Keynote Address for the Rochester Institute of Technology's Magic Center

The Rochester Institute of Technology just opened its Magic Center. According to the RIT's website, "the MAGIC Center at RIT is a conscious and deliberate effort to blur the lines between the arts and the sciences, between technology and expression, between the study of the creation of media and its impact and effect on society and the human condition. It is intended as a university wide, multi- and cross-disciplinary center in which faculty, staff, and student researchers, artists, and practitioners come together to create, contextualize, and apply new knowledge in a multitude of related fields and disciplines as appropriate not only to STEM, or the Arts & Humanities, but their intersection."

https://www.rit.edu/research/department/magic-center

As part of the opening of the Magic Center and its Frameless AR/VR Labs, I was asked to give the keynote address. Here is a transcript:

THREE SIMPLE STORIES ABOUT CULTURE AND POWER

I am excited and honored to be here today with you at RIT, one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

I would like to share with you three simple stories about culture and power. Stories that have inspired me and that I hope will inspire you as well.

WILD ENERGY AND THE POWER OF VIRAL NETWORKS

My first story is about a Yiddish writer, wild energy and the power of viral networks.

In early twentieth century Russia, there was an author and playwright named Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, better known as Sholem Aleichem. He wrote about Jewish life in Eastern Europe. He is best remembered for his stories about Tevye the dairyman, based on his life and the life of his daughters. The stories about Tevye eventually became the wildly popular Broadway musical and Hollywood film, Fiddler on the Roof.

When he was a young man, he met a wealthy landowner who asked him to tutor his daughter in Russian. Eventually they married, and he gained the financial freedom he needed to do his writing. 

At that time, Jewish writers had a choice of three languages— Russian, which was the language of the Russian writers Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Checkov, Hebrew, which was the “divine language of God”, and Yiddish, which was the “mamaloshen”, the "mother tongue”, their language of the street, commerce and gossip.

Sholem Aleichem wrote in Yiddish which was a very interesting choice. He said writing in Yiddish was mashugana (crazy), but he also felt that it was very freeing too — like a form of wild energy in a fertile field. Because his stories were written in Yiddish and were based on everyday Jewish life, they became so popular with the Jewish merchants and families around the globe they spread like a wild energy. For them, having these familiar stories was like having a portable homeland that spanned time and distance.

So why we would care about a Yiddish writer who died over 90 years ago? You could say that the wild energy that carried Sholem Aleichem’s stories across the world was one of the first viral networks.

In the era of Instagram and YouTube, there are other forms of wild energy as well. In the last several years, companies made huge bets creating and inserting branded content throughout the digital universe. Their thinking was if you told customers great stories and then connected with them in real time, their brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. But despite making huge bets on branded content and investing billions of dollars in content creation, companies got very little payoff or any meaningful consumer interest. In fact, social media seems to have made these brands less signi?cant not more. So, what was missing from this picture?

While major brands were struggling with branded content, digital technologies created potent new social networks that dramatically altered how culture works. The most effective and proli?c innovators of the new forms of culture are digital crowds, a social media phenomenon that Douglas Holt called crowdculture. Douglas Holt is a former professor at the Harvard Business School, and a world leading expert on branding and innovation. So why is it that branded-content strategies don’t work and crowdculture does?

Crowd-culture comes in two flavors, turbocharged art worlds and amplified subcultures. Turbocharged art worlds are a form of social organization where millions of nimble cultural entrepreneurs come together online to improve their skills, exchange ideas, ?ne-tune content, and compete to produce hits. This collective e?ort often generates major creative breakthroughs.

Crowd-culture has created hundreds of amplified subcultures too. One of them is gaming comedy that came out of the video-gaming-as-entertainment subculture of South Korea that produced the spectator E-sports competitions. E-sports competitions currently have over 143 million online viewers worldwide. Esports gave birth to video commentators like PewDiePie, the most-subscribed user on YouTube.

