My SIGGRAPH Teapot Exhibition entry, Tempest (inquiry)
I've explained in a far away place and time "Why the teapot?" but the call to enter my own version to the 30th anniversary celebration of the Teapot in SIGGRAPH's annual meeting this year appealed for many reasons. Not the least of which is ego, the chance to put my work in the highly competitive science meeting that is gold standard for the people I've been working for the last five years.
Artist's statement [first I've written]
Ann Torrence uses digital photography and Adobe Photoshop compositing techniques to reveal underlying patterns, histories and relationships in seemingly random movement or the passage of time.
The artist's personal connection to the teapot in computer science stems from her prior work at the School of Computing at the University of Utah. As coordinator of outreach and alumni affairs, she edited the school's newsletter, The Teapot, which was named to honor the significance of alumnus Martin Newell's Ph.D. dissertation work to computer graphics. She was inspired to use the icon in her personal work by students and faculty who illustrate today's advanced computer graphics techniques with a teapot motif.
Technical statement [this is a science meeting, after all]
To create Tempest (inquiry), Ann Torrence made multiple digital photographs of a glass teapot containing ordinary bubbles in plain water, under typical white strobe light, without the use of colored filters. In the post-processing phase, Adobe Photoshop was used to separate each image into its spectral source grey level channels. Using single channel elements from more than a dozen images as sources for the composite, she assembled a new color channel series to produce the teapot image shown here.
As with film-based multiple exposure photos, the photographer can use this technique to visualize spatiotemporal histories that are otherwise lost. But, unlike film-based exposures, digital photography gives the photographer immediate access to the source spectral and precisely time-stamped channels. The resulting transformation of time into spectral space yields a non-realistic yet evocative approach to image-making. Additional images in this series are available on the artist's web site, www.anntorrence.com.
The red lid is a nod to the Utah school color, which I hope at least the alumni in attendance will appreciate, should it get in the show. I also uploaded some historical artificats for the show (including a scan of Martin Newell's Ph.D. dissertation image) to SIGGRAPH.
