fostering a community of innovation: art + technology

This density of technology creatives – artists, programmers, technologists, designers, entrepreneurs  in the Pacific NW has had a meaningful impact on the regional art community and beyond, placing the Northwest in a unique position to show global leadership in emerging genres of interdisciplinary, technology-mediated art. Last summer (2014), my co conspirator Shelly Farnham and I started meeting, scheming and hatching a plan to further the research we had started with our 2009 research report, Art and Technology Incubation for Technology Creatives: A Questionnaire Study. Much had evolved since that time and we wanted to revisit our findings and take a fresh look at the evolving community of technology creatives in the NW. In July, 2014, we organized a workshop at Cornish College of the Arts, bringing together key stakeholders in the region.

We met with our colleagues at Cornish College of the Arts and Microsoft Research to create a framework for a forum that would engage thought leaders from this community. We gathered with these leaders for a half day at Cornish to create a collective agenda and spark next steps for achieving enhanced, cross-organizational and transdisciplinary awareness and communication to nurture this community of practice. Fostering A Community of Innovation at the Intersection of Art + Technology in the Pacific Northwest  is the white paper that colleagues Shelly Farnham (Microsoft Research), Ana Pinto da Silva (Microsoft Research), Jeff Brice (Cornish), Carey Christie  and I created to share our research findings and community building efforts. This document maps our regional innovators, articulates and prioritizes the community’s common goals and proposes knowledge sharing, communication vehicles and next steps toward further fostering this community. The Institute of Emergent Technology + Intermedia (iET+I), at Cornish College of the Arts is serving as one of the nodes of this community. You can download a copy of our report there. We are very excited to share it with you!

post workshop “Manhattans” cocktail reception celebration at Cornish

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