Live Stream: Art, Technology, Empathy and Disgust at ‘Seven on Seven’

The live-stream of this program has ended. Look for an upcoming report on the event by Truthdig contributor Carey Shenkman.

Rhizome’s annual “Seven on Seven” event pairs seven artists with seven technologists for 24 hours and asks them to create something wonderful. From noon to 6 p.m. Eastern time, Truthdig live-streamed the results of the tech-art-hackathon.

The website Fusion described the event as follows:

On Friday morning, six artists and six technologists gathered in the lobby of the New Museum on New York’s Bowery Street to start a caffeine-fueled adventure in rapid art-making. The night before at a dinner where most of them met each other for the first time, Michael Connor, the artistic director for the art non-profit Rhizome, prepared them for the day by describing a performance piece from 1983 in which two artists spent a year together attached at the waist with an 8-foot rope. It was Connor’s way of saying, ‘It could be worse.’

Instead of being bound physically, the six teams of two were bound by a commitment to create *something* that they could present to a sold-out audience at the New Museum the following day. The conceit is part of an annual event organized by Rhizome called Seven on Seven.

FiveThirtyEight statistician Nate Silver was paired with British conceptual artist Liam Gillick, who has turned Plexiglass into art. Instagram founder Mike Krieger was paired with Trevor Paglen whose art has frequently confronted surveillance. Vine founder Rus Yusupov, who popularized six-second looping videos, was paired with filmmaker Stanya Kahn, whose work can combine tragedy with absurd humor. Hacker Thricedotted, who gave the world the portmanteau_bot and badjokebot on Twitter, teamed up with British artist Hannah Black, who writes and makes video. Security technologist Harlo Holmes was paired with French artist and sculpturist Camille Henrot. Lifehacker and Thinkup founder Gina Trapani was paired with futurist artist-writer Martine Syms.

Usually all seven teams gather in New York, but this year included the pairing of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei with Tor technologist Jacob Applebaum. The former can’t leave his country and the latter can’t return to his, so they met in Beijing a week ago to make their project. Fusion travelled there with them.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.