 Are they all on? And thank you all for coming to attend the Future of Creative Engagement panel. We're really excited to have a Samoda really diverse and interesting group of entrepreneurs and artists to talk about how arts accessibility and engagement is transforming, especially at the intersection of like tech and arts. So we're going to kick it off here. Great. And thank you everyone for coming. My name is Charles Baldwin, and I'm with the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is your state agency for investing in the creative sector. And I'm really excited to be here because we've got a very exciting panel. So we're not going to be talking about me. We're going to talk to our wonderful participants. And thank you, everyone, for participating in this. But to kick it off, I'm going to have people introduce themselves, who you are, what you do, what brings you here. And then we're going to dive into some of these more provocative queries to tease out some things that might help and illuminate ideas for the audience. So Victor, I'm going to start with you because you're at the end of the table. Is this working? Yes. Awesome. So thank you, everyone, for having me here. So my name is Victor. I'm the founder and CEO of Defram, and at Defram we develop software and mobile applications for museums and art galleries to increase traffic into the exhibitions and also to engage with our visitors. So my name is John Olson. I'm a co-founder of a business called 3D PhotoWorks. Ten years ago, I set out with a small team to develop a means by which to share visual information, to share art, to share photography, with the blind community. And today we have works in about six museums in Canada and the U.S., and today I'd like to show you some of that. Are we to do that at this point? Yeah, I was going to say, why don't we jump right in? We can do a little bit of show and tell here. So just quickly, here's some of the statistics on the blind community. There are 285 million blind and legally blind people worldwide. In the U.S., one person goes blind every 11 minutes. Now when you look at the rest of the statistics, they're very alarming. Well, the first statistic is 75% of what we learn is acquired through site. And without site, learning within the blind community is impeded. But the rest of the statistics regarding the blind community, you'll note, less than 25% of the blind community receive a high school diploma, only 14% receive a college diploma, 31% live below the poverty level, 75% of the blind are unemployed. And still today in many states, it's legal to pay blind workers less than minimum wage. So our goal is to provide the educational and the cultural information to help fill that void. Our goal on the ultimate scale is to create a worldwide network of museums, of science centers, of libraries, and other institutions that are willing to provide the blind community with tactile information to provide them with this educational support and the cultural support. Now I mentioned that we're in six museums in Canada and the U.S. When I speak to an audience and explain what we're doing, it's someone from the sighted community who's telling you the story. We find that it's members of the blind community that tell our story best. So I'm going to play a brief clip where we hear from members of the blind community following our international debut at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. When I was looking at the photo of the boy in the bathtub and when I felt his mouth and had the description that it was wide open, as if in joyful play, and his teeth and tongue are visible, it's like, wow, I saw it. And I felt it, and you were just part of it. And it really felt good that I could experience what everybody else does. The instruction said to head towards her hand. By the time I got to her hand, and it was my hand on her hand, she was communicating through her hand, and I didn't want to take my hand off her hand. It was just so real. Groundbreaking and life changing for someone who can't see. So what I want to leave you with is that a year into our process, we've worked one-on-one with the blind community to do what we do. There's an organization called the National Federation of the Blind, the largest blind advocacy group in North America, has 50,000 members. Many of them have served as our technical consultants. A year into the process, a blind woman came to me and said, you know, this tactile experience, this simulated visual experience you've provided us, she said it's great, but it's not the best thing you do. So I asked her to explain what she meant. She said, when I can see a piece of artwork on my own, without a docent or a friend explaining it to me, that represents freedom. It represents independence and it represents equality. And those were powerful words that told us we were on the right track of trying to change the lives and helping to change the lives of a huge population. So I look forward to today's panel and any questions that you may have later on. Thanks, John. Brendan. Hello, everyone. My name is Brendan Sieko. I'm the founder and CEO of QZM. At QZM, we help museums, public attractions and cultural nonprofits with member, visitor and donor engagement. How we got involved in the space really started around seeing how painful, frustrating and obsolete a lot of the technology that was available to museums and seeing that there had to be a better way. There had to be a better way to engage, educate, and make the experience more accessible for the visitors. And I got my start in creative engagement and creative entrepreneurship at the right age of 11. I started my first company when I was about 13, used my interest in design, art, music and technology to basically build a company that provided creative services to people like Katy Perry, Mick Jagger and Lenny Kravitz. And as I aged into my later teens, my love for art really started to evolve. And I saw an opportunity to help these cultural institutions who make it their mission to educate and engage the broadest range of audiences. Do that with more ease, leveraging the power of technology. Thank you. And now, strategically, since this conference and this gathering is talking about the intersection of art and technology and business, Alice and I chatted. And so I wanted Alice to introduce herself final because she is an artist on our panel. Hi. I'm Alice Shepard. I'm a dance and choreographer. On screen