__ Electric Word __
__ Answer Man __
While the big-name search firms scramble to be big, bigger, biggest, David Warthen is busy making his little engine more selective. The Q&A interface behind Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.com) - which AltaVista licensed last October, followed by Dell Computer in December - leads users step by step to the one page most likely to answer their question, rather than serving up hundreds of links that match a keyword search. By March, Warthen will have Jeeves not only answering, but remembering, so that "every day will no longer be his first day on the job." A searcher who regularly asks cocktail-related questions, for example, might be led to a site on gin Gibsons rather than ones on William or Mel.
Warthen's motto: Let your engine do the searching.
__ Paul Boutin __
__ Hare Raising __
A bitter old rabbit, a bothersome moth, and the most amazingly natural natural light - these are the stars of Bunny. If the seven-minute all-CG film by Blue Sky Studios gets an Oscar nod or, even better, wins the gold - as the effects house-cum-movie studio hopes - it will be thanks to the company's proprietary radiosity tools. The software mimics the tricky subtleties of ambient light without which CG environments feel flat. In fact, the technology re-creates all the standard tools and techniques of an actual set. Lights! Camera! Animate!
__ S. V. McKim __
__ Clash of the Titans __
According to the Hollywood zodiac, it's the year of the nerd. Note the PBS doc Nerds 2.0.1, Fox's Killer App, the HBO Apple epic now in the works, and, come May, The Pirates of Silicon Valley, which writer-director Martyn Burke describes as "Diner meets Citizen Kane." The TNT telefilm tracks Bill Gates (Anthony Michael Hall and Steve Jobs (ER star Noah Wyle) from the betadom of boyhood to megabyte success. If Burke's vision of Gates as "quintessential nerd" is less than original, his view of Jobs as "one of the truly Shakespearean characters in American public life" offers a new spin. "At times he's Richard III, besieged from all sides," says Burke, "and at times he's Hamlet." Did someone say Puck?
__ Paula Parisi __
__ Relax, Have A Seat __
"My mentor always said that designing a chair for Herman Miller is like running for pope," grins Burkhard Schmitz of the Berlin-based firm 7.5. Now the designer can speak from experience: Last fall Schmitz & Co. - Carola Zwick, Nicolai Neubert, and Claudia Plikat - was one of only four firms invited to submit drawings for HM's first new chair since the Aeron, that symbol of corporate status and elegant ergonomic design. Instead of a sketch, the 7.5 upstarts offered a "3-D rough draft" made of brake cables and clutch springs from an old Vespa, some bicycle parts, and just about anything else they had around the office. Their final creation will be unveiled at the NeoCon Trade Fair, the Holy See of furniture design, in June 2000.
__ David Hudson __
__ Choreographics __
A collaboration of Riverbed artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar and dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones, Ghostcatching is a graceful pairing of chorus lines and lines of code. The dancing figures are ghosts of Jones, whose movements the Riverbed duo recorded with motion capture and animated using basic 3-D modeling software, adding the simple hand-drawn effect later with texture mapping. The ethereal pas de deux is an encore of sorts for Riverbed (www.riverbed.com), which created a similar piece with Merce Cunningham at Siggraph 98. Ghostcatching continues through February 12 at the Cooper Union in New York City.
__ Anne Speedie __
