Blind man’s stick

“I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man’s metal stick”. So says Claes Oldenburg in his seminal piece I am for…, written in 1961 for the catalogue of an exhibition at Martha Jackson Gallery called Environments, Situations, Spaces. While it’s been dubbed a manifesto, Oldenburg insists it’s not. The movement became known as New realism or Pop Art. Oldenburg later said that his piece was a slightly satirical ode or paean to the possibilities of using anything in one’s surroundings (mostly urban) as a starting point. We find Oldenburg’s metal stick statement to have multiple layers of meaning that we can apply to our experimentation approaches. Firstly, finding the red line of the conversation and interdependency between the theme, content curation, design and implementation plan is critical and needs a high degree of harmonization and adaptability. Secondly, the theme to which it originally referred, namely: Environments, Situations, Spaces and the power of emerging transformative show formats and environments with their own unique social psychological influences, challenges and opportunities provides the possibility to experiment across platforms with interchanging visions, techniques and narratives. Thirdly, the goal (deliberately or not) to create a new realm of events – a movement of sorts, based upon our concepts of “living the future” or “sense events” remains a massively provocative inspiration.

STEAM³ was a first of its type – a learning-based event that included an interactive playground of creativity and innovation to underpin the conference topics. The show presented the work of Georgia Tech’s Gil Weinberg founding Director of the Center for Music Technology and their work on artificial creativity, namely a robotic musician called Shimon that uses machine learning for jazz improvisation, and a prosthetic robotic arm for amputees that restores and enhances human drumming abilities. In 2017, we created the themes and content for The Tech Experience at CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2017 – a separate vision of What’s Next in the world of construction and infrastructure, with a time horizon ranging from the now to 2050, which was also a first of its kind. While, our area titled The Experiment at our Plutopia events took even the forward-thinking SXSW crowd by surprise.