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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.

US Regulators & Your Cryptocurrency: It’s Complicated

By: Rob Griffitts

This is the first in a series of posts in which I’ll examine the US regulations that impact cryptocurrency businesses.

Many describe bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as being unregulated. As a blanket statement, this is not true.

What is true is that regulators so far have provided only limited guidance on how existing regulations apply to cryptocurrencies. But that doesn’t mean those regulations don’t apply. This is because regulations typically apply to some activity, not to a particular technology. So, for instance, if you’re committing fraud, it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing so using pen and paper, or whether you’re using email. Similarly, if you’re laundering money, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using the traditional banking system or using bitcoin.

The consequences of violating the regulations can be devastating. So, it’s important that operators of cryptocurrency businesses become familiar with the lay of the regulatory land (in addition to hiring knowledgeable advisers).

This is the first in a series of posts in which I’ll explain the regulations that come up most frequently in our work with cryptocurrency businesses. These regulations fall into three categories:

– Financial surveillance
– Investor protection
– Consumer protection

In this post, I’ll give a short overview of each. In my next three posts, I’ll dive into each more deeply. I’ll tell you what we know, and what remains unclear. And to the extent regulators have provided unambiguous guidance, I’ll try to frame things in the context of the different actors that participate in the crypto-space, which I loosely categorize as software developers, miners, exchange operators and promoters.

Let’s dive in…

Financial Surveillance

The purpose of financial surveillance laws is to prevent money-laundering and terrorist financing, and to help law enforcement agencies prosecute crime. This is carried out primarily by the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), which is a federal law that requires financial institutions to monitor the transactions of its customers, and to report large transactions and suspicious activity to the government. This is where the acronyms KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and CTF (Counter-Terrorism Financing) come from.

In the past, there wasn’t much ambiguity as to whether the BSA applied to a particular business. If you handled currency on behalf of your customers, like a bank or Western Union, you were subject to the regulations. However, it was far from clear whether the BSA’s regulations applied to cryptocurrencies, and for a period of time, cryptocurrency businesses had the luxury of operating in what many considered an unregulated field.

That changed on March 18, 2013, when FinCEN (which administers and enforces the BSA) announced that it would make no distinction between virtual currencies and regular (“fiat” or government) currencies. Overnight, software developers and other cryptocurrency innovators – businesses that looked nothing like a traditional financial institution – were subject to a very burdensome set of regulations, and consequently, were immediately in violation of those regulations.

Since 2013, FinCEN has issued additional guidance on the applicability of the BSA to virtual currency businesses, with mixed results in terms of clarity provided. Some actors, like miners, for instance, can take comfort that their activities are not subject to the BSA. Others, including companies conducting ICOs, still operate in muddied waters.

Investor Protection

Much of the conversation about cryptocurrency regulation these days revolves around this question: are my tokens a “security”, and therefore subject to regulation by the federal securities laws? Much commentary has been offered on the topic, and while the SEC’s guidance has been limited, some consensus among practitioners about best practices has begun to emerge (of course, whether the SEC will ultimately agree with this consensus approach is anyone’s guess).

The consensus I’m referring to began to jell after the SEC released a report of its investigation into The DAO in July 2017. In that release, the SEC began to set the stage by reiterating some points that weren’t much of a surprise to securities lawyers, but which nonetheless provided some welcome clarity on its thinking. Most notably, the SEC said that cryptocurrencies can be, but aren’t necessarily, regulated securities, and that the determination of that question turns on application of the so-called “Howey Test” to the particular facts and circumstances of each case.

Based on the factors of the Howey Test (more on those later), securities lawyers began to draw a distinction between tokens issued before the network on which they will function has been built, and tokens issued after the network has been built. The former are likely securities; the latter may escape that fate – and therefore be unregulated as far as securities laws are concerned. Out of this construct came the SAFT – a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens – a new, hopefully compliant way to conduct token offerings.

The SEC’s concerns extend beyond the initial sale of tokens in an ICO. It also regulates the trading of securities after their initial issuance (in the so-called secondary markets). So exchanges on which tokens are traded, and intermediaries that participate in that trading, have to carefully consider the securities laws, as well as the commodities laws.

