tokion’s creativity now conference

Today Kristen and I attended the first day of the Creativity Now conference at Cooper Union, put on by Tokion. It was a shame to spend such a lovely day indoors, but the discussions were really interesting.

The first presenter was David Shrigley. I found his presentation a particularly good start to this event, because of both his artwork and his way of addressing the audience. His artwork seems to manifest the simplicity of blunt honesty, mixed with a little sarcasm and dark humor, which appeals to me. His work reminds me a little bit of Toothpaste for Dinner mixed with some Daniel Johnston. They all have sort of similar styles, though Toothpaste is definitely more of a ‘cartoon’ than the others.

Another interesting panel was The Commodification of the Street: Downtown Gets Sold. Well, actually, the presenters of this one weren’t all that engaging, but they showed an interesting video… This has a lot of the same clips they showed today but it’s edited differently.

Too bad Clayton Patterson wasn’t there himself.

And then there was my favorite panel… David Cross, Maria Bamford, and Zach Galifianakis. They were supposed to be discussing the ’state of comedy’, however after they summed that up in about 45 seconds the rest of the discussion was all over the place. Here’s what they concluded…

I hope to upload my other videos but honestly, youtube is taking forever.

The other presentations were interesting, but not as notable. Aside from being subjected to the same three Zune ads on a loop during breaks, it was a very enjoyable experience.