3dluvr: You mention that Salt Lake City is the birthplace of modern computer graphics, could you elaborate please?

Legalize: It grew out of the University of Utah Computer Science Department in the 60s and 70s. If you look back to the first important paper about computer graphics, its Ivan Sutherland's "Sketchpad" paper.  This was in 1963, I think, at MIT. Ivan came to the University of Utah to start up a program in computer graphics with David Evans, the department chair.  Ivan had gotten his PhD from MIT and joined Utah as one of the early faculty members.

Many of the effects you see in traditional demos; Gouraud shading, Phong shading, "the teapot" all original out of Salt Lake City, or more accurately the Science Department of the University of Utah. There wasn't much going on in graphics yet, so there was plenty of "low hanging fruit" for the graduate students like Jim Blinn, Henri Gouraud, Bui-Tuong Phong, etc., to get their PhDs in all the important groundwork of computer graphics. Lots of things that are commonplace today were invented in the 60s and 70s at Utah.

3dluvr:  Christian, tell us about your radio show.

RaD Man: I host a radio talk show called The ARTS, shorthand for The Artscene Radio Talk Show.  Simply put, we are focused on the scene; our focus is our demographic. We discuss topics of interest to artists, coders and musicans and feature interviews with guests from all over the world.  I love producing each new episode; it is an exciting new medium for sceners to communicate and get their message across.  The ARTS show archives, including MP3 redistributables, notes and transcripts are available at http://www.acid.org/radio/

3dluvr: Christian, you've been around for a while, how has the underground art scene changed over the past 14 years?

RaD Man: To quote Adok/Hugi, �Until the mid-nineties Demos were indeed focused on technology. What counted was whether your 3d engine worked faster than other peoples, and whether you brought new effects at a decent frame rate, rather than how they looked or what message they carried."

The computer underground art scene has really moved more towards artistic expression than a demonstration of optimization skills.