is an image of me in my wheelchair diving over an access ramp. I'm here to talk a little bit about disability arts as they come up in relationship to technology. And so I want to really focus for a second on what I mean by that because what we tend to think of as disability art is not what I'm thinking of. I am actually looking at work that is by disabled artists, featuring disabled artists, not about disabled artists, work that is rooted in disability culture, grounded in relation to other artists, interrogating us of disabled life, and featuring access as an art form. That's the key idea. Access is an art form, not a technology used to bridge a gap between us and the non-disabled world. So here are the informing ideas. On screen is an image of the exo-Bionics exoskeleton with a huge great X in it. The X across it really is to question the relationship of what do we think technology does. So one, dance is ready for technology, not what you usually think. Two, disability is not the deficit of diagnosis, which is interesting, right, because technology and art are usually positioned with technology bridging the gap between the disabled person and the non-disabled world. But what if disability is not a deficit that needs to be fixed by technology? What if it's a culture and an aesthetic? What if we think about technology that doesn't actually fix us, cure us, or able us to participate in a normative way? But what if technology exposes the joy of disability? What if design enhances the pleasure of disabled life? What really, if access is an aesthetic by which it's a way of making work and a way of featuring work? And that's that big X, glorifying itself. I want to really think for a second, who's responsible for access? In this world, in this room, I'm guessing that we think that technology may fix the gap? But really, how does access work? Is it the artist? Is it the venue? Is it the curator, the presenter, the funder, the audience? Who is responsible for access? Or do we rely on technologists to make art accessible retroactively? And these are just some of the ideas that look through that. If we are using technology to bridge a gap, what I think we might end up with is discriminatory access. You can get in, you can experience something, but is it actually the same equitable experience? It matters to me how I get into the door. It matters to me what happens when I get into the door, as much as it matters to me that I can get into the door. And my contention in my practice is that technology is used to make sure that we can get in the door, but it doesn't always ensure the equitable experience. Some images of me really thinking through technology as a kind of expressive joy, riding and flying down ramps. And last slide is to think through access and aesthetic. What does it mean as a dancer to make a visual art form as accessible to people who are blind or have a visual impairment? So this is thinking through how verbal description works. What if we render dance not as description, which is the displaced art form, but as sound itself. That way access becomes the aesthetic of the art, and I, the artist, take responsibility. And that's the ways to find me. Stay in touch, and we'll think about all of these questions together. Well, and thank you, Alice, because there's a lot to unpack there, a lot of ideas. And so to our panelists is this notion of when commerce and technology and art fuse together, what is the difference between a participant and a consumer, which in the context of an artist might be the difference between an audience member, and I'm not sure, but in the context of business, participation or consumption? What are you thinking about, Victor, when you want people to engage with Defraim? Yeah, that's a great question. I think in terms of how we see the visitor perspective, who in this case is a person who happens to visit the museums and our customers who are the museums, we believe that there is an actual disconnect between those two. We see that many times museums, they try to, of course, curate their exhibitions, they make their own galleries based on the level of expertise, but there is a disconnect between them and the actual public. What we are trying to achieve with our company is basically being that bridge that helps museums understand what is it that the actual public wants, the technology that we are utilizing and developing for that, it allows us in some way to get in the mind of the user, the visitor, and basically understand what he or she wants to see. So we can provide that back to the museum and they can create exhibitions or showcase content that is more relevant to the visitor. So, and Brendan, then to explore that a little further with the idea of trying to make deeper connections between the institution and the patron to illuminate on that. Was it what nexus from you thinking about creative energy, sort of spurred this idea on? You mentioned your own love of art and that you started early, but what sort of inspired this desire to connect it to a business platform? So seeing my, seeing the experiences that I had and others did around the art experience, once you have a guided experience, it's very illuminating and then you realize, wow, I've been missing out for all this time and it became abundantly clear that there had been this transition in the cultural space as things progressed from a curatorial focus to an educator focus to an audience-first focus. And so that idea as a catalyst, kind of paired with technology, made it abundantly clear that museums need these tools to achieve those goals of providing their visitors with the more engaging experience. This is how we communicate, this is how we socialize, this is how we see the world, yet the tools just weren't matching those expectations. And so for us, some of the things that really drove me beyond my personal passion for arts and culture was the end effect that it had on visitors, where visitors of any background could come and have access, equal access to information to give them layers of, layers to the art that wouldn't be abundantly clear. And I think we're heading towards this world where the object label might become obsolete, the curatorial guide might become obsolete because things can be delivered in a more personal way, in a more contextual way, and a more accessible way. So those were, you know, a number of things that were coming at me from various directions having worked with a