Yesterday I made my first ever Canadian train trip from Ottawa to Toronto where I’m attending the FITC conference. The train trip was nice – definitely the best way to get from Ottawa to Toronto, though they could maybe blow the whistle a bit less!!

Blurry iPhone photo of 'Beautiful Algorithms' presentation.

I didn’t really know what to expect of FITC – I’d luckily been given a conference ticket and wanted to make the most of it, and was glad that I did …

FITC began life a few years ago as ‘Flash In The Can’ – a Canadian centred Flash conference. In recent years it seems that FITC has morphed into a ‘festival’ with an emphasis the collision of art/design and software technology.

My experience of software conferences has been largely based on JavaOne – I was lucky enough to attend it I think on four occasions, and presented once. It is the world’s biggest software conference – or at least was – not sure how it’ll fare now that Oracle own Sun.

In contrast, FITC is smaller but still very substantial – 1000 attendees from diverse US towns and cities as well as Canadian ones. The bigger difference though is the emphasis in art and design.

My recent work at IBM has seen me increasingly working with browser graphics. I’ve been dealing a lot with geometry and transforms, so I’m developing more of an interest in where art meets computer science in my work. I’ve worked in this area in the past though and had hoped to work more in this area in the future.

So, art and technology is a fresh and stimulating area for me. The first session that I attended was called ‘Beautiful Algorithms’ by Alec Cove. It was a study of the occurrence and rationale of patterns in nature, and how they could be modeled using pretty simple software algorithms. It was a nice presentation – a great way to start the show. I felt though it would have been solidified with more real life examples of software that has shipped with these algorithms, or how we should apply what we’ve learned.

The next session that I joined was Mario Klingemann’s Tinkerer’s Box. He is a character, and his talk was very entertaining. It was in some ways an extension of  Alec Cove’s talk … was nice for me that one almost led to the other. Mario took some of the algorithmic ideas and applied them to photographs with some fantastic results – plotting lines and effecting transforms at dark and light shades. Definitely inspired me – gave me a couple of ideas for personal projects that I’d like to explore.

During the lunch break I chatted with a guy that had been to FITC a couple of times before and recommenced that I attend ‘Art, Gesture, Computation, Framework’ by Golan Levin, and Zachary Lieberman. I could write a really long report just on this one talk, which to be honest with you was mind blowing. A bit like a TED talk. Here’s a glimpse, but consider checking out the clips that I linked to their names above. Seriously – it’ll be worth it to spend 30 minutes looking at their project clips.

Adobe presented some updates – some attention to text in Flash. I’m not going to be using Flash much with my graphics work in the coming months, so a bit late for me this one, but based on my experience with text so far – much needed. Some very cool links below:

• Neat game concept – “Closure“
• Neat effects with triangle shapes
• Augmented reality – this is especially cool with webcam and printout – do it!

Finally we had a presentation from artist Joshua Davis. It was a fantastic talk, really funny! His art is beautiful. He worked on the art for the conference. He showed some examples of his work, and how he used flash and algorithms to help develop the pieces. He talked about his influences and dug into them in insightfully amusing ways ( like how Italian WW2 planes looked like they wanted to be on a catwalk ). It was a world class presentation.

I met up with my work colleague Simon and his wife Kate who live here in Toronto. They shared a delicious supper and great conversation.

Missing my family. I’ll see them tomorrow night. I’ll squeeze in a few more talks before then.