Day Two of C2MTL, taking place at Arsenal on 2020 William St. in Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighbourhood, focused on the innovative creations to come – and the understanding that the future, in fact, is already here.
Robots, bio plastics, the philosophical experiences of digital art; we are at a crossroads between our industrial past and digital future and the decisions that are made today will determine our collective reality in the years to come.
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Speakers like Ian Bernstein, founder and CTO of Sphero (the company that created the lovable BB-8 droid from Star Wars), industrial designer Karim Rashid and digital artists Daisuke Sakai and Takashi Kudo from the Japan-based Team Lab all offered up their personal and professional philosophies on embracing future technologies while considering its impacts on the human condition.
“Only create if it adds something to the human experience,” Rashid professed.
“The contribution has to be greater than what exists.”
In a time where we are saturated with commodity, we must focus less on materialism and focus on a great experience.
A similar theme came up on one of the “Brain Dates,” an ongoing networking opportunity offered up to C2MTL attendees to meet other like-minded people at the conference.
We met with some members from Meet the Future, an initiative started by Montreal-based Factry, a school of creative sciences that sent 35 people between the ages of 18 to 24-years-old to the conference this year.
Their 2017 motto: “This year, you can’t talk about the future without listening to what the next generation has to say.”
How can we truly discuss the future without the voices and opinions of today’s youth?
After all, they are the ones living this reality of our new digital, social age.
The millennial generation, as they are often referred to by marketers, will be an integral part of the success and survival of our world in the years and decades to come.
It seems they are ready, willing and able to stand up to the challenge, they just need the ears and the confidence of their older, more established counterparts to hear them out.
So, to the future we look, while we remain diligently perceptive of the moment in which we now live.
Ariane Laezza is the founder/creative director of Art&Industry.
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