number of museums and seeing the things that they were encountering day in and day out, and then working with museum visitors to understand where the friction points were and how we could, you know, provide a solution to solve those. Now, speaking of technology, Alice, as the artist here on site, describe how you might use technology in a performance, because I'm going to toss it back over here, but as curious because we have a choreographer on the panel. So I want to, I want to ask, I mean, I want to really think about that notion of design thinking where you've gone to thinking about, like, what does it mean for an audience and to experience the work. And we're talking, the language is actually interesting, right? Are we talking about users, consumers, patrons, audiences, all of these really kind of, to me, imply a kind of passive relationship to the art itself. And I want to be able to think about art as being a welcoming, open experience for all of us, so that, you know, this panel is about engagement, but I think we also use engagement in this kind of like, oh, it's done, now how do we engage them out there. So first question to you is, when you get the art and the art is here, the technology becomes the way for the audience or the consumer or the person to access or experience the art. But can we make, use technologies to make the art accessible in the creative process, so we're not trying to add, you know, ramps to staircases once the building has been built. How do we actually begin to think through equity on that relationship? So for me, I want to think about technology and access being, technology being the way in which I communicate my access as I create my movement, as I create the art, so that it is integral to the process and not something that comes later when I'm like, oh, how do we get to that point? How do we offer people not engagement, not user, but actually the art in some way, the experience of meeting and encountering the art. So I think that ties into really what is access. So in thinking about the businesses that you have started, the technologies that you use to help institutions and to help people was access, and that's a small word for big notions, but was access part of that vision? Was it something that was baked into your processes or was it something you thought about later? Because I think that's what we're talking about, yes? I'll start with you, I'm going to go down the line. Absolutely. So I think there is a fine line between enhancing and disrupting the experience of art, sharing a personal story as far as how everything began for me. I got inspired by my aunt, who is a professional artist back in Mexico. And she's been making art for over 50 years. And there was a time when we visited the MoMA in New York City with her and the other members of my family. And she was expressing herself and basically explaining art to me and to my family in a way that it was so passionate that she really felt like this is what she does for her life. And I was fascinated by that, by how much love she felt about art. But it was also the opposite of that, the disinterest. The rest of my family, they just were like, oh man, this is horrible, I'm tired, I'm sick, I don't want to hear nothing else about art anymore. And that happened very quickly after 20, 30 minutes. And it was there when I realized why is it that my aunt loves art so much and why is it that my rest of my family don't feel the same way? How can I use what I know the best, which in this case is technology, to help my family, the other members of my family feel the same way that my aunt does? But again, as I mentioned before, there is a fine line between having too much, disrupting the experience of actually being there and actually experiencing art. So yeah, I'll pass it up to you to see what you guys think about that. I love Victor's story. My assumption is that eight out of ten entrepreneurs engage in a process because of some direct connection to their life. And that was definitely my case. This is my second career. For decades, I traveled the world as a photojournalist. My career took me places and gave me access to people and places I never would have had. I learned through imagery and imagery allowed me the opportunity to be who I became. And it was late in that career when I began to wonder what it was like for the blind community who didn't have that access. And that's what prompted me on this mission. One of the things we've learned from having seen about ten installations to date in a number of different museums is not only is what we're doing changing the lives or giving the blind community the opportunity to change their lives, but it's also and this is wonderful when it comes to how the museums view what we're doing, it turns out that the sighted community loved to experience the art and photography we engage in along with the sighted. So not only does it blend both groups, but from an ROI perspective, the museums see the return. We have a an exhibition running right now in Washington, D.C. at the museum. It opened January 30th 2018. 350 blind people came to the opening. It was a historic evening. And the exhibit has been so successful for both the blind and the sighted that they opted to extend at six months. Thank you. So speaking about the two different sides of accessibility, because I think a distinction should be made, because I've had conversations with museum directors and when you bring up accessibility, they think about the ease for the masses to access this contemporary art that's so abstract that we need to interpret it. And on the other side, it's about giving people maybe non sighted visitors or low sighted visitors or visitors with different disabilities equal or equitable access. So to start on one side and make my way over to the other, kind of from a personal experience, I'm the middle child of five kids, my mom drives a school bus, my dad's a plumber. We didn't go to museums. I didn't have access to these places. And then later in life as I started to see the power that museums and cultural institutions had, I saw what I had been missing out and so many others have been missing out on and saw technology as a way of helping bridge those gaps and make knowledge and information more fluid and more accessible. But as I started QZM in 2014, I had to basically mold my company around what mattered most to the sector, to the museum sector in particular. And over the last couple of