Art + Tech. Two words that get thrown around Stanford like they’re some kind of revolutionary manifesto. Except here’s the thing, sometimes it actually fucking matters.
I was there because they wanted to hear about collaboration. Not the sanitized, LinkedIn-profile version where everyone’s “ideating” and “synergizing.” The real kind. The kind where I’m in the dirt with Aleta Hayes and Samer Al-Saber, trying to capture something that dissolves the second you reach for it, movement, presence, the space between intention and execution.
They asked about innovation. What they got was a reminder that none of this means anything if we forget the first word in Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. The folks at HAI get it, at least they’re trying to. Build your algorithms, train your models, but for god’s sake remember there’s a human on the other end. Technology in service of people, not the other way around.
Radical concept, apparently.
Stanford Arts, now there’s an ecosystem that understands what happens when you stop building walls between disciplines. Dance talks to data. Performance meets engineering. It’s messy. It’s supposed to be. The camera’s a tool. The algorithm’s a tool. The body’s a tool. What matters is whether you’re using them to say something true, or just generating more content for the feed.
“Emerging intersections”… it’s mostly about shutting up and listening. It’s about not being precious. It’s about understanding that art has always been in bed with technology, there’s nothing emerging about it. Artists have known this for millennia, from cave walls to iPhone screens, and pretending otherwise is just intellectual cowardice, laziness, or fraud.
What we gave them that day wasn’t a TED talk. It was a reminder that before you disrupt anything, maybe try connecting with something, someone. Human to human. That’s the real work.