Rhizome's Seven on Seven = The 14th (of May)

From the NEW INC perspective, it's hard to top an event that gave us one of our inaugural class of members — and a wild success story. Monegraph, the concept created by Kevin McCoy & Anil Dash in the 2014 Seven on Seven Conference, has incubated into a business over the last two years here in our space on the Bowery, right before our eyes.

But Seven on Seven's presenter (and NEW INC anchor tenant) Rhizome, has a knack for bringing together the kinds of creative minds that continue to impress year after year, bringing us new ideas in inventive expressions. This Saturday, the New Museum will host the eighth edition of Rhizome’s Seven on Seven Conference, giving us another set of provocative concepts to get excited about.

Seven on Seven pairs seven influential artists with seven prominent tech specialists and asks them to combine their skills to create an application, artwork, provocation, or anything else they can dream up. All seven projects are then unveiled in a day-long conference, alongside a discussion of the creative processes behind each endeavor.

To get a hint of the possibilities this incredibly rich format engenders, take a look at last year’s featured project, titled ‘Panda-to-Panda.’ Artist Ai Wei Wei worked with Jacob Applebaum, a lead Tor Project and Wikileaks member, to address the question of privacy in the digital age. They removed the stuffing from twenty toy pandas and replaced it with shredded Snowden documents and an SD card which contained copies of all the documents. Other projects from last year included applications and artworks that interact with social media and online messaging services, in order to in order to examine the ways in which we organize our online friendships and to explore our relationship with FOMO.

This year’s conference will feature a keynote speech from writer, activist, and documentarian Astra Taylor, and will include contributions from artists and creatives:

Join Rhizome for the unveiling of all seven projects and insights from leading contributors in the areas of art and technology, starting Saturday, May 14 at 12:00 PM.

Tickets to the event have been sold out for weeks, but lucky for us all, Refinery 29 will be livestreaming the whole event (Keep an eye out here for the announcement of that link). And if you want to get prepped before viewing the conference, Rhizome has been sharing daily videos, articles, and projects on the 2016 participants.