years accessibility and inclusion as it relates to experience for all audience members became a primary goal and priority for these institutions. So we knew that this was serious. We knew that this was something we need to put a lot of time and effort and, you know, in our user testing and the people that we're surveying, we need to make sure that there's a cross-section of populations to make sure that the technology is in line with what the cultural institutions are mandating, the level of excellence that needs to be put forth to make sure that these audiences are getting an excellent experience. And a number of the institutions that we work with make that one of the top priorities that they're measuring against and are using this for audio description and making sure that visitors who walk through are accommodated and have a great experience with the art and the museum as a whole, whether it be wayfinding around the museum. And we're talking about collaboration in a lot of ways. These places are very difficult for a lot of people to navigate. So you imagine how can you use technology to solve some of those problems. It's become very important to us. Thank you. Thank you. And so with that, before we, I want to dive a little deeper into this idea, do you think that the technology landscape, this is where we go into the business part, but do you think that the technology landscape is changing our ideas about what art is? Okay, so Alice is nodding. I'm going to start here. Side note, I love that the museum is such a contested site. The museum is that funky old place that maybe you don't go to all that often, but for this panel, the museum hosts these kinds of rich and complicated explorations and it's like a point where all of us kind of intersect around where art and technology works. So if the future of creative engagement is happening here, I'm saying part of it's happening on the museum, and part of it is happening on the stage. So to your question directly, does technology change in the landscape? Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine anything that is driving innovation and dance more than technology at the moment. And thinking through like, what does it mean for me to make accessible work, but also what are the technologies do, well let's just start with my body, right? I'm a wheelchair user. The very, very first technology that I deal with on a daily basis, never mind life, but on stage and in the studio, is what does wheeled technology enable me to create and do? And the more we advance wheelchair technology, the more we think about design and 3D printing and what it means to actually customize and to use new materials, new alloys to make these things lighter, the greater the expressive potential I have, the greater the artistic qualities of my wheels. When I think about the chair that I use to work in versus the chair that, you know, you may think of as a wheelchair those things you see in airports and hospitals, right? Those are technology and technological innovations. So for me that very first moment of technology is the more the technology of France or progresses or deepens, the greater potential I have as an artist to move in thrilling, challenging, emotional, gorgeous ways. So bring it on because technology is driving my body. That body, embodiment of body and technology, critical. But it's also in what I'm able to do, the environments I'm able to create. Like if I think about the work that I want to create, it's immersive. So there's a kind of technological innovation that goes beyond, here's the light lights up, lights down. I'm looking at technological innovation to be able to create not just a beautiful piece that you see, but an experience that you can feel in your gut and in your heart and in your breath. And that is partly my movement and partly the technologies that surround the expressin of that art. And I'm looking at technology in a way to just be able to open the question of like, what is blind? And here's another question. Clearly not only is the museum an important site, but the next round of innovation is happening around sightedness and blindness. So for me, when I'm thinking about developing a question of like the non-sighted, non-visual audiences, what does it mean to make dance sound, to listen to dance equitably and not to the description of dance? That's a technological innovation. And so technology is driving my questioning of what I do, who is in the room with me and who is on stage with me and who is absorbing and experiencing this. This is not an accommodation. This is not a retroactive bridge. This is the point of innovation that is actually making my art, I believe, I hope more, more. Just let me stop there. Sorry, that long answer. More. So, again, we've now got an artist in the room and she's given us a lot to think about. The landscape, the experience. How do you see art changing with the kind of work that you're able to provide this technology that you're offering? I think in a lot of ways this question predates the renaissance, but if we flash forward into Da Vinci's day looking at how technology has impacted the artist's experience, what was regarded as art and what was regarded at technology, people have been thinking about this and talking about this for quite some time. There's instances of Gustav Klimt visiting a friend who was a scientist in Vienna and being one of the first artists introduced to a microscope and seeing cellular structures. What an appropriate conversation for MIT, I have to say. And having that influence is aesthetic in the early 1900s and then you look at Nam June Puck and what he was doing with technology. And then you look at Marilyn Minter and how she's using Photoshop in her photography today. And then you look at how algorithms are being auctioned and all of these different intersections around technology and art that are just being so accelerated today. In the news recently we've probably all been talking about Banksy in Sotheby's. What is that? Is that destruction? Is that the art market's dark side? There's a lot to be said and analyzed there but I think to walk away with some specific examples, the conversations that we're having with artists today and the institutions that are cultivating and working with these artists is most definitely around augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality and little tidbits and sprinkles of artificial intelligence. So you're starting