Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference merges art and technology, provides model for collaboration in games.
Next weekend Rhizome will be hosting another round of its annual Seven on Seven Conference. Bringing together one artist and one technologist, the conference is excellent model of collaboration in the digital age by bringing together two sets of creators that are not always in conversation. In 2010, for example, artist Ryan Trecartin and Tumblr founder David Karp created Riverofthe.net (above), a machine-gun blast of stream of consciousness web videos. This year’s assembly looks just as promising The technologists are:
- Jeremy Ashkenas, creator of Coffeescript.js and Backbone.js and member of the New York Times Interactive News Team
- Blaine Cook, founding architect of Twitter and co-founder of OAuth
- Michael Herf, founder of Picasa
- Marissa Mayer, VP Local, Maps, and Localization, Google
- Aaron Swartz, programmer and co-founder of Demand Progress
- Khoi Vinh, co-CEO of Mixel for the iPad
- Anthony Volodkin, founder of Hype Machine
On the art side will be:
- Xavier Cha, performance artist whose work revolves around modes of technological mediation, cultural exchange and hierarchies of spaces
- Taryn Simon, artist whose photography, installation and writing touches on complex social issues such as the American justice system (through the Innocence Project) and perceived foreign threats to the U.S. (as distilled through items detained from passengers and mail entering the country from abroad)
- Jon Rafman, artist exploring the impact of technology on our consciousness, often described as a ‘virtual explorer’ for his diaristic explorations of online communities;Naeem Mohaimen,an artist and anthropologist who explores histories of the international left through essays, photography, and film
- LaToya Ruby Frazier, photo and mixed-media artist who manipulates the conventions of social documentary to upend traditional narratives of urban growth;
- Aram Bartholl, known for hispublic interventions and installations examine how parts of the digital world reach back into reality (including this CounterStrike project we covered)
- Stephanie Syjuco, sculpture/installation artist who incorporates open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital to create frictions between high ideals and everyday materials
I’d love to see more projects like this for games. After attending the Nordic Game Jam last year, I was bothered by the lack of non-programming talent — artists, musicians, architects, etc — and more friction between games and other creative mediums in the vein of Seven on Seven would be a wonderful thing.
You can buy tickets for the conference here.
