Hellicar and Lewis - Interactive Practitioners Meetup: Nov 2013
In November of 2013 I attended the Colab Interactive Practitioners Meet-up held at the Semi Permanent space in Ponsonby. The guest speakers were Peter Hellicar and Joel Lewis of Hellicar&Lewis.
Hellicar&Lewis are interactive, digital practitioners that work with brands, companies and institutions to invent and design new ways of communicating with their audiences in real time. They have done evrything from big corporate works for the likes of Coca-Cola, to educational works for children with physical or mental learning disabilities such as autism.
Their work blends together several different disciplines – from Art Direction and Software Engineering to Interior Design, combining the use of art, technology and design to create future focused experiences that bring people into the present moment with the goal of leaving a lasting impression. Fusing traditional media, digital frameworks and viewer interaction they are able to create feedback loops between the people, the technology and the environment.
At the heart of Hellicar&Lewis is the idea of making all their work open-source. All of the software behind their projects is made available for anybody to use, in any application or for any purpose. For Hellicar&Lewis it wasn’t only an ethical decision but has also turned out to be a great approach in the commercial sense. This is due to the quick development and iteration times achievable when working with open source frameworks and software - allowing faster, more economical development of projects with greater reliability. The open source approach also allows for open collaboration with professional (or amateur) creatives world-wide, which has lead to them gaining international support, as well as allowing the creation of further software that has already been field tested and proven beforehand by the open source community.
The movement towards creative businesses being founded on the open source ethos and principles is growing fast and attending this talk from Hellicar&Lewis really reinforced that for myself, proving what could be achieved with such an approach. Prior to hearing Pete and Joel speak I had begun to look at how open-source could be applied economically in the creative sector - having read books such as Makers from the editor of Wired Chris Anderson - and how the future of our economy could be based partially around the idea of a gift economy but being able to hear them talk and have a conversation with them at the end of the presentation about the future of things really opened my eyes further.
The presentation from Hellicar&Lewis also identified a new creative area for me to explore - digital interactive art and installations - which I had not been made overly privy to before hearing Pete and Joel. My focus primarily lay mainly in still forms of art (illustration, print-making, sculpture etc) and the ‘making’ of physical goods - combining the traditions of craft and hand-made goods with new digital fabrication technologies. Seeing what kind of art could be achieved with code got me quite excited about the future of art-making.
Breaking a number of engrained forms of status quo, Pete and Joel were extremely inspirational and motivational but in the most humble and approachable way. Their approach to both their work, their life, and the balance between the two was really on par with myself, and their entire presentation was full of points that really resonated and reinforced ideas of my own about living a creative lifestyle, as well as opening me up to a vast number of new references in the digital interactive and installation art realm.
I will finish with a quote from John Lassester which inspired Hellicar&Lewis and speaks volumes to myself in terms of moving forward with my creative endeavours.
“The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.”
http://www.hellicarandlewis.com/