to see a lot more of this surface where curators are getting comfortable and more comfortable with the idea of how technology can be used as a tool for creative expression for creative experimentation just like a paintbrush or a camera would have been done. So it's something we'll probably be seeing a lot more of and Boston's a great hub for this conversation. I think the ICA did an extraordinary job with Art in the Age of Internet and really encapsulating the way that the Internet, these networks changed the way people thought about art, the way they thought about distributing information in so many different ways. So it's really, I think it is no more exciting time than right now actually. So I see you nodding over there Victor and I'm going to come to you John because you're just looking for it. But Victor, you're like, yes, yes, AR and the different environments about the creative experience. If not art, the creative experience. Absolutely. I think this just resonates to me a lot. I was listening to actually another talk yesterday from another company that the only thing that they do is print DNA and they were talking about how art is actually utilizing that as a medium to create new forms of art to grow bacteria out of the floor and create a new piece. So I think that technology ultimately is bringing new mediums, new ways to create art but at the same time we have to step back a little bit and think about the audience. I'm talking about again the visitors who go to museums. Something that we found early in the beginnings of the frame was that many people go to museums or go to exhibitions just to say that they were there, not to be there. So why is that? It's because there is again a disconnect between them that is something that is some missing piece between the technology that has enabled them to communicate but also the actual endeavor of being there and experience art in a more meaningful way. So for the artist, it's amazing. I think we're seeing a lot of great things and we're going to keep seeing a lot of new innovations but for the visitor, the audience, there has to be something that allow us to engage with them in a more efficient way. Thank you. Okay, John. So Charles, your question, it couldn't be more timely. I would say about four years ago Top 10 American artist Richard Prince learned of what we were doing and he started having us create a number of pieces for his collection, most of which have been warehouseed to this date. A few have been seen in public but in a very limited way. But recently we completed a piece for Richard that goes on display next month. So it's that will be from a purely ground level connection between an artist and the process. Our technology will find its way into the public's eye. So we're unpacking these different ways to look at art, that cultural landscape. How we move through the space, how we see the space, how we connect to the space. And how are these different communication modes, these different technological manners, can we turn them into commerce? Do you need your business plan? That's the entire nature of our business when you think about it. New avenues and new channels for the cultural institution who hosts the works by the cultural practitioner or creator to distribute it to the audience. So being kind of a layer within that to either amplify or spread the message wider through interpretation or interpretation, that's the whole essence of where we fit in. So absolutely. So I'd just like to jump in there if I may and say that for the course of my two careers which span decades, I have been a for-profit entity. In this, in my most recent career that we're discussing here the last 10 years have really been to develop a product that accomplishes two things, pays for itself, pays for the development and two, serves the social good. And when I consider a true success, a true home run, when you can develop a product that serves both those needs. And we're on the precipice of that. Again, a solid business so that it's sustainable, but that it serves a social good. This idea of corporate citizenship. What do we think about the future when we're talking about all of this? The healthy business landscape, the inclusion of art centering the artist and how that might spark new ideas. And thinking about where you want to be in five, ten years you get to hum on that a little bit. Where do you see yourselves going with this? Where do you see it expanding? What does the future look like based on where we are but with all these ideas sparking? For us, ultimately the main goal from day one was making sure that art remained relevant to younger generations and future generations. So as far as what we want to accomplish is just that. We just want to make sure that people can appreciate again the beauty and the cultural importance of art in all aspects. Modern art, traditional art, any way, shape or form. As far as the future, I think that again, ultimately technology is going to take us there. There is a lot of things that need to catch up as far as the museum space, the art space in order to get there but ultimately I guess that we have to embrace technology but also I go back to the same concept that I was mentioning a couple of minutes ago. That there is a fine line between enhancing and disrupting. There has to be a way that we can actually be in that specific medium and actually enhance the experience without disrupting it too much. I like this idea of trying to reconcile enhancement versus disruption. Because in a certain way isn't disruption where new ideas come from? Can I speak to that? This is the second time you brought this up and the first time you brought it up I was like, ooh, can we go there? We are going. I want to ask you, what does it mean to enhance and disrupt? Think about that from my own practice. The app that we have designed allows for users of the app to get multiple streams of content that they can DJ among themselves as if they were you can choose which track, you can switch tracks, you can play two tracks at once. Immediately for me that is a question about authorial control. It's called choreographic control. The idea that I now am presenting a work on stage is lost because the people using the app are choosing this, looking here, looking there, looking there, looking there. It's a simultaneous enhancement and disruption. I don't think those two things are necessarily mutually exclusive. Further, I want to ask the