Marin | Talking Paintings and Story Machines: Claude in Creative Tech.
What happens when people who spent their careers building worlds for film and museums start building with Claude? On Thursday, November 12, two of the sharpest minds in creative tech come to AvantSpace in San Rafael to show real work. Hilmar Koch spent years at ILM and now leads media research at Autodesk. Theo Watson builds installations that people walk into and play with. Both will show where Claude fits into how they make things, what it’s good at, and how they keep creatives in charge. Bring questions. This is a room full of people who build.
Doors open at 6:00 with drinks. Talks start around 6:45. Each speaker has about 25 to 30 minutes plus Q&A.
Hilmar Koch, Autodesk Research
Hilmar leads research on the future of media and entertainment at Autodesk Research, where his team is exploring what an operating system for creativity might look like. Before Autodesk he was Head of Computer Graphics, Director of Virtual Production, and Director of the Advanced Development Group at Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm. His credits include Avatar, Star Trek, Transformers, Star Wars Episodes III and VII, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and Pearl Harbor. He won an Academy Award for developing ambient occlusion.
What he’ll show: Story Architecture, an Autodesk Research prototype for the earliest stage of story development. Drawings, scripts, and floor plans live together in one nonlinear space, with guard rails that keep creatives in control of their assets. He’ll walk through how the team built it with Claude and what that changed about the process.
Theo Watson, Design I/O
Theo is an award-winning interactive artist. With his partner Emily Gobeille, he leads Design I/O, winner of the 2020 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Digital Design. Their work has been shown at the Tate Modern and Ars Electronica and is in the permanent collection of MoMA. Clients include the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Tech Interactive, Bell Labs, and the Toronto International Film Festival. Theo also cofounded openFrameworks, the open source toolkit a lot of creative coders grew up on.
What he’ll show: how Design I/O is bringing AI into experiences people play with. At The Tech Interactive’s Dream Garden, visitors write generative haiku with their bodies. At a new Cleveland Museum of Art exhibition, you can talk to paintings and explore the styles of famous works. He’ll get into where Claude fits in the build, and the unglamorous problem of shipping AI into installations that have to run for five to ten years.
Space is limited, and these evenings fill up, so register early.
Hosted by Steve Huber, Claude Community Leader.