Creative Tech Roundup: April Rundown
From an AI art festival to a dark net Wi-Fi hotspot and more
If SXSW taught us anything last month, it’s that the arts and tech industries are slowly (but surely!) beginning to get along. In the spirit of encouraging that development, here’s a roundup and a rundown of some of the more interesting things happening in creative technology right now.
Art-AI and If So, What?
They may be in their inaugural years, but the Art-AI and If So, What? festivals in Leicester, England, and San Francisco, respectively, are tapping into something big: creative commercial and artistic applications for emerging technologies. Both festivals also feature majority-female teams!
The Latest in Museum News
Believe it or not, Legal Issues in Museum Administration isn’t as boring a title as it sounds. This year, the Boston conference covered the dangers of high-tech art, from compromised personal information to surveillance issues.
In some more uplifting news, earlier this month, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) went “beyond its doors to pick a leader who bridges art and technology,” according to The New York Times’ Robin Pogrebin. Max Hollein has been the museum director for a number of institutions in Germany and the U.S., and he has a track record of both expansion and also digital innovation.
South Australia’s MOD is a museum of discovery trying to redefine what a museum even is (maybe Hollein can borrow a few ideas). According to Caroline Wilson-Barnao of The Conversation, “Former engineer and futurist-turned-director of MOD Kristin Alford says that rather than a curation-based model, her team — which includes a neuroscientist, filmmaker, coder and user design specialist — is focused on facilitating immersive and interactive experiences that draw upon a strong basis of research.”
Marina Abramović’s First VR Installation
World-renowned Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, aka “the grandmother of performance art,” has created her first art installation using virtual reality. Anny Shaw of The Art Newspaper explains, “In her piece, titled Rising (2017), the viewer encounters Abramović standing chest-deep in a tank rapidly filling with water. She beckons to you to press your hand against hers, which transports you to an Arctic scene where melting ice caps tumble into the sea, sending waves crashing overhead. Viewers then go back to face Abramović and have to choose between committing to save the environment — and the artist from a watery grave — or doing nothing, thereby destroying both.”
Bridging the Fuzzy/Techie Divide
Last, but definitely not least, author and venture capitalist Scott Hartley is doing his best to bring some liberal arts into the tech space with his 2017 book, The Fuzzy and the Techie. If you’re not familiar with the Stanford lingo, a “fuzzies” are liberal arts or humanities folk and “techies” are the more STEM-minded among us. While the book isn’t brand new, Hartley’s explanation of “Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World” has been generating more and more interest as of late.
Fortunately, that’s just the tip of the creative tech iceberg. For more, check out our SXSW roundup, and stay tuned for more intersections of art and technology in May.
