HACKING ARTS: Ideate, an IdeaStorm and Pitchathon

Presented by MIT Sloan’s Entertainment, Media, and Sports Club

In partnership with the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, New England Conservatory of Music, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts

In a world that increasingly values sensory experiences over physical things, interactions between the arts and technology are producing moving, interactive, and immersive experiences as never before. To extend these capabilities and inspire new advances in the creative industries, join us for a cross-disciplinary idea-generation event at one of the world's centers for technological innovation.

Let's produce entrepreneurial visions for technology-based projects and ventures in music, film/tv, performing arts, visual arts, and fashion. No preparation necessary... Just show up!

Featuring talks and idea-generation mentoring from:

• Nadeem Mazen - Artist and Entrepreneur - Co-Founder, danger!awesome
• Panos Panay - Music Industry Innovator - Founder, SonicBids
• Bruce Brubaker - Entrepreneur Performer - Piano Chair, New England Conservatory of Music
• Katarina Miljkovic - Entrepreneur Composer - Music Theory Professor, New England Conservatory of Music
• Brian Kalma - E-Retail Entrepreneur and UX Guru - Ministry of Supply
• Henry Holtzman - Media Inventor and Entrepreneur - Chief Knowledge Officer, MIT Media Lab

Who should attend? Entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, designers, engineers, developers

Prizes, including free entry into our upcoming two-day conference and hackathon in the fall: Hacking Arts

Attendance is limited!

Agenda

10:00am - Check-in and mingle

10:30am - Short talks by technology entrepreneur-mentors in the creative industries

12:00pm - IdeaStorms, supported by mentors

1:00pm  - Team formation, pitch generation, lunch

2:30pm  - Pitch!

3:45pm  - Prizes awarded and closing

Mentors

Nadeem Mazen is CEO of NimbleBot, a Boston-based design and consulting firm specializing in interactive software, UI/UX, viral marketing, and design. Mazen is also co-founder of danger!awesome, a laser-cutting studio and community art storefront at the heart of Central Square, Cambridge. He is engaged in ongoing pedagogy, experiential learning, and education-software research, and is currently teaching a course on creative entrepreneurship at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Panos Panay is the founder and CEO of Sonicbids, a Social Music Marketing platform that connects bands, promoters, consumer brands and fans. Panos is widely credited for spotting and capitalizing early on three distinct emerging trends in the music business over the last decade: the shift to a primarily online means of marketing; the emergence of an "artistic middle class;” and the shift from a record label-funded industry to a consumer brand-funded music business. Panos speaks regularly about entrepreneurship at universities including MIT, Harvard, Berklee, Tufts and Northeastern, as well as at industry events like SXSW, MIDEM and CMJ. He is the co-founder of Boston Young Entrepreneurs, a City Hall-backed group that mentors local start-ups; a founding director of Boston World Partnerships, which facilitates collaboration between innovators & entrepreneurs in the community; and the Chair of Berklee College of Music’s Presidential Advisory Council.

Henry Holtzman has been a member of the MIT community since 1981, joining the Media Lab as a researcher when it opened in 1985. Currently, he is the Lab's Chief Knowledge Officer, co-director of the Digital Life consortium, and director of the Information Ecology research group. In addition, Holtzman co-directs the Lab's CE 2.0 initiative, a collaboration with more than 40 Media Lab sponsor companies to formulate the principles for a new generation of consumer electronics that are highly connected, seamlessly interoperable, situation-aware, and radically simple. Holtzman has led research projects in the areas of tangible networking and image compression, resulting in desktop applications for RFID such as the Smart Mousepad, multicast network architectures for multimedia, IP television, scale-free image representation, and knowledge-based video representation. As a member of the MPEG standardization committee, he helped to define MPEG-2 video technology, used in DirecTV, DVD, digital cable, and digital TV broadcasting. Holtzman has been granted multiple patents for his inventions. Holtzman has extensive experience with RFID, computer programming, hardware design, operating systems, and network architecture. He has worked with Codex, a subsidiary of Motorola Inc.; Apple Computer; Hearst New Media; and Art Technology Group. He was founder, CEO, and CTO of Presto Technologies, Inc., a Media Lab spinoff that introduced many novel uses for RFID to the market. He received his MS in media arts and sciences, and his BS in computer science, both from MIT.

In live performances from the Hollywood Bowl to New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, from Paris to Hong Kong, and in his continuing series of recordings for Arabesque — Bruce Brubaker is a visionary virtuoso. Brubaker’s playing, writing, and collaborations continue to show a shining, and sometimes surprising future for pianists and piano playing. A longtime member of the faculty at the Juilliard School, Brubaker has chaired the piano department at NEC since 2005. His blog “PianoMorphosis” appears at ArtsJournal.com. He is a frequent performer at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge and has appeared at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival at Avery Fisher Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, Tanglewood, London’s Wigmore Hall, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, Antwerp’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Finland’s Kuhmo Festival. Well known in the music profession as an identifier and nurturer of musical talent, Brubaker's students have won major international competitions and prizes, and built recording and performing careers throughout the world. Brubaker trained at the Juilliard School, where he received the school's highest award, the Edward Steuermann Prize, upon graduation. He joined the Juilliard faculty in 1995. At Juilliard, he has appeared in public conversations with Philip Glass, Milton Babbitt, and Meredith Monk.