Beyond Conference 2025
Reflections from artist Emily Bold
Earlier this year, I was nominated by Lowry and selected as ‘Emerging Innovator’ at this year’s BEYOND Conference - a creative research and technology conference. After a busy summer of making and operating roughly 3,265 individual captions and then sleeping for two months afterwards, I woke up and smelled the CreaTech. It was time to attend the conference (with my emotional support producer, PJ). Here are a few of my post-conference musings, in listicle format, ready for you to drag and drop into your BrainDrive.
The conversations on AI were… difficult.
No, it’s not just you. Even the clever people can get a bit tangled up. Clear cut answers are hard to come by, but good questions aren’t. There is some cool journalism being done around AI at the moment, so if we pay attention to that, then hopefully we’ll arrive at the compu-table better equipped and ready to carefully dissect and then vigorously chomp down on this meaty, fibrous topic, that takes up so much of our podcast listening air time (and fresh drinking water, it seems…).
If it’s innovation you want, you’re likely not going to find it on the internet, especially not on social media.
When experiencing the sludge of a post A.I. internet, it’s all too easy to want to write off all technology, become a luddite, burn your motherboard and return to the ocean from whence humankind first emerged. We’ve all thought about it. But most of the innovative tech that was showcased was not something you’d find on the internet. Good, useful tech exists, but you’ll probably have to leave your house to use it. Sorry.
If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
While big tech so often promises the world on a plate, effective tech tends to offer a smaller, realistic and more nutritionally balanced plate. So, don’t let your webcam be bigger than your SSD.
We should have more empathy for influencers. Or at least maybe I should…
When it comes to influencers, it’s easy to say ‘if you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen’, but what if you’ve got a restaurant full of ad revenue and paid partnerships and rent to pay? What if you only started a bake sale for fun, but now have people queuing round the block for an authentic slice of platform pie? Admit it, you follow at least one influencer and it seems that the only kitchen they can cook in is extremely hot and there’s little help available to them to stop them from getting burned.
I have many, many more tasty take-aways for your brain to chew on, but I have a graphics card in the microwave and it’s way past my screentime. Overall, there are good people working in the creative research and technology industries and a lot of them just happened to be at this conference. I’d particularly like to thank producer PJ, Antonia from Lowry and Josie from BEYOND for getting me to and sustaining me through my first ever conference.
If you want to know more about the BEYOND Emerging Innovators, here is the link: https://beyondconference.org/b25/innovators/ and if you want to find out about what I’m working on, here’s the link to my website: https://www.emilybold.co.uk/.