Venue: ThoughtWorks (99 Madison Ave, 15th floor, New York, NY 10016)
RSVP required: https://www.meetup.com/MakeIt-NYC/events/238113911/
Join us at Hackaday NYC March for an evening of Virtual Reality and more! Tonight, we're featuring talks by creative technologists who are designing a broad range of interactive experiences with VR.
We'll convene with our friends at ThoughtWorks during their weekly Hardware Hack Lab. If you have a project that you'd like to bring and work on, you are more than welcome to participate in HHL as well.
Tonight's speakers include:
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist, creative director, and organizer who develops cultural communities at the intersection of art, technology, and advocacy. She is currently the director of I.D.EA. New Rochelle, Interactive Digital Environments Alliance (I.D.E.A.) is dedicated to promoting, developing, and maintaining a vibrant new Arts and Technology District in the City of New Rochelle’s Downtown Business Improvement District (BID).
Amelia was a professor of time-based media art and performance art at Vanderbilt University for five years before returning to her roots in NYC creative technology, graduating from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2015. In 2016 she went on to found and direct the DBRS Innovation Labs, a FinTech research lab that specialized in developing creative uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Amelia is part of Facebook’s Oculus Launchpad, and co-founder of Stupid Hackathon, which now holds events around the world.
"Intimate Gestures: Future of VR Interfaces: Performance art brought me to the world of VR. In this talk, I will outline private gestures as strong models for future interfaces in VR."
Milica Zec is a NY/LA-based film and virtual reality director, editor, and screenwriter. Her directorial debut in the virtual reality medium was a short narrative piece called, “Giant,” which premiered at Sundance Film Festival New Frontier 2016. Since its premiere, “Giant” has been lauded as a seminal expression of the potential of virtual reality as a storytelling vehicle. Milica has been collaborating for nine years with the performance artist Marina Abramovic on numerous projects, including MoMA’s “The Artist is Present” show.
"I will be discussing the creative stages behind my works Giant and Tree including ideation, execution and finally their journey through the festival circuit. Also discussed will be how Giant and Tree fit into a master VR/AR trilogy examining the collective state of life on earth."
Cassie Tarakajian is a software developer, hardware engineer, creative technologist, artist, and musician. She is a cofounder at the creative agency Girlfriends, an engineer at Cycling '74, a Processing Foundation fellow sponsored by NYU ITP, and a contributor to open source. She is interested in ways that art drives technology and vice versa.
"Machine learning is an emerging technology that has surged in popularity the past few years. While we interact with machine learning algorithms in our day-to-day lives, we have little insight into what happens within this technology's black box. How can we visualize machine learning algorithms, and does this give us any insight as to how they work? Does the medium of virtual reality add to our understanding?"
This is something of interest to me, however, it is not an insignificant investment for me to get there (coming from Baltimore). How large do these things typically go? I'm more into low-level vive stuff. Are there typically people who use these for networking with others within the community? Are they usually only two hours (I'd have to travel 6 hours round trip)