Join us in-person on 14 June at “Disruption: Creator Edition” as we explore the profound influence of generative AI on creativity across multiple industries.

In collaboration with the team at EQTY Lab, and with Nonny de la Peña of the Arizona State University California Center, Creative Commons welcomes our community to join us next week on 14 June in downtown Los Angeles. We’d like to thank ASU for donating their space for this event, and our sponsors, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP (DWT), for enabling us to make this event happen. Select sessions will be recorded and released at a later date.

Program

Speaker Spotlight

We’re thrilled to welcome an accomplished, thoughtful, and diverse set of speakers to the stage to share all sides of the debate on this critical issue. Meet some of our speakers below:

Damon Krukowski is a multi talented musician, writer, and activist. His music career began as the drummer for the alternative rock band Galaxie 500 in the late 1980s. The band released three critically acclaimed albums before splitting up in 1991. Following Galaxie 500, Damon formed the indie pop duo Damon & Naomi with bandmate Naomi Yang. The duo have a distinctive style of melancholic pop, and continue to produce music to this day. He is also a well-respected writer, having published two books, “The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World” (2017) and “Ways of Hearing” (2019), and writing for numerous esteemed publications like Pitchfork and The Wire. His writing often intertwines with his music career, as he explores themes around the intersection of technology, music, and culture. His observations and critiques have been influential in discussions about the digital evolution of the music industry. His unique perspective, combining his background as an artist with his understanding of technology’s impact, makes him a compelling voice in these debates. Catch him at a live show the night before the conference at Permanent Records Roadhouse.

Nonny de la Peña is a pioneer in emerging media and immersive journalism, and is currently the program director of ASU’s Narrative and Emerging Media Program. With over two decades of experience in visual, virtual, augmented and extended reality, her award-winning work in film, print and TV has had a major impact on storytelling. As the founder and CEO of Emblematic Group, Nonny leverages cutting-edge technologies to tell stories that foster deeply empathetic viewer engagement. Recognized as a “Technology Innovator of the Year” by WSJ and dubbed the “Godmother of Virtual Reality” by major publications, her contributions, including the first VR pieces shown at Sundance and Tribeca Film Festival, have set industry standards. Her influential paper “Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of the News,” in MIT’s journal Presence, is among its most downloaded. A laureate of numerous awards, including the SXSW Innovation Awards Hall of Fame, de la Peña’s innovative approach to storytelling continues to inspire and drive the field forward. She holds prestigious fellowships and degrees from Harvard University and USC.

Robert Tercek is a globally renowned figure in digital innovation and dematerialization, blending his roles as an author, entrepreneur, educator, and co-host of The Futurists podcast. As the founder and CEO of General Creativity, Robert shapes strategies for digital transformation and future-proof planning for new products, services, and ventures. His former executive leadership roles in media studios and software companies allowed him to launch digital services now integral to millions of daily lives. In 2021, the Media Excellence Awards named him Humanitarian of the Year for creating COVID SMART™, an interactive program ensuring worker safety during the pandemic. His book “VAPORIZED: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World” has made him an authority on software dematerialization, a process that is continuing to reshape various industries. 

Qianqian Ye is a Chinese artist, creative technologist, and educator based in Los Angeles. Q merges her architectural training with art and technology, generating spaces—digital, physical, and social—that probe into gender, immigrant, power, and technology matters. The Future of Memory, her recent collaboration, secured the Mozilla Creative Media Award. As the lead of p5.js at the Processing Foundation, she is central to an open-source platform that champions inclusive and accessible learning in code, a community now exceeding 1.5 million users. Q serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at USC Media Arts + Practice, teaching creative coding, and imparts 3D Arts knowledge at Parsons School of Design. In 2022-2023, she will broaden her reach as a Civic Media Fellow at USC Annenberg Innovation Lab. Having been raised in China and moved to the US in 2012, Q’s work now centers on alternative community building, technology against misinformation, the Chinese language system, and re-envisioning gender in non-western narratives. Her distinguished work has been showcased globally, from the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art to Ecobuild London. 

Jesse Damiani is a celebrated writer, curator, producer, and entrepreneur known for his expertise in virtual reality, augmented reality, and emerging media and technologies. He currently serves as Senior Curator of Nxt Realtime at Nxt Museum. Nxt Realtime represents a new exhibition structure, evolving 2-4 times annually to explore critical questions facing humanity. This innovative initiative assembles artists, curators, scholars, experts, and the public, seeking to stimulate critical and curious approaches to new ideas and practices. Concurrently, Realtime echoes web3 movement ideals, focusing on how art and artists pave the way for decentralized power and collective imagination as a problem-solving tool. Jesse is renowned for curating exhibitions such as Synthetic Wilderness, Sea Change, and PROOF OF ART. Beyond curating, he writes extensively on art, media, and emerging technology for Forbes and other prominent publications. He is also the founder of Best American Experimental Writing and CEO of Galatea, a tool for VR and AR storytelling.

Topics

These are the key themes we’ll be interrogating throughout the day:

Representation

• How can we address the problems of representation in generative AI while we’re still early in its rise? How can creators be a part of that?
• How does AI affect inclusion and representation in the entertainment industries?

Lessons learned

• What can we learn from the past? The ways previous technologies have been incorporated into art, and in particular the relationships between creators and publishers, distributors, and other intermediaries?
• Generative AI carries both opportunities and challenges for creators, but which if any are innate in the technology and which stem from other factors, like the current business and institutional structures?

The political environment

• How might labor policy and organizing from the creator perspective factor into the future of generative AI, and how do they compare to other levers for policy and business change?

The proceedings will be recorded and select sessions will be released at a future date. If you have any questions, please reach out to Anna Tumadóttir at anna@creativecommons.org.