question, what if you have them together? Doesn't that make the art in some ways more challenging or more engaging or more critical? It's the question of if enhancement and disruption go hand in hand, technology is the innovator that enables us to push forward in these spaces and I want that. I want to be able to have a practice, not a business, but a practice that is accountable to my peoples rather than my audience or my institution or my presenter and have that practice be beyond me so that I don't own my art as much as I want to own my art. But in the experience of performing my art, the work that people have is not the work that I offer. That's both an enhancement and a disruption that takes things way out of my control. I want it. Gentlemen, dancer in the room, moving forward wanting not to reconcile enhancement and disruption, but to merge them. Reactions? I mean, I think for me, looking at the there's a lot of questions to answer there, but looking at the cultural institution and thinking about they are in the forever business. Businesses are in the business business where they come and they go and they come and they go. It's different than venture capital is different than philanthropy. Your fund which is supposed to last you hundreds of years so you can basically be the rebuilding humanity kit if mankind were ever to be wiped clean from the face of the planet. When you think about the purpose of museums and themselves being the underpin of society, they're not positioned to take risks in the same way commercial businesses are. That said, we are embarking on this journey today where museums are seeing, museums and cultural institutions far and wide are seeing the speed and agility at which for-profit tech businesses have been able to operate. I don't want to quote Mark Zuckerberg, but we're going to go there. The idea of moving fast and breaking things, yeah, that sounds great for a startup or a tech company that needs to achieve certain things by certain dates, but for a cultural institution, that's a very daunting idea. There are more entrepreneurial movements taking place within the museum community and within the arts community to embrace failure, which is a word that you wouldn't use all too often. That I think is a natural part of artistic practice, but when you're the museum and you're on 5th avid showtime and there's really an expectation of excellence, an expectation of some academic level when you're displaying works or debuting a new piece and so on, that idea of failure is fairly new and it's fairly frightening, but it is being talked about today at the director level and all levels of the cultural institution. So that idea of cultural entrepreneurship or even intrapreneurship at the institution level is something I'm really excited about because it kind of loosens it up a little. It says, hey, we're willing to take small risks to try things out, to disrupt things perhaps or to enhance things, but that's what I think will drive the space forward is that willingness to fail, that willingness to experiment and be a little bit more entrepreneurial, less rigid and more agile as a cultural community. Well, I think that's a great sort of re-balancing, re-defining again what's enhancement versus what might be disruption. What I'd love to add here, if I may, just as there are 100 unique personalities in this room, in my conversations with museums over the last four years I've found out there are 100 different personalities out there and there's some that the moment is just absolutely right to take that next step. I've never been to a museum, I've never spoken to a director of education or a curator of accessibility who has said to me, no, we're not interested in serving the disabled. They're all interested, they're all interested in serving the blind. In our case, we present a conundrum because up until this point there hasn't been a significant step forward in how to do that. Now we've come forth with a solution and that presents the conundrum. What do we do now? What do we use it for? When do we use it? How do we pay for it? One of the things we found early on is some of the smaller organizations we've dealt with have been ready to seize that opportunity. Larger institutions that can take longer. It is possible, I believe, to turn the battleship. Some turn more quickly than others and there have been some surprise opportunities where some relatively large organizations have seen the opportunity and seized it. Okay, so that idea of seeing the opportunity and seizing it speaks to a certain nimble quality you want to be able to maintain when thinking about your business. Nimbl's a good word for a dancer, yeah? I'm just trying to tie it all together. With this idea of wanting to remain nimble and finding those opportunities how would you categorize the opportunity you took to take your ideas into a business platform to turn that in? What was that opportunity that you grabbed based on people in this room looking for opportunities, maybe not always knowing how to identify them? What was that opportunity? I need to confess something very early on. I am the ultimate entrepreneur. I'm ready to release that product as soon as it's right, but it's never quite right enough. And for years I wanted to make it better. And a museum discovered me before I wanted to be discovered and they made me commit. Did they make you better? Hugely. I guess answering your question as far as my journey is this. We found and how we grabbed this niche area, which is very... we tend to think about entrepreneurship and art as something that is not in the same area, but I actually think they're also so close not distinguish them. You look pretty closely. Before being here in the morning I was a couple weeks with a local artist from Boston and he brought some of his art to our exhibition booth and we made our booth his mini gallery for the morning. And as we were talking about how has been the journey for him to be an artist to where he is right now, it was almost like hearing my own story as an entrepreneur. It's the same story having something from nothing to becoming something. That is something that he's been trying to achieve for so long. And we have seen this through the story of time from the movement of the impressionism to the modern art when Picasso used to be living in poverty trying to work with other artists seems very similar to an incubator nowadays. But again, going back to how we saw