As part of the last reading group activity I reviewed the Lift Conference that occurred earlier this year in February. The conference agenda listed many talks on various topics, all quite interesting. The talks themselves were streamed live during the event and are available to watch online for anyone who is interested.
Since I’d likely never get the money together to attend a conference overseas, I really enjoyed having access to these talks. Many of the talks were fabulous, but I had to pick 2, the ones that really stood out were:
- Venkatesh Rao’s talk during the Resilience and Resistance track were he shared ideas on the fox, hedgehog, and turkey archetypes
- Sebastian Dieguez: Are Human Brains Hacking New Technologies? During his talk he shared some of his thesis research on how the body (mind?) reaches out to external objects for engagement. He also talked briefly on how the writing system may have hijacked the human brain
I encourage anyone thinking of watching these talks to take a brief scan of the conference agenda, then cruise on over to Stephanie Booth’s blog where she’s posted her notes which she live-blogged during the event. I found her notes quite helpful too in deciding which talks to watch first.
There are other Lift conferences coming up again this year. Up next, the Open Knowledge Conference, again in Geneva, 16-18 September 2013. The event site is https://okcon.org. Following that, there will be a Lift France: Occupy Industry, 16-18 October 2013. More info on that at https://liftconference.com/lift-france-13. Both look equally as interesting and I hope they will also be live-streamed.