Interview, Fireside Chat
There's an Art to Getting Brilliant People to Surprise Themselves - Kevin Slavin of The Shed
- The speaker predicts approximately 15 university bankruptcies annually in the United States within the current model's trajectory and expects the current high school system to release individuals into an unknown environment in about 16 years.
- Academic and cultural institutions are expected to provide continuity, with the Media Lab hiring "misfits" and people "equidistant" from 30 disciplines to foster anti-disciplines, while the speaker anticipates the emergence of urban metagenomics as a discipline roughly two years after their arrival.
- The speaker plans a large-scale CRISPR artwork and expects their focus at the Media Lab to shift to microbiology within two years, aiming to bring science and engineering back into the cultural environment at The Shed.
- Future VR games are predicted to produce great content, though the current output remains console-derived, with the speaker noting that big AAA studios are unlikely to reinvent VR cinema; instead, new forms will emerge from artists thinking about play rather than narrative vehicles.
- The speaker expects the "Shed" to be the first scalable cultural center built in New York City since Lincoln Center in the 1960s, designed by Diller, Scalfidio and Renfro, featuring a movable structure weighing 8 million pounds that moves at 12 miles per hour.
- The building's unique configuration of five stories, three enormous galleries, a large performance space, and two small theaters is expected to blur boundaries between exhibition and performance, creating a model never seen before due to a lack of legacy infrastructure.
- By 2019, when 98% of the US is expected to own smartphones, the Shed plans to eliminate paper tickets entirely, anticipating a "synchronizing signal" broadcast rather than recorded content on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo.
- The speaker expects "live digital broadcast" to be the core ethos of the venue, utilizing unprecedented bandwidth to potentially reach 3 or 4 billion broadband connections globally to create a shared sense of attention.
- The first weekend of the Shed is projected to see roughly 20,000 people passing through the doors, with 200 people per hour waiting without physical lines, requiring new solutions for visitor engagement.
- The speaker plans to remain at The Shed for 10 years, commissioning scientists to produce non-academic work in the museum for 2019, aiming for a first show that is "not neutral, not pretty," but "important and loud and rich."
- The speaker expects to continue working effectively between disciplines without legitimate domain expertise, finding value in navigating arriving complexities similar to their past experience in advertising where accounts changed daily.
- The "American high school system" is expected to release the speaker's daughter in 16 years, while the speaker anticipates "Area Code" would have failed had they pursued growth from the start, noting it only scaled after iOS and Facebook games arrived five years into the project.
- Risks regarding the future include the speaker's inability to predict specific outcomes, their reliance on working in a state of uncertainty where they have no idea what they will do tomorrow, and the challenge of reinventing transmission modes for VR that have not yet occurred.
- The speaker views cities as biological superorganisms similar to termite mounds, expecting technology to affect them in 10 different ways including logistics and policing, and anticipates that the "gut biome" reshapes the concept of humans as collective organisms.
- The speaker expects that culture transmits ideas rather than information, distinct from the Media Lab's focus on information, and anticipates that the "software for cities" concept will evolve from a banal idea to a complex reality.
- The speaker plans to produce high-end live cultural events for the internet constantly, operating on the premise that the industry has delaminated love from the mode of transmission, seeking to reconnect with people limbically.
- The speaker expects that Alexandra (Alex) Chasin, the artistic director, will continue to take authentic risks in programming, a trait described as rarely found in large-scale cultural institutions.
- The speaker anticipates that a game involving multiple players and a bomb defusal scenario in VR is a modern instantiation of a concept from three years prior, and that location-based games have shifted from research in 2004 to established industry practice.
- The speaker expects that VR games will eventually include cinematic cuts similar to how cinema evolved from stage recording, referencing William Gibson's early concepts of cyberspace and reality.
- The speaker plans to figure out what is orthogonal to their existing knowledge during their two-year tenure at the Media Lab and expects the gut biome of their personal environment to be distinct from global counterparts like Tokyo or Lagos.
- The speaker predicts that the "Nintendo Corporation" Pokemon game idea from 2004 would have been a mistake if the team had bet everything on that single concept, highlighting the danger of singular bets.
- The speaker expects that film schools currently lack courses on writing for binge TV and that games are generally not narrative vehicles in the traditional sense, referencing complex narratology ideas.
- The speaker expects that the "shed" along with Cooper Union and MIT will force individuals to acknowledge their existence within a broader positive context and that the "batch structure" like YC will continue to foster strong alumni bonds.
- The speaker expects their ability to draw out the best work from people to remain a cultivated quality and plans to work on a very large-scale artwork using CRISPR by connecting with people good at their craft.
- The speaker expects the essential story told when fundraising must be a story of scale because the money is intended to scale, contrasting with past experiences where growth was a byproduct of doing the best work.
- The speaker expects that the first show at the Shed will be the "first weekend" experience where 20,000 people pass through, serving as a beacon that emits a live synchronizing signal to the world rather than an archive.
- The speaker expects that "3 or 4 billion addressable broadband connections" exist globally to be targeted by the synchronizing signal, creating a feeling of being with people at the same time with the same attention.
- The speaker expects that "attention" and the separation of mind and body will continue to be topics of discussion, while the gaming industry remains bullish about VR despite current limitations.
- The speaker expects that the building's moveable mechanism is comparable to systems integration work on the Voyager spacecraft and that the unprecedented amount of bandwidth will likely work for the next 50 years.
- The speaker expects that the Shed will be a new cultural institution for New York City that is too good to pass up, with no legacy infrastructure or incentives to keep paper tickets.
- The speaker expects that working on something for the first time makes one feel young and hopes to continue exercising the ability to work effectively between everything in the future.