this moment, this opportunity, we saw that not only there were two groups of people, younger people who are tech savvy, but they're not interested in the arts. And there are other groups of people who are lovers but they don't really understand technology. So again, finding this balance as far as we can create this tool that will bring young people into the museums, they will show them that museums are actually interesting, that they are relevant, and also they will enhance the experience for the people who already love art. But again, going back to that word without disrupting their experience. I think as an entrepreneur my answer is quite simple. If you see something that is broken that you can throw yourself behind and make better or different or drive innovation forward, then you seize it to use your word. You jump on that. And I think for us it was having experienced, you know, as visitors and museum lovers experiencing what we experienced but also working on the inside and just seeing how painful certain processes were around engagement and going there has to be a better way. This is how we communicate, we socialize, we see the world, it's all in the palm of our hands. How can we harness technology, lessen the burden to the cultural institution, and make it a little bit smoother, a little bit easier for the visitor. So it was all about seeing that and experiencing it and having dozens of conversations. So as an entrepreneur you need to be talking to all sides of the table who's going to be purchasing your technology, who's going to be using your technology, and really let that mold your company. And I think that's the most important thing is just having an open line of communication, learning from past failures, talking to people in the field, and admitting that you're vulnerable and that there are things that you don't know so that you can better yourself by having that kind of network around you. Can I jump in for a second on that? It's about, for me, listening to you, it's about creating a better cartography of the relationships. So as I talk to you, Victor, about relationships between are we talking about the relationship between an audience and the artwork and the audience and the institution and I want to see where is the artist, what responsibility or role does the maker have in that intersection? Who does the maker think they are talking to? Which is kind of what you're saying, Brendan, about all people at all parts of the design process. So I want to be able to figure out these maps of how we relate so that we aren't just like dealing with two of the three stakeholders or more like there are six stakeholders and we're dealing with three of the six stakeholders because the relationship is actually kind of complicated. You know, I make a work, but before I make a work I have an ideal audience, an imagined audience, an ideal audience, an imagined audience, a potential audience, I like the audience, a dream audience and I have ways to think and speak in them. The audience is in my work, my people are in the work as I create the work and the technology is in the work as I create the work and so I'm thinking about connection, like this multi-layered connection so that it's flowing from all of the people who might want to engage. So are we engaging with the art or are we engaging with the artwork itself? And are we engaging with the artist? It's a multi-level, it's a complex engagement practice and if we only deal with one I feel like we're kind of like shutting the door some tired metaphor about shutting the door after the horse has escaped or something. It has to be messy and I love that idea again of fixing it. I don't know if we can fix it. We're failing fast to use tech terms but in that failure, what if we really create failure as the creative process itself? Because if you think about art as a process and a set of connections and relationships, every time we break it we fail but we've made the connection. I would honestly love to see it be a mandate within the museum framework that if the artist is living, the voice of the artist should be represented in any form of interpretation and I think so far within that. And one of the, like these little experiences that you have like you go to the walker in Minneapolis and you're like I've been to maybe a thousand museums and I think they're one of the few museums that has a image, an image of the artist, a photograph. This is a person, this person has a story. They created the work and those moments really stick with you but it really takes the museum as the content creator or the curator of that content to do that and I know in every art museum it's very different because the artists are living and their voice is more likely to be included but just a conversation about that, that we're going to balance the curatorial interpretation why this is relevant today and here's the story but also the voice of the artist, what was the process of creating the work? What disruption took place? How many times did you fail before you got there? And I think so many times it's glossed over but I would love to see more of that, more of the ugly side, more of the underbelly, the creative process and I feel a lot of people feel the same way. And that's often the connection right? When it's a one to one personal connection you can have a reaction to the artwork but it is sometimes the story of the artist that might make that deeper. Now Lily, you're waving and I couldn't understand but do you want to open this up? Ah, we're going to, I wish we could see Alice perform well AliceShepard.com see that was pretty good. It feels the arts is losing ground to Netflix and Instagram. Is it enough to layer tech on existing art institutions or do we need to reinvent from the ground up? I think it's a very interesting question although we haven't used the word barrier I sometimes think that anxiety is the first barrier. Why get off the couch? Do the technologies that we've sort of danced around I couldn't help it. Do they help us fight that, fight that the lethargy to get out of the house? I think it's a much bigger question about what we as a society value and you know, you look at Netflix, their currency is literally cold hard cash, it's currency they're not in the business of maybe artistic expression abstract ideas, unpopular non-mainstream avant-garde, that's not the business that they're in. So it's really difficult to put the two side by side and