Art as a Startup: Engineering Attention and Reality

Business is used to defending itself against uncertainty with strategy sessions and plans — the artist doesn't fight uncertainty, but plays with it, and always wins: it's artists who create the image of the future and the reality each of us carries in our heads. Launching the festival in Stary Oskol was the same kind of startup: zero budget, no cultural habit among the audience, and total unknown.

The lecture covers how directing tools, systems thinking and creative practice turn a point that doesn't exist on any map into a place of attraction for thousands of people; why contemporary art is really about the hard work of building communities; and how founders can stop searching for a magic "growth" button by learning to create meaning where others see only industrial pipes.

Nobody wanted an iPhone until Steve Jobs invented it.