PewDiePie is a pseudo name for Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, a 29-year-old Swedish comedian and YouTube celebrity known for snarky video game commentaries, particularly of the horror genre. To give you a sense of the power of crowd-culture, PewDiePew makes inexpensive videos in his home, yet has 71 million subscribers and billions of hits. Compare this to the major brands that are spending millions of dollars on social media yet have less a million subscribers at best.

Along with artworlds and subcultures there are the wild energies of augmented and virtual reality, AI, natural language processing, machine learning, ambient sensors, big data, intelligent buildings, and advanced 3D printing. The culture of true digital natives, Generation Z- the generation after millennials, is another form of wild energy. Generation Z expects everything to be interactive and available 24/7, they tend to have little faith in traditional organizations, and they experience the word augmented, virtually and corporeally.

As the boundaries between physical and digital blur, new sources of wild energy are emerging at a dizzying pace. Yet harnessing wild energy is a challenge as it is ambient, fluid, and counter intuitive. But once you can connect to wild energy, it’s like riding a high-speed carrier wave that multiplies an idea’s effect at blinding speed.

THE POWER OF SERENDIPITY

My next story is about A Hungarian physicist, a rainy London street, and the power of serendipity.

In Autumn, on a rainy London street corner, on the morning of September 12th, 1933, the Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd was waiting for a light to change from red to green. He was deep in thought and irritated about an article that he had just read in The London Times. The article described a lecture given by Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, who said that “anyone who believed that nuclear reactions would be a potent source of useful energy was talking moonshine”. Szilárd was annoyed, as how could anyone be so positive about the future of energy yet be so wrong.

As the light change from red to green, Szilárd stepped off the curb, and in that moment, he realized how to create a nuclear chain reaction that would release the enormous amount of energy needed for an atomic bomb. As Szilard later recounted the story, when he reached the intersection of Southampton Row and Russell Square a red light caused him to pause, giving time for his fertile imagination to engage.

Six years later when the Nazis split the atom and invaded Czechoslovakia for their uranium, Szilárd, realizing the scientific and geopolitical implications of these events, wrote a letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning him that the Nazis were building an atomic bomb. But because he was not as well-known as his friend Albert Einstein was, he asked Einstein to sign the letter for him.

It was a red light on a rainy London street that gave pause to an irritated Hungarian physicist time to think that started a chain of events that lead to the atomic bomb. This is the power of serendipity.

Serendipity has a lighter side as well. Serendipity is looking for one thing and stumbling across something else of greater value. It is the engine of innovation. Rubber, dynamite, the atomic bomb, Kandinsky’s discovery of abstract art, X-rays, and even Post it notes were all discovered by accident. Serendipity is a misadventure, the inadvertent observation, a happenstance when a smart mind opened to the unforeseen discovers the true power of serendipity.

But you have to listen actively for it.                                                  

THE POWER OF ACTIVE LISTENING

Which brings us to the story of the power of active listening and breaking assumptions.

After graduating from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art as a photography and sculpture major, my first job was at the South Street Seaport Museum where I was a store manager, exhibition designer and curator. I was green, and they were cheap, so I wore many hats. One of the things I did was appraisals of historical model ships for Sothebys, one of the leading international auction houses.

As an appraiser, I got to know and befriend Hugh Hildesley, Sotheby's Executive Vice President and world-leading expert in European Master paintings. He was an older man and had been with Sotheby for some time. After leaving South Street, I reached out to him, as we had not spoken for many years When I phoned Sotheby’s and when I asked about Hugh, the receptionist told me that he was no longer with us, he had moved on to the Church of Heavenly Rest. “My god, I said what did he die of” to which she replied, “well, nothing, he’s the rector at the church.”

Assumptions can produce weird results and unintended consequences. Listening isn’t just listening to words or music, but to listening to what people are saying and not saying. Listening to their underlying narratives, and their pregnant silences. In business, it’s listening to industry trends, the ambience of an environment, or what your colleagues, customers and managers are really trying to tell but you might not want to hear.

