talking art & tech with Beau Takahara

I had a great big discussion yesterday with Beau Takahara, the co-founder and CEO of ZeroOne: The Art & Technology Network. Beau has been fomenting creative revolution at the intersection of art and technology for many years, at places like George Coates, SFMOMA and The Tech. She's definitely a force to be reckoned with. I'd like to see her start blogging, I suspect it would be unique and good.

Among other things, we were talking about the contemporaneous emergence of so many new digital, connective and ubicomp technologies that may dramatically change our experience of the world, and how this creates a great need for cultural sensemaking. The arts provide ways to envision the possible and examine the human implications of a changing world. Artists create lenses through which we can perceive the world from new, unexpected perspectives. Art may also incite and admonish and delight and inspire us. In the new environment of pervasive technology, we deeply need all these things that the arts can provide. But we also need crossroads, places where artists and technologists can discover each other and find shared context. After talking with Beau, I'm hopeful that ZeroOne can make an influential contribution to this new sensemaking. This should be interesting.