publisher so bloggers were -- terrell made and i suspect few people run facebook. things have changed. this year walter isaacson spoke about digital media and is up in remarks and we have been given hashtag for the life tweeting panel. every person from roundtable has developed a robust digital strategy for their brand. if you're listening to the leaders on that roundtable six years ago you might not have seen pitchers give up the impending disruption but there were emerging leaders in that crowd that year that could've told you not only that massive change was going to calm but that it was our day already happening just outside the digital field of the industry powerhouses. you have calm to hear the best ideas of the moment that the session is going to be a little bit different. today we are going to start with the best ideas of next year or the year after that. the four people you are here from today are already established leaders in their field. they're also the carriers of the future. they have the vision and understanding required to actively -- in the coming years and we trust you'll agree that these are the kinds of people you want in that role. we are excited to present you with the frontlines of change. >> i am alexis madrigal senior editor at "the atlantic." this session as in keeping with the idea that is going to be different it's going to be logistically different as well. we have four speakers and we will introduce them in just a second. two of them are speaking solo and their sandwiching people who will do a little too wet. these are going to be fall on presentations as opposed to sort of the more panel discussions that you have seen and they are going to try and really bring you something a fully packaged idea. why we chose these four people aside from -- you know in technologies which is what i mostly write about we talked about the adoption curve and we talked about as a new technology comes to the market like some small percentage of people adopted cell phones or the iphone after came out or computers in the 1980s. but the truth is that lots of different cultural ideas and new practices also have really similar a adoption curves. and so the people that you are looking at here are cultural early adopters. in their chosen fields they are at the forefront of practice and are really trying to bring you new ideas before they hit the mainstream. does anyone here know who the artist -- is? [laughter] for people who don't know i want to let you know you all know his work. he is the sculptor of mount rushmore and adam lerner might be the world's foremost expert on mount rushmore. he has his ph.d. from hopkins and american monuments. from there he entered the museum world and the contemporary muse -- museum in baltimore and at the denver art museum. after that he wanted to strike out on his own and so he decided to found an art space in a suburban shopping mall outside of denver shopping complex. is called the laboratory of art in ideas and he quickly established himself as one of the most innovative and creative people in the art world and so when the museum of contemporary arts in denver at the mca came looking for someone to run their building they found him. there is also -- and inspiration for this session because that denver and ca, he does a program called -- where he pairs unlike speaker so i gave a talk about compressed air and my counterpart gave a talk about art history and alchemy and you defined unexpected connections between these. amanda mitchell, we appropriately met when her project beat our longshot magazine for an innovation of journalism award. she has been at the absolute edge of additional media and politics since things really exist it. do you remain the heart -- [inaudible] that was amanda. [laughter] she moved to "huffington post" when she had a groundbreaking project off the bus and now has ended up most curiously after a time back in the newspaper the guardian, the u.k. guardian running many of their social media things. i just want you to believe me when i tell you she is one of the sharpest minds in digital media in one of the most articulate advocates for how social media can be just or then marketing. she will be presenting with matt thompson who is sitting to her right and he is the digital media inventor constantly on the edge of what our new realities or scientific changes are in its kind of hard to tell because he is so far beyond what most people are thinking. he runs digital things that mpr and he is another advocate for digital journalism and all its forms if there are any budding journalists. he is going to entice you to go out and run on code is simply -- quickly as possible. we couldn't have two better people to talk about the future of media and political media. last but obviously not least gustavo arellano sitting right there. i actually met gestapo in the best possible way because my dad was his biggest fan. when he was writing the mexican column for "oc weekly" hysterically funny and informed by gustavo latin american studies from ucla my dad never taught me much about mexican culture just outsource that whole project. [laughter] i met him five years ago when his first book came owhic which is ask a mexican and in the five year since he has been skyrocketing forward. he has two other books, one of personal history of orange county and his most recent book which is called "taco usa" and it uses mexican food to probe the borders and boundaries between american and mexican culture and he is also the editor of "oc weekly" in southern california. >> just a final comment, we are going to be tweeting these talks using the hashtag aspen futures. and in general just as alexis already mentioned we really want to encourage everybody to draw connections. ese presentations have some boundaries between them but ideally we are breaking down the boundaries and finding the commonalities in the interdisciplinary date between them and that makes interesting things happen. without further ado our first speaker is adam lerner. [applause] >> i love it when people talk about my work as a graduate student, at least until i pay off my student loans. i like to make sure that it gets some airplay. actually, i was a graduate student for a very long time, about 12 years, and sometimes i felt embarrassed to admit to my peers that i was writing my dissertation on the sculptor of mount rushmore because of its lowbrow associations. but now what amazes me is something very different. what amazes me is that i actually fail to learn what is probably the one single great lesson of studying an artist, especially an