The Arts, Culture and Technology meet-up – or just ArtsTech as many of its members quickly shout out – is a great meet-up that explores the convergence between arts, culture and well, technology! ArtsTech is a great informal gathering and presentation series – each speaker is given 6 minutes to blaze through as many slides as possible on their company, product or idea. While most things “tech” are pretty overwhelming for some (i.e. MySQL databases, open-source software, GNU licensing, etc.), ArtsTech is also a LOT about contemporary art. Lisa Niedermeyer from Jacob’s Pillow Dance gave a great analogy that is perfect to what ArtsTech seeks to support, which is that they are not a technology company – and they’re probably the furthest example from “tech” of all the presenters – however because of events like ArtsTech, and through other collaborations, they’ve come to understand how technology helps move their art forward – technology has improved their dance festivals (downloadable brochures), their online archives (I love archives!) and their education outreach. Brilliant!
And big ups to the new Pivotal Labs for hosting this first ArtsTech meet-up of the new year – they’re space is super-fresh (only two weeks old!) and they’re already looking to expand their staff and programming – hopefully many more exciting events will be hosted there this year.
the new Pivotal Labs … lab! in Union Square. Part-production, part-conference, maybe part-coworking I’m not sure, it’s a lovely new space and environment for clients to work from.
Julia Kaganskiy welcoming people, and introducing the meet-up.
Collectrium bills itself as beautiful technology for the art world – their main upcoming feature is they have every artwork from all the major art fairs in a database, so with a mobile phone app you can take a picture of that artwork and find more details (meta!) about it online. Pretty impressive.
Tahir Hemphill talked about his hip-hop word count – which is currently kickstarting in the hope of going public-beta. Here’s a taste of his arts-tech:
and a wonderful talk by Michael from the NYPL on UIX and how people click things, fill out one-question surveys, and attempts to improve public access to public data. The text on his slide is especially fitting for user-interaction design!