A conference for artists who code
If you need to meet or recruit creative software developers, then you’ve got a good enough excuse and a purely practical reason to attend LISA 2012. It’s a one-day conference, October 16 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, for developers, designers and other digital creatives who use technology to make art. Their realm includes iPad apps, data visualizations, interactive, online, algorithmic, sound, social, crowdsourced and other forms of digital art.
Guggenheim Museum, NYC
Also practical: Here’s a code to save $100 on the registration fee. We Media is a sponsor and we’d love to see some We Media friends there.
Use this code: WEMEDIA
Here: http://lisa2012.eventbrite.com/
Enough about practical. There are other reasons to go.
I’ve got two.
1. Inspiration and insight into the creative process.
Spend a day within an icon of 20th Century architecture surrounded by artists and their ideas. Allow your mind to wander. Look at the world, and your place in it, in a new light. The networked culture is inherently creative. I’m not sure if code is poetry, electricity or oxygen for the digital experience. But it’s undoubtedly everywhere and essential, like language, to business, health, entertainment, communication, commerce, agriculture, food distribution and day-to-day life. The code within provides, simultaneously, a foundation, superstructure, canvas, text and texture for what we know and how we know it. Software, devices and always-on, pervasive human connections empower us to express new forms of creativity through new channels and for new purposes. Creativity also leads us to unexpected places – like cyberwarfare and drones; global meditation; and new ways to fact-check politicians.
For me, art and artists pull these threads together – and pull them apart to suggest new ways of thinking about the world, my place in it – and what I create.
2. Laurie Anderson.
She’s a musician, poet, technologist, painter – and I really don’t care what she means to you. Few artists in any medium have moved me the way she has. Laurie Anderson’s chords, words and designs cut through me. Her rhythms, movements, sounds, observations and humor take me somewhere I’d like to be more often. If you don’t know about her, learn more here. Then sign up to learn more from her at LISA 2012. She’s a keynote speaker.
Photo Credit: By librarygroover via Flickr
