Digital Art and Space Blog
Reflections on Art, Computer Graphics, Photography, Space and Astronomy

See You At Windycon

This weekend I’ll be battling my way around the Windycon Science Fiction convention. Windycon, one of the country’s larger science fiction conventions, opens Friday Nov 14 and continues through Sunday Nov 16. The theme for this the 35th Windycon is military science fiction and features topics like “Child Soldiers“, “Evolving War“, “Strategy, Tactics, Logistics: What Are They and Why Do I Need to Know?“, and “Mistakes That Go Boom” - to name just a very few. This year the convention will be held at the brand new Westin Lombard - Yorktown Center in Lombard, IL.

Following is my Windycon programming schedule.

Digital Art: Artist Meets Technology Cypress B, Friday 6:00pm:

The panelists will discuss the whats and whys of digital art. The emphasis will be on science fiction digital art: otherworldly planetscapes, three-dimensional aliens, and colors you never saw under our yellow sun. In addition to myself, the other panelists are David Mattingly, Windycon’s Artist Guest of Honor, and science fiction author Roland Green.

Interstellar Warfare: How exactly do you do it Walnut, Saturday 2:00pm:

This panel’s description reads: Interstellar warfare is the blood and bones of military SF, but how do you run a war in space? Given the physical limits of communication, how does a general direct a war? And what are we fighting over anyway? Planets? Wormholes? The Horsehead Nebulae? Join our panelists as they discuss this basic topic. At last year’s Windycon I participated in a panel that discussed the subject of planetary and interstellar governments and the issues that such a system would face. So you could say that last year’s panel was on how to bureaucratize the galaxy and this year’s panel is on how to destroy it. The other panelists are M. D’Ambrosio, R. Garfinkle, J.L. Nye, and M. Shepherd-Moscoe.

Selling Space With Space Art Ballroom AB, Sunday Noon:

The actual title of my presentation is “Using Art to Promote Space Exploration“. My talk includes an overview of the history of space art and how space art has been used, and can continue to be used, to promote space exploration. I developed this presentation specifically for the International Space Development Conference which was held in Washington DC earlier this year.

If you’re curious, you can read about my participation in Windycon 2007 and Windycon 2006.

See you at Windycon. Jim

Abstract Experiment in Rotation

I’m back from a weekend of Capricon. Unfortunately I was only able to spend Saturday morning at the con as my wife had to work and my oldest son was home sick. The only presentation I attended was Bryan Palaszewski’s Moonbases: Not For The Weak Minded Pirate. The first half was mostly devoted to discussing the Apollo lunar program and the second half dealt with moon base designs.

Following Bryan’s program I headed off to the Art Show where the first person I saw was one of my favorite ladies of SF, Lori, who was running this year’s art show. I also ran into friend and space artist Tom Peters who had some art in the show. We only had a few minutes to talk before he and his wife had to head off. I took this, my one opportunity, to walk through the art show and look at the art on display. Much of the art was small pencil drawings. The most popular themes seemed to be cats and dragons. One of the ladies working the show told me that “ninety percent of science fiction fans love cats.” In fact the only art on which I observed bids had cats, dragons, or both as the subject. Unfortunately for me I don’t do either dragons or cats. Tom had some space exploration art in the show - the only such art I saw. It seems to me that over the years space ships and astronauts have been on the decline in the local SF art shows. The only two pieces of astronomical art were my own. The most impressive piece in the show was a very large recreation of primitive cave art. It was wonderfully done and I lingered over it far longer than any other piece in the show.

Sunday was a hectic day. I arrived early so that I could begin the process of packing up my art. Fortunately I was able to get into the show area (the doors didn’t officially open till 10:00am) and got my unsold art packed up.

Programming began at 10:00am and I was on for my presentation Imaging Mars which was illustrated with my own Mars images. A good portion of my presentation was actually a tutorial on how people could access the raw Mars mission data for themselves and create their own Martian artwork.

I ran my presentation right up to the hour mark and had to make a mad dash to get to my panel on Podcasting. This panel had very much of a tutorial feel to it in that I and my fellow panelists spent most of our time discussing the how-to aspects of podcasting.

Following the end of the podcasting panel, I had one hour in which to go through the art check out process, get my art into the car, and grab a quick bite of lunch before heading off for my last presentation.

The last hour of programming for Capricon began at 2:00pm and I was surprised to see a nice sized audience for my Space Solar Power for Earth presentation wherein I explain the concept of space solar power and how it benefits both humanity and the environment. Note that the best resource for papers and studies dealing with space solar power is the NSS Space Solar Power Library.

And with that I was out the door feeling that first tickle in my throat that told me that I was probably going to come down with the same bug that caused my son to miss three days of school. Well, better to be sick after a con than before.

Ad Astra, Jim

Femme Fatale digital painting

I returned earlier this evening from the Capricon Science Fiction Convention which this year has pirates as its theme. Back in January I sent in three programming ideas to the Capricon folks for their consideration. Little did I suspect that they would choose to accept all three. I gave the first of my three presentations today. The Universe According to Monty Python is a presentation I created that provides an analysis of the planetary, astronomical, and cosmological statements made in Monty Python’s The Galaxy Song. It’s amazing that one can spend an entire hour explaining the meaning behind the lyrics of a two minute song.

I actually showed up at Capricon on Thursday in order to set up my art for the art show. I decided to limit myself to six works. The newest of the six is Femme Fatale which I’ve used to illustrate this entry. The difficult part was in deciding just what to bring and what to leave behind.

Saturday I am totally off the hook so can roam as I please. However it will be a busy Sunday with my giving two more presentations and sitting in on one panel. My lead off presentation is Imaging Mars in which I provide an introduction to the image processing associated with Mars mission data and an exploration of Martian geology using imagery from the Viking and Mars Global Surveyor missions to Mars. This is immediately followed by the panel Podcasting where we will discuss the technical aspects of creating and syndicating podcasts. Personally I think that podcasts may be on the way out. Given that the computer has a built in screen, that webcams are cheap, and that more and more people have high speed internet access, I predict that videocasting will grow in popularity and that audio podcasting will decline in relative terms. The one saving grace for podcasting is that those MP3 files can easily be loaded into people’s MP3 players and listened to in any kind of setting.

An hour break for lunch and then it’s off to give my presentation on Solar Power from Space for Earth which explores the idea of using a system of space-based Solar Power Satellites to meet the large increases in energy demand resulting from increasing world population and per capita energy consumption.

The Art. The piece that I have used to illustrate this post is titled Femme Fatale. It is a freehand digital painting I created using Photoshop and a custom brush I created for use with my Wacom tablet. I was quite pleased with the result and my only regret is that I decided to create this as an 11 by 14 inch painting. I now wish that I had chosen a larger size. I will be adding this piece to the Artsnova Art Gallery once I create a separate gallery to hold portraiture.

If you’re attending Capricon, be sure to check out the art show and my art.

Ad Astra, Jim