Jeremy Bailey demonstrates “Big Penis Mode” at last year’s Seven on Seven in NYC. Photo by Jesse Untracht-Oakner. (Image courtesy of Rhizome.org)
Get ready for some conversation. That’s the main deliverable promised by Rhizome’s annual Seven on Seven event, a conference (held May 3rd) that pairs off seven technologists with seven artists and gives them the undefined mission of collaboration. This year’s pairings (listing technologists first and artists second) were announced last week and will include Rus Yusupov with Hannah Sawtell; David Kravitz with Frances Stark; Kate Ray with Holly Herndon; Aza Raskin with Kari Altmann; Nick Bilton with Simon Denny; Jen Fong-Adwent with Ian Cheng; and Anil Dash with Kevin McCoy. Kate Crawford, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, will give the keynote.
If “conversation” as a promised product sounds a little deflating relative to the hope that the conference will one day birth world-altering software, it shouldn’t be. The latter is a pipe dream, and in my experience the excitement of the panelists and the conference-goers every year makes the conference worth attending. The ideas presented may not be refined, but there’s never a shortage of them. This in and of itself makes Seven on Seven unique; people without ideas are ubiquitous.
So set aside your May 3rd and prepare to spend the day listening and talking. It’s not everyday that a conference brings this much creative energy into one place, so it’s good to be there when it happens.
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