say as a cultural institution we're competing, I mean it's absolutely true, you're competing these are maybe the words of the former chief digital officer of the of the Met that you're competing with Candy Crush and Instagram and Netflix how do you do that? And digital can definitely make things more accessible but it all goes back to how we as a society as a culture value the arts and I think that's a much more deeply rooted political conversation that could probably merit its own panel next year at Hacking the Arts. Its own panel next year. That's good. In the case of 3D photo works our technology demands that blind people leave their home and visit a museum. In Washington DC there are 22 million visitors annually, 2.3% of the population are blind, that's a half a million people who currently aren't visiting museums who are potential customers. Just to add a little bit more into all of this I think that technology as we speak is we're living in a very interesting time where technology is allowing the artist to use what the tools that we have as another form of another channel of communication but also as far as the art and the museum industry is I think that we are just in the early beginning so what is going to happen where it's going to actually become pretty soon and ultimately I think that closely that we're able to embrace this technology the better connection we're going to start seeing between the museums the art, the people and the artist. Just quickly, I don't think we are losing ground to tech. Instagram is one of the ways you can find me. It's one of the ways I can give you a little hook about what I do. I can livestream my performances to people who can't get to them so you don't have to leave your house because the assumption is if you can't leave your house you can get my art on tech. I don't think we are losing ground. I think the old ways of interacting and understanding and moving in art are different. Those are changing. I don't know that change is ground loss but I don't see these things as mutually exclusive and dear me, if I ended up on Netflix, if I made a dance short film or you could get my work on Netflix instead of being in a library I would welcome that. Yeah, bring it on. Now there are some juicy questions coming up and I know we don't have a lot of time but in speaking of that the idea of that we're not losing ground. There's a question here that if technology is transforming arts accessibility how is it also changing the definition of ownership in originality? And I mean certainly that's something in the music industry we hear a lot. Ownership as opposed to process product. I like my work and I protect my copyright where I can but I think the challenge for me and actually one of the practices of archiving is to understand that disability and access means that part of this is the focus on the process but on the relation and the connections, the interdependence and not on choreographic authorial control. It breaks me. It really breaks me. I struggle with it I want it, I welcome it, I open to it and it's a real change in perspective from what I grew it up with and I think that is one of the beautiful things that is coming forward. I think this is one of the things that we grow to and I'm right there. I'm going to take one more question offline and I know people in the audience might but people in the audience will be able to see us after when we leave the stage but I thought this would be a great way to sort of wrap this up in many ways because how do we engage the artist, audience and arts institution to create an interactive collaborative experience that is not strictly bounded by space and time. Wow. Go. Is this true, false or multiple choice? This is from Anonymous but we talk about experience we talk about the expanding definition of art if we think about space and time as a barrier how does technology create that? That's a really interesting question and I know that the director and lead curator of the Serpentine in London who's one of the most celebrated thinkers in the art world and the future of the art world said we need more experiments in art and one of the things that he hinted to was that through the digital lens the exhibition no longer has a start date or an end date and can live on forever so you can only imagine an element coupled with the fact that so much of what we consume and experience today is user generated or user modified or user augmented that something like that could be achieved if you had a decentralized distributed museum that wasn't held together by a core central institution but something that was an equal playing field and how do you achieve that is a much more difficult question to answer. A good year of the hacking arts panel. Responses to the boundaries of space and time gentlemen because our space and time is... I'm going to pass to Victor and give him the opportunity to answer on my behalf. I think that ultimately in terms of space and time and how everything brings together it goes back to actually empowering everyone to have a voice to enter the museum even the art. It is about just listening to what they have to say. It is about listening to their journey to their story and just empowering what they actually want. Ultimately the artistic endeavor of an artist is not the final piece but it's the actual journey of making the piece so ultimately we're able to grasp that by utilizing technology I think that we are in the right way in the right path so in three years of that. Well I'm sorry that we can't answer more of the online questions. There are some juicy ones in there. I encourage our audience here in real time real life to engage with the panel as we come off the stage. Certainly thank you to Victor John, Brendan and Alice for sharing your ideas with us. I would love to be talking to you for another hour because now I'm crackling with my own ideas so thank you to the audience and thank you to MIT for hosting this discussion. Thank you so much to our wonderful panel of panelists and moderators. You guys have really led way to a really dynamic and interesting conversation. I've certainly walked away with a lot of takeaways and thoughts and I hope the audience did too. So if we could get another round of applause for this amazing panel feel free to talk to any of the panelists or moderators off the stage. Feel free to check out John's work. Outside at 5pm we have a mixer hosted by Clover. So thank you all again.