Jury statement

Realities, I wanted to accept them all. I knew that every proposal represented the work of one or more people who wanted to share their coolest ideas with the rest of the SIGGRAPH community. Since I like to support imaginative and creative thinking whenever I can, I wanted to invite all the proposers to come along and show their stuff. But that wouldn't be fair to the SIGGRAPH 98 attendees, whose time at the conference is already in short supply. Our job as a jury was to select those entries that would really reward someone's time and effort. The ideal Enhanced Realities entry would inspire a new idea or cause someone to laugh and grab a friend, insisting that they had to come and check out the piece. There are at least two ways to think about evaluating pieces. One way is to be selfish and simply judge each entry by its impact on one's own self. Another way is to consciously act as a representative for other viewers and try to choose entries that would delight and excite them. Our chair, Janet McAndless, did a great job of selecting people who represented a cross-section of the SIGGRAPH crowd: artists, scientists, programmers, dreamers , and so on. Janet's up-front work in assembling the committee meant that we were free to be selfish. This meant that as a juror, I could operate as my mind and gut told me to. Because I believed that every entry was a sincere proposal, I wanted to extract every bit of good stuff from each one, so that I'd have a chance to really evaluate how each work hit me. Unfortunately, many of the proposals didn't give themselves a fair chance. The first big problem was ambiguity. Some proposals were simply too short to explain what they were about. Others were unclear, either because they were couched in jargon or simply poorly written. We had several proposals that were filled with " art speak. " For those who are unfamiliar with this form of expression, it is the intellectual language of art that can obscure as much as it illuminates. Art speak would refer to a pencil as a " trans-physical emotional/intellectual realizer, directly projecting mental thought processes without correlated referents into concrete manifestations of private and public iconography. " You get the idea. It is almost impossible to understand what this stuff refers to. …