Pushkin House presents a new edition of Seven of Clubs – an interdisciplinary event series on the cross-section of arts, sciences, society and entrepreneurship.
The unique format of this info-tainment salon will allow guests to hear speakers candidly share insights into their area of passion and expertise within the intimate setting of Pushkin House.
The event series aims to ignite curiosity, forge collaborations and celebrate strangeness. Bringing people together over in-depth stories of hard work, artistic expression and intellectual curiosity will provide a friendly forum for inspiration, discovery and human connection.
Seven of Clubs has been hosted quarterly by Zima Bar in Soho. Since its launch in 2015, it has brought together over 80 speakers including poets, cyborgs, sperm scientists, digital artists, archaeological choreographers, speculative designers, copyright lawyers, librarians and many more.
About the speakers
Maribeth Ruth is an engineer by training, a researcher by accident, and an enthusiast about almost everything. The intersection of technology and society has been at the heart of Maribeth’s interests since she began her career in tech, and she believes it is critical that perspectives from across disciplines and society have a seat at the table as we apply AI ever more widely. As a Research Engineer at DeepMind, she does research focused on the risks and benefits of large language models. AI outputs from ChatGPT to DALLE-2 are captivating, hilarious, possibly even useful... but what are the inputs? Explore the world of the massive datasets that these models consume and discover how they perpetuate the best and worst of society. Come and learn about how the (AI) sausage is made.
Baroque Anarchist is a visual artist based in London. She was born during the Chernobyl disaster and has long been interested in the intersection of science, art and the human body. In her work, she draws inspiration from the Baroque period and seeks to explore themes of immortality and the balance between vulnerability and strength. In addition to her fine art and theatre set design practices, Baroque has also ventured into street art, using the persona of three distinct art personalities. During her talk, the artist will discuss her artistic journey, her admiration for Old Masters and her approach to creating art.
Pierre-Francois Gerard, PhD, is a co-founder at Kinetic Art Labs, a VR game studio fusing lucid gameplay and contemporary art. Formerly an architect and 3D visualiser, he dedicates his skills to developing unforgettable immersive experience using the best practice in spatial- and human-centred design. The core of his discussion is about architectural space in a digital world. The concept of space is tied to conventions and codes that allow a group of individuals to inhabit the same shared physical or virtual place. Moreover, the perception of space is a function of the human body. With the growth of the industry and the immersive web, it’s time to get more specific about what works and what does not when building virtual worlds.
Ryan McClure is a multi-disciplinary design engineer and has been involved in many different areas of environmental activism. He aims to foster new ways of solving problems through the convergence of emerging technologies, science and radical community-led projects that generate and celebrate a newfound relationship with the natural world around us. What if we can create consumer products for environmental change? What if we can be at a protest, without being at a protest? With the need for activism more pressing now than ever, we must look for new ways to tell stories about the problems we face through the lens of technology and novel forms of activism. A new-era is upon us.