Consumer Protection

Consumer protection is a broad term that means different things depending on the context. In the context of cryptocurrency businesses, consumer protection laws refer to the various money transmission laws enacted at the state level aimed at custodial businesses – namely, those businesses that maintain custody over the funds of another. The concern is that custodial businesses may be mismanaged, hacked, suffer from illiquidity or otherwise may lose those funds. Each state, except Montana, has such laws on its books.

The state money transmission laws are particularly frustrating for cryptocurrency innovators because complying with them is a cumbersome and costly affair — each of the 49 states has a different set of laws, and each state’s laws reach anyone that services or even solicits a resident of that state. This means that a cryptocurrency business that intends to offer its services nationwide must satisfy each state’s licensing regimes. Exacerbating things is that these statutes are archaic, and with only few exceptions, state regulators haven’t offered guidance on whether, or how, their laws apply to cryptocurrency businesses.

In the next post, I’ll begin to examine these regulations in more depth.

Cryptocurrency, Blockchain and the Future of Finance in Art

By: Steve Masur

Join us on Monday, December 4 at the National Arts Club (7:30PM) to discuss Cryptocurrency, Blockchain and the Future of Finance in Art.

About the Panel:

In recorded music, so much of the money is kept by middlemen that songwriters and musicians are looking to a new kind of money as a means of getting back some of what is derived from their craft. It is called Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency powered by a technology called Blockchain, which records and encrypts transactions in a transparent public ledger. Pledge Music & Dot Blockchain founder Benji Rogers, Steven Masur, Ujo Music product owner Jack Spallone and painter/visual artist Lindsey Nobel will discuss the promise of Blockchain, and how it can change the artistic and creative world.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

About the speakers:

Steven Masur has over two decades of experience advising emerging and established businesses on new opportunities and business challenges. He focuses his practice on corporate finance, M&A, intellectual property, entertainment, emerging businesses and strategic guidance. Steve brings a unique mix of legal, business, and strategic experience to bear on client matters. He has counseled enterprise level clients including Shazam, Virgin Mobile, Liberty Media, Yamaha, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Bob Vila and Conde Nast Publications in corporate, digital media, and new business matters. He has also helped emerging businesses in a wide variety of sectors, and is especially knowledgeable in media, entertainment, advertising, consumer products, food and technology, including mobile, games, digital music, social media, augmented and virtual reality, software and hardware.

Benji Rogers is a British-born, New York-based entrepreneur, technologist, musician, and the founder of Pledge Music. An early pioneer of the direct artist-to-fan model of distributing music, Rogers founded Pledge Music based on the belief that artists should share the process of their artistic output, not just the finished product. Straddling the worlds of technology and music, Rogers uses his dual background to advise a range of tech and music companies on how to bridge the divide between their industries. To address the unique challenges facing artists releasing their work in the digital economy, Rogers also co-founded the Dot Blockchain Music Project, an attempt to create a decentralized global registry of music rights using blockchain technology that will overhaul the commercialization and movement of music online. In addition to these projects and his ongoing role with Pledge, Rogers is also an instructor at Berklee College of Music on digital trends and strategies in the industry. A dedicated patron of arts and creativity in all its forms, Rogers’ work is rooted in a belief in the democratizing power of the internet; he will always be “loving your work.”

Lindsey Nobel is a mixed-media artist living and working in Los Angeles. Her art employs various media to explore ideas of technology, science and human connection. Lindsey’s artistic process stems from investigating memory, dislocation and environment. Attachment and reflection. In 1992 she began developing a drawing language that, for better or worse, connects us to computers. Lindsey’s work exposes the invisible world to which we are utterly attached via the Infosphere.

Jack Spallone comes from the US with a diversified background working in music and tech. Starting as a music and events blogger while still an undergrad, Jack soon expended his experience into talent buying and inevitably managing artists. After launching the careers of two Billboard artists, Jack’s attention turned to exploring alternative methods for maintaining a career as a musician, leading him to thinking about how blockchain and decentralized technology could usher in new financing, licensing, and interactive opportunities for artists. Today, Jack drives the product vision for Ujo Music, focused on solving the many problems of music’s digital supply chain while also growing the revenue pie for rights holders.

