The Future of Creativity: Will Art Become Automated? A Panel Discussion at The National Arts Club
By: Steve Masur and Matt Field
Join us on Wednesday, January 17th at The National Arts Club (7-9PM) for the following panel discussion:
The Future of Creativity: Will Art Become Automated?
From an AI bot that recreates classical works of art, to an algorithm that created thousands of original folk songs by learning ABC notes of Celtic folk songs, many are wondering whether creativity too, will someday become automated. In this panel, we’ll discuss the role of the artist in the advent of technology. How will the artist continue to remain relevant in our advanced technological world? Will creativity still play a role in the creation of artistic works? This panel will include insight from researchers behind AI-art focused projects and contemporary artists working in this medium. The discussion will focus on how artists and researchers are utilizing technological innovations in their practice. Panelists include Douglas Eck, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, and Helene Alonso, Director of Digital Experiences at the American Museum of Natural History, Grace Cho, CEO of fine art platform Orangenius, Matthew Field, Attorney Scott Draves Software Engineer/Artist at Two Sigma and Lev Polyakov an accomplished animator as moderator.
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC – REGISTER TO ATTEND HERE
About the Speakers:
Douglas Eck is a Research Scientist at Google working in the areas of music and machine learning. Currently he is leading Magenta, a Google Brain project to generate music, video, images and text using deep learning and reinforcement learning. A main goal of Magenta is to better understanding how AI can enable artists and musicians to express themselves in innovative new ways. Before Magenta, Doug led the Google Play Music search and recommendation team. Before joining Google in 2010, Doug was an Associate Professor in Computer Science at University of Montreal (MILA lab) where he worked on expressive music performance and automatic tagging of music audio.
Helene Alonso is the Director of Digital Experiences at the American Museum of Natural History. She directs a multi-disciplinary team through the design and production of interactive experiences. She focuses on the integration of digital layers, the three-dimensional environment and connected spaces. Helene is now working on several innovative projects involving physical computing, projection mapping and Virtual Reality, playing with Vive, Hololens and Unity.
Grace Cho founded Orangenius on the premise that artists were lacking the necessary tools and resources they needed to thrive in the creative economy. With over 25 years of experience in the financial services, media and entertainment, and private equity industries, Grace has transformed global business units at GE Capital, NBCU, and Nielsen. Skilled at taking conceptual initiatives and turning them into $100 million businesses, Grace founded Orangenius to assist independent, working artists in building their own creative empires. Inspired by visionaries like Richard Branson, Walt Disney, and Ralph Lauren, Grace’s vision for the creative economy encapsulates her singular mission: to do away with the myth of the ‘starving artist’ and empower future generations of creators.
Matthew Field is an attorney at Masur Griffitts + LLP. For nearly a decade, Matthew has worked with emerging companies, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals on a broad base of transactional matters, including angel and VC financings, equity compensation, intellectual property identification and protection, commercial transactions, corporate governance, and mergers and acquisitions. Matthew’s clients operate in a variety of sectors, with many focusing on advertising technology, financial services technology, e-commerce, enterprise software, consumer products, and digital media. He is also a co-founder of Marauder, a boutique marketing and consulting firm focusing on the development of emerging talent from around the globe within North America.
Lev Polyakov graduated School of Visual Arts in 2009, receiving the SVA Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding Achievement in Animation. He has experience creating short films both personal and commissioned, that leave a lasting impression for their story, characters, and design. After designing and storyboarding his projects, Lev oversees the entire production of animated films ranging from 4 to 15 minutes, managing crews of up to 15 people composed of animators, colorists, and clean-up. His shorts have played on Reel13 and ShortsHD, as well as over 30 film festivals worldwide. Lev’s recent clients have included Giants Are Small / Universal for their “Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood” i-pad app, and Uber (illustration for its internal division)
Scott Draves is a pioneering software artist best known for creating the Electric Sheep, a collective intelligence consisting of 450,000 computers and people that uses mathematics and genetic algorithms to create an infinite abstract animation. His work has been shown at LACMA, MoMA.org, Prix Ars Electronica, ZKM, Art Futura, Emoção Art.ficial Bienial and is in collections world-wide including Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, the 21c Museum Hotel, MQS Capital, Google, the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, and MEIAC. His clients range from Skrillex to the Adler Planetarium. Electric Sheep apps are available for iPad and Android. Draves Bomb was one of the first interactive software artworks (1994) and also the first Open Source artwork, and the first interactive reaction-diffusion. His Fuse algorithm (1991) was also extremly influential. In 1990 he received a BS in Mathematics from Brown University and in 1997 a PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University for a thesis on metaprogramming for media processing. He is currently employed by Two Sigma to develop the Beaker Notebook.
