Sure enough, wide awake at 4:00 a.m. After watching Mr. Rives enlightening 2007 TED presentation on the 4 a.m. conspiracy (a.k.a., The Giacometti Code) last night before going to bed, I fell victim to it. That’s okay though, being awake gave me some more time to work on a current animation:

The Telfair Museum (Savannah, Georgia) is holding their annual art and technology event, now a festival, in their Jepson Center for the Arts. The PULSE: Art and Technology Festival will run 21–31 January 2009. One of my prints, 2003.1a, and a time-based work, 2007.2a, are being shown and I will be presenting a lecture on my work during the event.

Here is 2003.1a and a detail from that print work:

2003.1a, limited variant edition print, 2003, Kenneth A. Huff.

Detail from 2003.1a, limited variant edition print, 2003, Kenneth A. Huff.

And here are some still frames from the animated work, 2007.2a (you can see short excerpts from the piece here and here):

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

The lecture will be at 12:30 p.m. on Monday, 26 January 2009 in the Jepson Center Auditorium. I will be presenting my body of work, focusing on the inspiration and ideas behind the work, with particular emphasis on the two series of works represented by the two pieces above.

While the festival ends on 31 January, the museum currently is scheduled to continue showing my print and animation throughout 2009.

[Personal aside: I am particularly excited to see tonight’s performance by Ben Neill and LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Robots).]

I am very happy to announce that my work is now being shown at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. Twenty of my still images and two site-specific time-based works are being shown in the Center’s Deep Space projection space. The showing is currently slated to last at least through 2009.

The Ars Electronica center is one of the longest-established centers for new media art, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year. On 2 January 2009, they celebrated the grand opening of a new building and the start of Linz’s year as the European Union Cultural Capital.

In the Center’s new building, Deep Space is a dedicated projection gallery with the capacity to show 4K (3840 by 2160 pixels), stereoscopic, 16 meter by 9 meter projections simultaneously on the wall and floor! With my still images, visitors will be able to zoom in on the full detail of the works, allowing them to explore the works in a way that until now was only possible in my studio. Very exciting.

Through fortuitous circumstance, I was in Linz for a site visit on the day the Deep Space projectors were turned on for the first time and my pieces were the first images to be projected in the space.

Here I am standing in front of a portion of EPF:2003:V:B:5::383(25) with a silly happy grin.

Here is my partner, Sean, acting as human scale in the space and standing in front of a projection of my time-based work, 2007.3. The horizontal red laser line is for projector alignment. Four projectors are being used for the wall and another four for the floor (one of the projectors shut down with in a few minutes of starting up). The bright horizontal and vertical bands are the projector overlaps that had yet to be blended away in the installation. (All of this is from early December, when the new building still was very-much-under-construction.)

In addition to the still images being shown, I prepared site-specific versions of 2006.7 and 2007.3 to be shown in the space. The two time-based works were recreated to take full advantage of the 4K cinematic projectors. Below are reduced stills from 2006.7 (Deep Space) and 2007.3 (Deep Space).

Additional events incorporating my work are being planned throughout the year, including during the Center’s annual Ars Electronica Festival, 3–8 September 2009. I will post details here and on my Events page as soon as they are available.

Links:

Kenneth A. Huff: Selections from Ôr’ganik Constructions in Deep Space

Deep Space

Ars Electronica Center

Ars Electronica Festival

Here is an annotated list of technical resources that I find useful for my work. Currently, they are in no particular order and all are in the realm of high-end 3D computer graphics software, specifically Autodesk Maya and mental images mental ray. I first prepared this list for my students in the Visual Effects Department of the School of Film, Digital Media and Performing Arts at Savannah College of Art and Design.

Dave Johnson’s blog has very good material regarding mental ray, character technical direction and MEL:

http://www.djx.com.au/blog/

Zap Andersson is an engineer with mental images who worked on the fast skin material. His blog is a great resource for mental ray information:

http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/

The Los Angeles mental ray User Group has all sorts of mentral ray-related goodies:

http://www.lamrug.org/

mymentalray.com is a growing resource for the mental ray community:

http://www.mymentalray.com/

A personal favorite is the page explaining sampling in mental ray, a good thing to understand for high-quality and efficient renderings:

http://www.lamrug.org/resources/samplestips.html

Eric Pavey’s MEL Wiki is an excellent aggregation of information for Maya’s built-in scripting language, MEL:

http://mayamel.tiddlyspot.com/

There’s always Duncan Brinsmead’s blog…recently showing some fun with Maya’s nCloth for non-cloth simulations:

http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/blogs_duncan/blog_list/

Here is a very good Maya Wiki:

http://www.tokeru.com/t

I will update this post as things change or as I come across additional resource.

Partly in preparation for upcoming events at the Ars Electronica Center (more on that soon) and partly to take a long-delayed vacation, Sean and I visited Austria and France in early December.

Above, Sean is drawing one of Michelangelo’s Slaves in the Musée du Louvre.

Rather than duplicate our efforts, we decided to post everything on Sean’s blog: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. The post are heavy with photos and heavier with silliness.