Utah teapot was mentioned only once.
Otherwise it just wasn’t there. And it couldn’t hold water, much less tea.
Fish (standing on Driskill’s shoulders) gave it a solid bottom in 1992. Now, of
course, Newell’s original paper is referenced as one of the two or three most
important treatises ever written in the field of computer science.
Since its inception in 1975, the benchmark Utah
teapot has become
“the”
highly recognizable, utilitarian, topographically complex reference for
texture mapping, shading, ray tracing, renderosity and other such data. It
packs into a small storage space…. and is free (even though Homer Simpson
thinks, “It looks really expensive…”). It has interior and exterior concavities
and convexities, together with “saddle points” useful in checking algorithms
associated with continuing research and development. As a long-standing insider
joke in the computer graphics industry, the teapot enjoyed cameo appearances in
Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Disney’s Beauty and the Best,
as well as The Simpsons…not to mention its appearances
in the Windows Pipe screensaver and other popular industry products. The
highly evolved Utah teapot now boasts retroactive status as the “Teapotahedron,
(The Sixth Platonic Solid)”.
Jim Blinn said he
“squashed it shortly after Martin created it, as a demonstration targeted to the
Department of Defense to get new research funding. They didn’t get it, but they
kept the squashed version anyway, about 2/3 the scale of Martin’s original
model.” Just goes to show what you can learn by joining a tea party. Trust in
the nature of evolution! Knowing this piece of trivia won me “the delightful
teapot tile prize” awarded by Peter Shirley during his fascinating lecture. At
teatime, Martin Newell was kind enough to sign it by saying “It was my wife’s
idea!”, and went on to explain that after donating her original Melitta teapot
to the Boston Computer Museum in 1984 (the very one that inspired his own
model), that she demanded a replacement. Because of its iconic stature, the
once inexpensive pot could only be replaced on e-bay as a collector’s item worth
upwards of $350.00… a fact truly appreciated by the growing number of teapot
trivia fans… and reinforced by his
own infamous remark at a SIGGRAPH presentation in the late 80’s “that
of all the things he has done for the world of 3D graphics, the only thing he
will be remembered for is That Damned Teapot".
Enjoying the World’s most Popular Beverage
with Frank Sanchez
Despite common misperceptions, all the
different kinds of tea…red, green, white and black…all come from the same
plant. Each tea has its own unique piquancy and provenance. Sri Lanka is the
mother lode of the richest and most robust of teas. Tea from Autralia has a
flavorful nutmeg nuance. Although it was considered unpatriotic during the
Revolutionary War for Colonists to drink tea, the love of tea generally crosses
all cultural boundaries.
Whether grown in Indonesia, Australia, South
Africa, China, Japan or India, the best tea pluckers return to the same rows of
tea plants to harvest only the freshest new shoots. Although source is
essential to definition, processing systems are key to flavor. Harvested from
only the smallest buds, it can take as many as 170,000 pluckings to create the
very finest tea. The method of plucking, withering, shaking or rolling, shaping
or cutting, oxidation, pan frying or firing (drying), packaging, and final
shipping strategies ultimately determine the unique quality and essential
character of each tea.
Judging moisture, crunch and aroma are standard
esthetic criteria applied to a tea’s potential for sweet, bitter, or tangy
flavor. Yet tasteful tea connoisseurship also references brightness,
luminescence, sparkle and aroma. (Doesn’t this sound like a wine tasting?) Lu
Yu, the Patron Saint of Tea, was famous for testing his tea-time guests by
asking if they could judge which water tasted best…. that from the middle of the
stream, or that from the edge of the stream? Ultimately, Lu Yu judged, “Tea’s
goodness is a matter for the mouth to decide!” Steeped in tasteful tradition,
this is the secret of success in the world of tea.
To see the teapots:
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conference&p=teapot&s=index
Extra Thanks:
A Critical History of
Computer Graphics and Animation at:
http://accad.osu.edu/~wanec/history/lesson20.html
sjbaker.org/teapot
Wikipedia
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