*In addition to this event, we also have another Cryptocurrency and Blockchain event coming up November 16. See more info and register to attend here.

Exploring the Impact of the Blockchain on Music and the Arts

By: Steve Masur

Tracking Creative Digital Rights:
A Panel and Reception Exploring the Impact of the Blockchain on Music and the Arts

Join us on November 16 (7PM ET) at the Abrons Arts Center (466 Grand St. at Pitt St., Lower East Side, Manhattan) to learn about new paths for managing digital creative property with the emergence of the blockchain, a tamper-proof distributed record keeping system. This panel of experts will explore issues of artist, management, label, dealer, collector, customer control over licensing, royalties, attribution, sampling, provenance, copyright and transparency at this kickoff event to the Open Source Music Festival.

Panelists include: Ken Umezaki, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer, Dot Blockchain Music; Daniel Doubrovkine, Chief Technology Officer, Artsy; Jennie Rose Halperin, Communications Manager at Creative Commons; and Steven Masur, Senior Partner MG+. Isabel Walcott Draves, President of Creative Tech Week, is moderator.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

About the Panelists:

Ken Umezaki is an independent investor and business advisor for music startups and artists, through his company Digital Daruma, with a specific focus on artist facing music and media service companies. Digital Daruma has made select direct investments in music artists and songs, and has also co-founded Dot Blockchain Media, a public benefit corporation that has introduced a new music file technology architecture to modernize copyright management and the music supply chain fit for the digital music age. Ken currently is the Chief Business Officer of dotBC. His past experience includes 25 years in financial services trading, asset management and senior management positions. He is also an experienced musician, and currently plays bass in the band Fifth of Bourbon. Lastly, he is involved in a number of music foundations and academic organizations, including serving on the boards of Little Kids Rock, and Future of Music Coalition, as well as advisory board position for programs at New York University and Berklee College of Music.

Daniel Doubrovkine (aka dB.) is a seasoned entrepreneur, technologist, CTO at Artsy.net in New York, the largest online fine art marketplace and publication. Daniel graduated from University of Geneva in late 90s with a degree in Computer Science, and founded and sold Vestris Inc., an early stage technology start-up right after college. He joined Microsoft as Development Lead, was Director at Visible Path, then Architect and Development Manager at Application Security. Daniel is the creator and maintainer of many popular open-source projects and a lifetime artist.

Jennie Rose Halperin is the Communications Manager at Creative Commons. She makes the CC communications and brand sparkle and works with communities to tell their stories through a variety of media. As a freelance writer and editor, Jennie is currently working with MIT’s CoLab, where she is assisting in the creation of a book and multimedia series on social justice for SAGE Publishing and the SEIU. Before joining Creative Commons, Jennie worked for Safari Books Online/O’Reilly Media as the Product Engagement Manager where she managed community marketing and test-driven product growth with a mighty team of technologists dedicated to innovation in online learning. She was previously at Mozilla on the Community Building Team and earned her masters degree in Library Science.

Isabel Walcott Draves (moderator) is the founder of Leaders in Software and Art (LISA) and President of Creative Tech Week. She is an Internet entrepreneur with over two decades of experience organizing technology communities, conducting research and managing large projects. In 2015, she started Creative Tech Week to create a network of creative and business professionals originating new technology-driven content in media, entertainment, advertising, music and the arts. Since 2009, Draves has convened Leaders in Software and Art, bringing together cutting-edge software and electronic artists, curators, collectors, and coders to share their work in conferences, shows and salons. Draves founded the first website for teen girls, SmartGirl.com, from 1995-2001; managed content publishing systems at Bertelsmann and directed an elite think tank for cybersecurity executives at Gartner in the 00’s; and has provided expert consulting to dozens of startups and Fortune 100 companies nationwide.

Enjoy wine, beer and appetizers with speakers and guests after the panel discussion at an upstairs reception.

Programming provided by Leaders in Software and Art and Creative Tech Week.