A geek-sters paradise
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 by Jon Clements
As a - primarily - “social media for business” resource, PR Media Blog was transported to a parallel universe at last night’s Social Media Cafe Manchester (#smc_mcr).
The brave new online worlds of artistic endeavour shared by Heather Corcoran, curator of Liverpool’s media arts centre, FACT, seemed a heady mix of Heath Robinson and the crazy cartoon inventor, Clunk, in “Dastardly and Mutley”.
The collection of “innovation communities” included artists’ collective, Dorkbot describing itself, worryingly, as ”people doing strange things with electricity”, while Node London - an “independent net art collective, exploring new creative territories that straddle between the virtual and the real” was an experiment in open working where nobody was in charge and the result was, according to Corcoran (pictured below), a “crazy nightmare that happened only once”.
But behind the art-for-art’s-sake lunacy was an interesting concept of loosely associated groups of people working together - and blending online and offline activity - to share knowledge and create something new. An example of this is the School of Everything where those wanting to learn and those wanting to teach can find one another.
So, an interesting and unexpected tangent for the #smc_mcr. But does this mean that it’s now “sexy to be a geek”, as somebody mused? Think “Bill Gates” before you answer that one.
