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Seven on Seven: A 24-Hour Particle Accelerator for Art and Technology

On Saturday the signs at the front of the New Museum announcing Rhizome's "Seven on Seven":http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/4/17/rhizome-event-seven-artists-and-seven-technologists-cross-the-streams--2, an event that paired artists with technologists in...

On Saturday the signs at the front of the New Museum announcing Rhizome’s Seven on Seven, an event that paired artists with technologists in 24-hour collaborative projects, said “conference.” It was almost funny, that misnomer, something like confining Ryan Trecartin to the role of “artist” or calling his collaborative partner for the event, Tumblr founder David Carp, a “technologist.” But the dullness and slipperiness of the terms was a reminder of how their roles were already intertwined – most of the artists are old hands at new media, and the tech heads could easily be confused for “designers.” This was a conversation in mid-stream, not a debate between beings from different planets. The common goal wasn’t to find common ground. Someone pointed out everyone instaed was trying to find in our high-tech tools more humanity, more emotion, more inspiration.

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That the participants were already speaking the same language in many cases was also a reminder of just how hard it is to make art now without engaging technology. Pushing around bits or pixels or learning basic programming is much easier than wiring an electrical circuit or building a machine. That was the pre-internet challenge of Robert Rauchenberg’s 9 Evenings, a somewhat messy precursor that introduced artists to “technicians” at the Armory back in 1966.

In some ways, the relative ease of Seven on Seven (at times it felt almost like a series of pitch presentations, and not just because the audience, paying up to $350 per ticket, included more than a few venture capitalists) indicated how interdisciplinary we’ve all become. But the fluidity here was also perhaps by design; the event might not have worked at all had the organizers (Fred Benenson, John Michael Boling, John Borthwick, Lauren Cornell, and Peter Rojas) paired geeky engineers with folk artists, computer scientists with art fixtures, Jaron Laniers and Julian Schnabels (although wouldn’t that be fun?).

But if the small explosions that came out of the New Museum on Saturday proved how close art and technology already are, they also showed how clunky our thinking can still be about this hybridization. Which is precisely we why we could probably use fewer conferences like TED and more particle colliders like Seven on Seven.

More on Seven on Seven’s real and hypothetical projects: