San Base: Computer Graphics Avant-Garde

Current And Future Deployments, Continued

On a grander scale, San Base's work could be enlarged to include airport concourses, upscale clubs and museums. San stated that compared to other art forms, "Dynamic Painting is more intriguing due to its unpredictable nature, but everybody will see and interpret the image according to his mood. It might calm one down or stimulate creative thinking, so there actually might be even a therapeutic use for this technology. I'd be really interested in seeing some research done in this area. While clinical use of this technology might be a bit farfetched, using a Dynamic Picture at the reception area of a doctor's office or a lawyer's office might calm down and relax clients."

One idea that San Base did not comment on would be using his programming to build a brainstorming application for other artists. Just like most of us need something to jump start our mornings, the human imagination sometimes needs a boost to get its creative juices flowing. Dynamic paintings could act as a catalyst for spawning new directions. When asked about the popularity of his techniques, he stated, "I'm confident that dynamic paintings will be widespread in the near future. The falling costs of powerful computers and high-quality LCD or plasma TV panels will make it affordable and widespread. The benefits of this genre are obvious: an endless supply of unprecedented and unpredictable paintings in place of one static image."

Final Thoughts

While this is Tom's Hardware Guide, the software and ingenuity behind developments are just as important to cover. We plan to have another session with San Base in the future, to see how his computations and art come together. We will look at the makeup of shaders, how the system is primed, and how he gets from concept to final product. Of course, we will not be able to learn all of his secrets, but it should shed some light on the process.

"The dynamic painting techniques I've contrived guarantee an always new juxtaposition of colors and shapes in an abstract picture. On a landscape there would be moving clouds, darting birds, and trees swaying in the wind. You could see in a painting seasons or changes of day and night, or many other phenomena that I can dream up. Unlike a movie, the painting never ends and will never repeat itself - it will have a life of its own. Sounds like science fiction? Not at all, this is the very near future."

We agree. Not many applications can demand the full effort of a computer; however, dynamic painting is an application that could require home systems to need even more power. The advent of more computational power inside current computers as well as the emergence of personal supercomputers is just the tip of the iceberg. It has been a while since software has demanded innovation from hardware, and we want to see more developers driving the market forward.