THIS IS IT—The Definitive Schedule For The Creators Project: San Francisco 2012

Artist talks, panel discussions, hands-on workshops and a whole horde of music you want to see—plan accordingly!

March 16, 2012, 7:27pm

With just one day away from our San Francisco event, March 17-18, we know you’re trying to plan your schedule to maximize your Creators Project experience. As you know, Saturday features performances by HEALTH, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Shabazz Palaces, alongside the a recently-announced screening of the LCD Soundsystem film Shut Up and Play the Hits.

In addition to bands, films, and art, attendees will be able to get a closer connection to the artists, ideas, tools, and techniques on display this weekend by attending our various artist talks, panel discussions, and creative workshops held over the course of both days. Casey Reas (one of the creators of Processing) will be hosting an artist talk and conditional drawing workshop on Saturday, explaining the nuances of drawing with code. On Sunday, design studio Zigelbaum + Coelho will also give an artist talk, as well as demonstrate the detail and fabrication techniques behind the custom pixels in their installation Six-Forty by Four-Eighty.

Both days feature panel discussions on topics including the creative potential of the web and how the creative goes about building an online audience. Creators United Visual Artists, Casey Reas, Quayola, Sosolimited, and an engineer from Intel labs will also speak to how artists humanize technology by conducting hyper-personalized R+D, employing many of the same tools and techniques that scientists use in their work. A selected panel of museum curators and artists will also discuss the impacts of technology on both museums and galleries on and offline, and the complex challenges and opportunities presented by this digital era.

For hands-on experience, we’ll be hosting three different workshops on Sunday. Here’s the full schedule below, and make sure to download the PDF Festival Guide on your mobile phones!:

Panels and Workshops

Saturday, March 17

CONFERENCE CENTER—GOLDEN GATE ROOM

1 PM
Artist Talk + Conditional Drawing Workshop
with Casey Reas

Software artist Casey Reas will present an overview of his Processing-based body of work and lead participants through a conditional drawing workshop exploring the main concepts of drawing with code using pen and paper.

4:30pm
The Artist as Researcher
with United Visual Artists, Casey Reas, Quayola, Sosolimited, and Intel

Today's artists engage in a process of creative exploration with modern technology that's not too far removed from the kind of inquiry-based experimental methods employed by scientists in the world's laboratories. By investigating technology's various potentialities and how these tools are shaping and re-defining our human experience, artists are playing a critical role in making technology more human, and discovering the human within technology.

SOUTHSIDE THEATRE

3 PM
The Digital Museum
with Kevin Hull (Hirshhorn Museum), Willa Koerner (SFMOMA), Eric Socolofsky (Exploratorium), and Caitlin Denny.

Museums are going through some major changes these days, their status quo disrupted by technology. Whether its questions about how to extend their collections into the virtual space, how to supplement exhibitions with interactive experiences, or how to tackle the integration of technologically- powered art work into their collections—it's clearly no longer business as usual. How are museums contending with these shifts? What challenges and opportunities do they pose for museums and art lovers alike? And what is the future of art in this age of rapid technological innovation?

4 PM
Building Online Audiences
with Meridith Valiando, Jessica Frech, Alison Watson, and Tamara Conniff

The democratization of the web means that just about anyone—from an eight-year-old musician to an up-and-coming filmmaker—can produce high quality work with almost zero overhead and connect with an audience without the help of a major label or distributor. We've all heard about the success stories, but how are today's Internet sensations leveraging the power of the web to not only super-charge their creative potential but also expand their reach and build a fanbase? And, more importantly, how do they translate online success into a sustainable artistic career?

5:30 PM
Designing Platforms and Experiences for Creativity
with Scott Snibbe, Mary Fagot and StumbleUpon.

Today's social web makes the process of sharing, discovering and combining ideas easier than ever before, resulting in a vast influx of creative output that's fueling in- novation at an unprecedented rate. Artists are taking to web platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to create dynamic experiences that promote self-expression and creativity and engage their fanbase in new and interesting ways. Meanwhile, the people behind today's top social platforms are designing tools that optimize the process of sharing and discovering information and facilitating inspiration.

7 PM
The Creative Potential of the Modern Web
with Aaron Koblin, Josette Melchor of GAFFTA, and the winners of Art Hack Weekend SF

New web-based technologies like HTML5 and WebGL are making the web more interactive than ever before and enabling designers to transcend the 2D limitations of the browser. Earlier this month, The Creators Project partnered with Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA) to host a weekend-long art hackathon focused on exploring these new creative possibilities. The winners of the hackathon, whose work is presented at Fort Mason, will discuss their work and how these new developments are affecting artistic projects on the web.

Sunday, March 18

CONFERENCE CENTER—GOLDEN GATE ROOM

2 PM
Exploring Björk’s Biophilia Mobile App (ARTIST TALK + WORKSHOP)
with Scott Snibbe and Max Weisel

In October of 2011 Björk released Biophilia, the world's first "app album," in collaboration with a vast, multi-disciplinary team of designers and developers that included Scott Snibbe and Max Weisel. Conceived as a suite of 10 song-specific apps, each app links music composition and scientific concepts in a set of hands-on, immersive audiovisual experiences. The developers behind the project will talk about their work and lead a hands-on exploration of the Biophilia apps.

CONFERENCE CENTER—MARINA ROOM

1 PM
Exploring Projection Mapping (WORKSHOP)
with Mary Franck of Obscura Digital

Mary Franck, new media artist and an Interactive Art Engineer at Obscura Digital will lead a creative coding workshop on projection mapping using the TouchDesigner video programming environment. In this crash course, she'll cover the essentials of projection mapping, from modeling a surface virtually to having the model correspond with the projection and creating real-time video effects. Attendees should bring their own laptops with TouchDesign- er installed and have a basic familiarity with how to navigate and create operators in TouchDesigner. Course materials and examples will be provided.
· RSVP Required, to attend please email create [at] thecreatorsproject.com with subject line SF Workshops

3 PM
Audio Shader Toy (WORKSHOP)
with Syed Reza Ali, Gabriel Dunne, and Ryan Alexander

The winners of Art Hack Weekend: San Francisco, the HTML5/WebGL focused creative hackathon we organized with Gray Area Foundation for the Arts will showcase their Audio Shader Toy. The project combines a WebGL shader editor with audio spectrum data, allowing users to drag an MP3 into their browser window and start manipulating the audio visualizations in real time. Attendees should bring their own laptops with Chrome installed and have a basic familiarity with javascript.
· RSVP Required, to attend please email create [at] thecreatorsproject.com with subject line SF Workshops

HERBST PAVILION

4 PM
Artist Talk
with Zigelbaum + Coelho

Cambridge-based design duo and MIT Media Lab alums Zigelbaum + Coelho will describe in detail the design and fabrication techniques behind the custom pixels they created for the installation Six-Forty by Four-Eighty. They'll cover broader ideas on contemporary digital/physical design, based on their research at MIT, and do a live demo with the pixels.