Lets hear it for Anarchy!

I'm a big fan of creative anarchy.
Making change for changes sake can be
inspiring, powerful, and most of all fun.
And when it doesn't work out, sometimes
there are valuable lessons to be learned.

Recently (last week), ACM Siggraph did a major
change up, some of which I applaud, and some of
which I hope they'll learn from, move on, and never
repeat. In the former category, I applaud the return
of Friday Sessions (because traditionally, Friday
sessions have the best papers presented). In the
latter category, doing the 'Welcome'
dinner on the last night of the exhibition and the
penultimate day of the conference always strikes me
as silly; Making it impossible to see the best of
the CAF/Film Show/Electronic Theater at a single sitting
was disappointing. I'd also like to commend everyone who
stepped up and provided for an otherwise great CAF, the Stan
Winston tribute, the showing of Clone Wars, and other great
uses of the Nokia Theatre.

I'd like to give particular props to:

Diffusion Curves: A Vector Representation for Smooth Shaded Images,
A. Orzan, A. Bousseau, H. Winemuller, P. Barla,
J. Thollot, and D. Salesin (INRIA, Grenoble U, Adobe, UWashington);

Real Time Gradient-Domain Painting,
J. McCann, N.S. Pollard (CMU);

and
Interactive Visual Editing of Grammars for Procedural Architecture,
M. Lipp, P. Wonka, M. Wimmer (TU, Austria)

Oktopodi, winner of both the Jury and Audience awards, and
Our Wonderful Nature, winner of the 'Well Told Fable' award at the CAF.

And what of Siggraph 2009?

New Orleans has a great history and culture of
both food and entertainment.
I hope the committees take advantage of what the
community has to offer. It also seemed like the show floor was
both small and somewhat under-utilized...might I humbly suggest the
wheel of fortune for next year -- an interleaved circle/pavilion of
recruiting booths (DD, Imageworks, ILM, Pixar, etc.) and Schools
(SCAD, Ringling, etc.) perhaps surrounded by an outer ring of book,
Magazine, and DVD publishers (thanks Carmi for the initial idea).
And if the recruiting organizations or people don't like the idea of
everyone seeing who is talking to who, face the recruiting booths outwards...