048 - Michael Naimark: What Artist-Explorers Know That Corporates Always Forget

What happens when an artist imagines the future decades before the rest of the world catches up?

In this episode, Nir Hindie sits down with pioneering media artist and researcher Michael Naimark, whose work has shaped immersive and interactive media for more than forty years. If you’ve used Google Street View, you’ve seen the shadow of a project he helped create at MIT in the late 1970s: the Aspen Movie Map, a radically early experiment in “surrogate travel.”

Michael’s career moved across some of the most influential innovation environments of the last half-century: MIT, Atari, Lucasfilm, the Apple–Lucas multimedia labs, and Interval Research, Paul Allen’s legendary “five to ten years ahead” laboratory. Across those settings he explored how artists, engineers, and researchers push each other toward breakthroughs that conventional corporate structures rarely allow.

Shownotes:

Michael's website: http://www.naimark.net/

Michael's workshop: MediatedPresence.com

Aspen Movie Map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Movie_Map

Steve Jobs at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9HmOz8H0qI