Monika Bielskyte: The Intersection of Tech and Creative
A rebellious child, Monika Bielskyte defied her father’s insistence on a ‘serious’ career pathway as a doctor or scientist, controversially immersing herself in the worlds of art, fashion and design. By her early teens, she had a catalogue of exhibitions to her name, but, despite growing success and the perceived creativity associated with the arts world, the young Lithuanian found it to be, quite conversely, deeply uninspiring.
“Being a young artist was very much like being a model or an actress, it’s like you’re going through casting, people judge you very subjectively and I just felt so alone in that.
“I started feeling disillusioned about this stuff that is created for literally 0.001 percent of the world’s population – the very privileged part of the western world. Because we have this idea that creativity is only reserved for the affluent and the educated and that others can’t participate in the discussion, which I find not to be true.”
This disenchantment with everything the art world stood set Bielskyte on a journey that would explore new creative ground, learning about scientists and technologists, and developing a fascination with futurism that was only exacerbated following her first experience of sci-fi blockbuster, Ghost in a Shell.
“Ghost in a Shell is, for me, the most extraordinary sci-fi film,” she says. “It’s amazing aesthetically, but it also has philosophical undertones and there’s just so many different cultural references in there – it’s a heterotopia. There is a dystopian element, but it’s not all dark and depressing, there’s magic and beauty, and so, after I saw it, I was like, ‘okay, this is possible’”.
The ‘aha moment’ as she calls it, saw Bielskyte begin to cultivate content for her self-founded magazine, Some/Things, entirely devoted to creativity manifesting outside of traditional art worlds. It delved into quantum physics, interviewed theoretical physicists – anything that saw people push the boundaries of innovation into new spaces of understanding.
Today, Bielskyte’s career pathway is rooted at the intersection of tech and creative. She is a creative director and strategist who focuses on immersive media technologies and new, digital formats of reality; exploring how people perceive the future around the globe and helping to prototype those diverse, possible futures into tangible experiences.
“In VR and movies and games, imagination is totally dominated by the white western world,” she explains. “And I find it incredibly troubling, because then people from the other parts of the world cannot see themselves in that future, and the people from the white western world cannot see the others in that future, and I think that creates the tensions that we are seeing in the world today.
“So I spend my time travelling around the world, actively asking how all these different people imagine themselves within the future and then seeing how I could incorporate that in the sort of story worlds that we design.”
According to Bielskyte, designing story worlds that successfully encapsulate this multiplicity of vision, in a bid to create a future that everyone can actively participate in, is being continually suffocated by the industry’s ongoing techno fetishism:
“I’m in love with the possibilities of tech, but I know that it’s not technology that will change the world – it’s us. Gadgets don’t mean anything unless we think about how they can really be used as a tool, not just to solve practical problems, but really empower and inspire people to create something that participates in this vision of a more open tomorrow.”
This concept of taking immersive medias out of the entertainment space and reimagining them with more meaningful purpose is one Bielskyte will be unraveling as part of a panel debate with Content Strategist Diana Williams, of Lucasfilm, and ex-Magic Leap Human Experience Designer, Alysha Naples, at Pause 2017.
“What we need is not more technology-driven experiences, but experience-driven technology. So when you spend time in these worlds across platforms, you carry out something that is meaningful. You can open up creatively, emotionally, intellectually; you can expand your knowledge of any of those aspects or acquire new skills by playing a game. So, it’s not just like you go into that virtual space to isolate yourself and to distance yourself from the real world, but actually how these immersive media spaces can be a proxy for us to look back at our reality in a better way.”
Using VR as possibility space for fostering courage, openness and a willingness to collaborate with one another is a huge deviation from existing VR experiences, where instilling fear appears to be the overriding pervasive theme. But it is one that Bielskyte feels can change the world – into one that that is more positive, more inclusive and more connected than that which is currently being authored.
“I want more possibility spaces that open us up, not continue to close us down,” she concludes.
fluoro is an official media partner of the premier creative, tech and business festival in Australasia, Pause, where Bielskyte will feature as part of the 2017 edition. To celebrate the partnership, we have created a special edition Pause Magazine 2017 by fluoro. Each feature within the magazine has been curated to offer an exclusive insight into the game changers from the Pause 2017 program, including the likes of Bielskyte, SXSW, Lucasfilm, The Mill, Pixar, Google, Etsy and frog.
Click here for a complimentary copy of this special edition magazine.
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