artist like him so in the six years of research and writing about this artist, who found his voice by attempting to do something that nobody else had done before, it never occurred to me that there is a lesson in that. there is a lesson in that actually might apply to me, that i might actually think about doing something that no one else had done before. and it's actually the nature of academic pursuits to remain an observer of other people who break the rules. now, as the director of our museum of contemporary arts actually i realize it's actually the nature of all cultural institutions to remain detached as an observer of those people who break the rules. that actually it is the nature of our cultural decisions to cultivate a sense of maybe appreciative or respectful detachment from the risktakers. it is the nature of art as we have inherited to actually be about breaking rules and going against conventions. there is something about the formal presentation of museums that actually is very similar to an academic thesis and their own creative impulse. so the great implicit message of all of our cultural decisions is that the artist has made the sacrifice so that you don't have to. and that is basically the christian model. which i think is something that i have sort of always as a museum or sort have tried to work against. so museums, and traditional cultural institutions, they point to the arts and they say isn't that an original voice, but the audience what they see is, they see the institution which has no original voice of its own generally. so it's like when you point in front of a dog, if you have dogs. what does it do? he sniffs your finger, right? the dog sees you, not what you're pointing at and the same thing as the audience for cultural institutions they tend to see you, the cultural institution as the framer of all that creative energy that the artist has sort of mustard. which means that the institution has to be a sort of model. if they have to model themselves, how we can learn from these creative artists to express an original voice, to break out of existing conventions and so if you want to foster the idea of the artist sacrifice, the artist sacrifice should be an inspiration for us to take chances, for us to break the rules, for us to clear away those conventions and start to see the world afresh. we want to sort of foster that attitude, then we as an institution have to do that ourselves and that is actually what i'm going to talk to you about from here on, sort of how i have tried to serve as an institution to have an original, creative voice. it is the attempt to model what it is we learn from our. i began in 2004 when a real real estate developer invited me as alexis mentioned, to create a cultural institution in the suburbs of denver where i was freed from any strictures of one cultural institution ought to be. and i began with a lecture program as mentioned. i called it the lab, the lab and it was a labrador retriever. i don't have a labrador retriever. at the docks and that it was sort of funny. i found it funny. maybe you don't come i don't know. we started with a lecture program and that lecture program we called unrelated topics and this was sandy -- andy warhol and artificial lighting. one speaker spoke on one subject for half an hour and then an unrelated subjects for half an hour and then both of at the same time. now, there we have it. we are in an unleased storefront space in the shopping district and there are 20 people in the audience and that is about two weeks into it. there a few weeks later we have maybe 75 people now showing up. on the left a of professor at the university of colorado talking about ts elliott and then you have a grocer talking about fresh meat sausage. [laughter] this is a sample season for you. carnivorous plants and colorful painting. earth art and cheese. l. and -- chinese opera and alfred hitchcock, walt whitman and whole hog cooking. what we do is sleep here things according to how they sound good next to each other and that sounded great. tequila and dark energy in the universe. [laughter] so you start to get what happens, your mind immediately makes the connection doesn't it? soul food and existentialism. prairie dogs and gertrude stein. and then the one which of course is obvious, marxism and kittens, kittens, kittens. now the point of all of this is that the mind naturally follows existing patterns when thinking about any subject. think about where you want to go to dinner on an average day and your mind will always go to the same places that it always goes to. you have got to check the mind to get to something new. by forcing the mind to make a connection with indifferent rounds it fosters new patterns of ranking bringing us out of the old patterns. which is why salman rushdie says a bit of this and a bit of that is how the newness enters the world. so we start to get the developers to build a separate building for us where we did have these programs as well as contemporary artists position. our motto was because culture is big, like canada. we also thought that was funny. obviously a very different sense of humor here. [laughter] so we did exhibitions on international art that there is a sense of play in everything we did. we were across this place from this -- across the street from this place called sporting goods. welcome to the lab, we are not. [laughter] and then we had to actually apologize for that. we had to publish something, apologize to our neighbors saying we are not. apparently we are. [laughter] so what happens is through play we not only deflated for tensions that are normally associated with high art of the created a sense of the unexpected so we are not sort of saying that this is our budgets a playful spirit of art so joke making for us became a model for creativity for breaking out of what you usually expect from any kind of art institution. then in 2009 with the popularity of the labs programming's as alexis mentioned i was offered the position of the director of the museum. now the class clown becomes the class president. at mca denver we are a contemporary art museum but we added the dog to our logo because we believe we both are a museum preserving the tradition of art but also we are a lab, laboratory for experiments and with the future of art is and what the future of the museum might be. and in that we try to develop a new language for contemporary art that would be outside of a traditional museums tend to do. this is our program, art fitness training. waiver program feminism and company were for example this is let by julian silverman and hear a