Studio 2005
The Guerilla Studio 2005 – Los Angeles
by siggraphstudioadmin on Jan.01, 2005, under Studio 2005
For many years, the Guerilla Studio at the SIGGRAPH Conference has been a special venue where attendees experience exotic technology hands-on. The Guerilla Studio, known by other names in the past, has faced ebbs and flows of conference support over the years, but it has always featured exotic video, 3D, print, and imaging tools. Participants sign up for time in the studio to explore new software and equipment or to work on projects. They take home their creations, including images, books, videos, and 3D prototypes.
Corporate support
The studio receives support from corporate donors, including Adobe, which provide the equipment and supplies for the weeklong event. These include computers, network hardware, software, large-format inkjet printers, 3D rapid prototyping printers, digital nail printers, paper, scanners, motion capture devices, video cameras, and technical expertise.
The Guerilla Studio team
Peter Braccio of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute spends a year organizing all of the donations necessary to run a functional multifaceted lab for just one week a year before the lab is again packed into crates. At the 2005 SIGGRAPH, Braccio was supported by a team of more than 25 talented artists and scientists, including Patricia Clarke, a longtime Guerilla Studio contributor in the video area from Arizona State University, and Lyn Bishop, who had recently been traveling internationally and working with Asian students.
An international project
Bishop proposed a collaborative art project for the 2005 Guerilla Studio that would involve people she had worked with in India, at National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore. One of them, Kumkum Nadig, Srishti’s Visual Communication Design Department head, was planning a trip to the United States in the summer, and Bishop convinced her to participate in the Guerilla Studio as part of her travels.
Challenges of working across cultures and time zones
Seven art students from the two schools, along with Professor Nina Sabnani from NID, participated remotely from India, with Bishop and Nadig leading the efforts from Los Angeles. The challenge was to conceive and scope a project that would reflect the two cultures of the collaborators. The effort required extensive three-way communication via daily two-way video conferences with each school and numerous daily three-way sessions using Apple iChat. On the first day of the collaboration, the team chose to create an edition of handmade picture books as its project.
The artists conceptualized images they found meaningful in their cultures. They chose to work with a variety of source material that touched their lives, such as scans of local film posters from Bangalore (a good match for a project physically located in Los Angeles), images of the classic Ambassador taxis prevalent on Indian streets, and figurative images representing the human condition.
Each collaborator added two to three six-inch by six-inch images and used Adobe Photoshop software to create a series of digital paintings. They then used Adobe Illustrator software to lay out the text on the cover and in the interior of a 24-page book, which which they called “Connections.” Each morning they conferred and critiqued their contributions to the book and worked to complete the additions and changes during the remaining hours of the day.
Working to the ultimate deadline
On the next-to-last day of the conference, Bishop realized the enormity of the work required in the Guerilla Studio to print, cut, and bind multiple copies of the many elaborate images. She used an Epson Stylus Pro 9600 wide-format inkjet printer to output the books on Hahnemuhle William Turner 190gsm Fine Art Paper, six pages at a time, throughout the night.
She and a team of artists and student volunteers spent the following day hand-cutting, folding, and binding 17 original books. Aided by the technical resources gathered for this special venue, her labors physically connected the creative inspiration from two continents during the brief existence of the 2005 Guerilla Studio.
Check out the final book here
