The Art of Tech
The STEAM art-and-tech festival series I produced through SpacePost Labs — a meeting ground for LA's artists and the technologists moving into their neighborhood.
The Art of Tech was a STEAM festival — art and technology in the same room — that we ran as a series between 2017 and 2020. SpacePost Labs produced it together with Startup Coil, part of the wider Nerdstage ecosystem of LA builders. The premise was plain: invite the artists of Los Angeles to come try their hand at digital tools, and see what they made of them.
It landed at a particular moment. Netflix and a wave of tech companies were moving onto the Westside, and the arrival wasn't gentle. Rents moved. Studios that had been fixtures for decades started doing math they didn't like. There was real tension between the people who had spent years making this stretch of the city an art town and the newcomers who mostly saw office space. The festival was our attempt to put those two crowds in the same room on purpose — not to smooth the tension over, but to give it somewhere useful to go.
And the rule was the one we ran everything by: this was never tech coming to rescue art. The artists already had something to say — decades of it. What a festival like this could do was hand them a few new tools, show them how the tools worked, and then get out of the way. Some took a digital method back to their practice and kept it. Some tried it once and decided oil paint was still right. Both were fine outcomes. Technology was the partner, never the point.
The Art of Tech was one thread in the larger SpacePost Labs chapter — the boardwalk pop-up, the community dinners, the maker space where a graffiti artist and an ML engineer might spend the same afternoon working on different things. The festivals are over now, but the instinct behind them is the one I carry into the science work today: find the people who already care, hand them real tools, and build the room where different worlds can actually meet.