sample program would be were repaired a woman who is the leading salesperson of toys at passion parties and paired her with a leading tupperware sales person and followed by a sociologist who studies women's -- and there was a kind of ringing together of the cultural right -- richness and understanding the various ways. there is a kind of understanding of our culture that is very fabric, the very fabric of our lives and that is both commercial culture and not really looked out on a normal basis. we did a program called art meets these were we had an artisan butcher who fabricated a carcass in front of an audience. meanwhile we had a guy named roger green playing guitar who is a vegetarian so we called the vegetarian option. and we had sarah rich and nicola doing talks going everywhere from the animal itself all the way to the restaurant in the city. the point is to connect art to those creative forces that actually make up our civilization. through these live programs life programs we become as an institution, coproducers with these other creative people out there who produces with the artist as well so his co-authors in a sense we developed our own unique voice as an institution. but i think more than anything else though we had to relying upon the creativity of our staff, the people who want to work at an art museum or people who are attracted to creative endeavors. these are incredibly creative people and we have a young generation of folks who work there, who you have to actually work to keep down their creative spirits, which actually most cultural institutions do. we tried to do the opposite. here is sarah and brett. but, so for example we did an exhibition called energy effects, which feature your thermonuclear weapons paired alongside a video work by gonzalez and when our exhibition manager went to return those weapons to the air and museum he decided he would wear a bunny suit. there you see him with his assistant, and he drove around in a flatbed truck wearing a bunny suit and the rest of the staff wanted to play a prank on him and wanted to have him arrested and called the cops on him which was funny. nothing happened. he is an artist, but this is something, this is kind of like the creative spirit that takes place within the organization that i think is not about our. it's about energy. energy has this natural gravitational pull to it. it's not even something that is marketed. is something that becomes an attractive force. there you have my assistant at the time aaron, who for our event dressed as a taco and played the trumpet and the donkey is also carrying a tropics during the fund-raiser. we have our graphic designer alec stevens who cannot do anything without being fabulous. this is our visitor services director who organizes -- andy lyons who organizes a friday night event called black sheep friday and one night he organized an event for example called museum professional wrestling where he invited museum professionals to engage in thumb wrestling competitions. and we still do mix to taste at the program, mixed taste. sarah and by the way these crowds now are like 300 plus people at these events. we have to use in industrial space across the street becerra who produces these programs, she likes to -- so we giveaway a raffle and in this case what we did once, we gave away free tickets to the king tut exhibition at the denver art museum and the winner had to redeem these two used tires at the art museum to collect their winning tickets but we didn't tell the art museum that. [laughter] so we never did that again. so anyway the point of all of this is that why do we have art? why do we have art if we cannot ourselves learn from the artists who break the rules? to find new patterns of thinking and doing things through play, and to connect to each other as human beings through laughter, through sort of somehow shaking things up and sort of not being as professionals to each other as an institution to a visitor but actually as being human to each other. we do exhibitions of art, but as a museum will do, but the important thing is by modeling creativity for our visitors we hope that they will be able to see our exhibitions in a different light. we want them to be actually inspired by our artist so themselves be creative. we wanted them to believe that they too can re-create the world so we believe in masterworks. this is not to say oh yeah to wear a bunny suit is the same as to make a masterwork of our. the core of every art is the authentic creative act which is common to everyone and to do that you need to do it yourself. you can't just say it. you need to do it as an institution. that is what inspires other people to do a too. then there are a couple of institutions i will end with which are crucial to our attitude about art and culture. one is an exhibition that i co-authored focused on the american counterculture of the 1960's and seventies. this is a crucial one called west of center and it's a large-scale exhibition. what it does is it looks at certain creative individuals in the 60's and seventies and why it is interesting is these people i believe have to find an alternative legacy for a culture that actually continues to exist today. these are people and here's a picture of trinidad colorado a geo-descent commune and these are people who didn't necessarily define themselves as artists but set out to live artistically and do so in sort of set out to make the world that they wanted to live in and so they inspired other people to do the same. and that was an attitude you also found in the punk era which followed and this was an exit vision we did centered around the work of bruce conner who you see here where we explored in this exhibition this idea which is again the opposite of what is that the mainstream of cultural institutions today. the attitude is when i see somebody on stage doing something creative and expressive, the feeling that is cultivated in punk rock is i can do that too and those early days formed bands themselves. bad along with the counterculture is the origins effectively the origins of the diy culture that is everywhere today, especially amongst youth culture. that is the origins of the spirit you see amongst my staff, the people who sort of belief that they are not trying necessarily to find what they're doing as art but to do things more interestingly in the world. they try to live in the world that they feel is more interesting place to live in. and the question is to let that happen so the diy attitude i believe now dominates youth culture. more partly i think it's everywhere and our culture an