From a conversation with Cesar Hidalgo at Edge: At the [MIT] Media Lab, the whole goal that I see is that I have to be creative and I’m free to be creative, and I’m not constrained to a subject category. I don’t need to be creative in chemistry, or I don’t need to be creative in physics, or I don’t need to be creative in policy. It’s not about a subject category, the criticism of: well that is not, from the subject, it’s not valid. What that creates is a group of people that have interaction between artists and technologies and designers and theoreticians and thinkers, and experimentalists, which all share a pursuit of freedom and of new ideas. I find that it’s a little bit paradoxical because this idea of pursuing creative freedom is the oldest idea in academic. The idea of an academic is someone that is doing something that nobody told him or her to do, someone that is running with his ideas and trying to make them happen. There might be people that think that those ideas are not worth even pursuing, they don’t make sense. It might be that those ideas are not going to have applications in the next 200 years. Who knows? But it’s an academic who will go away with his/her ideas, or take them where he or she wants. I would say that
Cesar Hidalgo on Academia & Culture
Cesar Hidalgo on Academia & Culture
Cesar Hidalgo on Academia & Culture
From a conversation with Cesar Hidalgo at Edge: At the [MIT] Media Lab, the whole goal that I see is that I have to be creative and I’m free to be creative, and I’m not constrained to a subject category. I don’t need to be creative in chemistry, or I don’t need to be creative in physics, or I don’t need to be creative in policy. It’s not about a subject category, the criticism of: well that is not, from the subject, it’s not valid. What that creates is a group of people that have interaction between artists and technologies and designers and theoreticians and thinkers, and experimentalists, which all share a pursuit of freedom and of new ideas. I find that it’s a little bit paradoxical because this idea of pursuing creative freedom is the oldest idea in academic. The idea of an academic is someone that is doing something that nobody told him or her to do, someone that is running with his ideas and trying to make them happen. There might be people that think that those ideas are not worth even pursuing, they don’t make sense. It might be that those ideas are not going to have applications in the next 200 years. Who knows? But it’s an academic who will go away with his/her ideas, or take them where he or she wants. I would say that