In the creative arts it is listening to the your beliefs, culture and events that make you who you are. Listening to your roots is also listening to the wellspring of your creativity. In my own life I can remember the moment that spot-welded my interest in art, science and media. Growing up in Brooklyn my family owned a wholesale and retail electrical supply company in Williamsburg. Williamsburg then was not the Williamsburg we know today. At that time hip was just a body part.

My family owned two stores, side by side with an interconnecting door. One was the electrical supply store that sold hardware — cables, lights, fixtures, etc. The sister store was a lighting showroom. For me the lighting showroom was magical. It was a space about 15’ x 40’x 10’ high, packed with floor-to-ceiling glittering chandeliers, glowing lamps and hanging pendants. All lit up like a Christmas display on amphetamines. On one wall there were shelves on which there were Lionel “O” scale trains.

Walking from the gray functional world of electrical supplies through a door into a space of light and imagination instilled in me a sense of wonder, an ability to gauge scale, and an appreciation for the power of surprise. These are the same qualities we use in Unified Field projects and in the art that I make. What I got from that early experience is that connecting to your roots grounds you in your authentic self.

The key to connecting is actively listening and a willingness to challenge your assumptions. At Unified Field, we do an exercise with clients in thinking in opposites that we call The Absolutely Worst Idea Possible. It’s designed to break assumptions and free creativity.

When most of us are given a task, we try to “get it right”. Getting it right puts a lot of pressure to get it right and is often not the most effective strategy for generating original ideas. We tend to base our first ideas on a set of deeply-held, unspoken beliefs or assumptions. This not only stifles creativity, but ideal solutions are often overlooked. Thinking ‘in opposite’ can generate surprising results, as many bad ideas contain the “seeds” of good ones.

In an Absolutely Worst Idea Possible exercise, a team determines what outcomes they want to achieve. Then each person writes down their twenty worst ideas. We’re talking about bad, ineffective, stupid, illegal, or even gross. Then everyone shares their ideas with the group, who then challenges everyone to come up ideas that are even worse. The worst the better. From this second list, the group selects their favorites and then flips them around to come up positive versions to match the outcomes.

We completed this exercise with a team from a 50-year-old New England technology company. The team used their trade show booth as the workshop scenario. The worst ideas for the booth started with refusing to talk to anyone, punching people in the face, going naked from the waist down, and my personal favorite - slaughtering livestock in the booth. You can imagine how funny this was.

When we got to the second-round the slaughtering livestock idea became human sacrifices. Now on the face this sounds a bit insane, but if you look it metaphorically, what’s behind this idea is ritual. What emerged was an idea to do a yearly ritual of hosting a cool, “must-go-to” party for select clients that could build relationships and fulfilled their marketing goals.

Breaking assumptions is one way to come up with original ideas. But only through active listening can we accurately receive and interpret messages in communications. We see this pattern in science centers and museums who are better served by listening to the massive changes in technology and audience behaviors. We see this retail where they need to merge their physical and digital experiences to meet their customers’ expectations. We see this in organizations that need to not to listen from the inside out, but from the outside in, as they move towards a future of culture that demands this.

We find this dynamic in developers and creatives as well. When they present their ideas to key stakeholders, they tend to focus on cool ideas, features and technology. But that is only part of what gets a project approved. For any project, be it virtual, augmented, interactive, themed, or linear, what makes it happen is being present to who you are presenting to and how it resonates with them. It means listening to the needs and values of audiences and stakeholders while promoting the benefits that your creations will bring them. This is the world in which amazing projects happen.

From a Yiddish writer, to a Swedish comedian and a Hungarian physicist, there is a common thread that runs throughout. And that is by being present, being open to fresh ideas, and challenging assumption, actively listening, you can bring your best ideas to life.

Be open

Be bold

Be vulnerable

And thank you for listening