Aiming to start a community within the Creative Technology scene in Singapore, an inaugural “Creative Technology: Pre-Alpha” meetup was held on 4 October 2023 at the AI Playground at PlayPan, Peace Centre.

This inaugural meetup was organised by Christine Chong from Tusitala, Jake Tan from SERIAL CO_ and Akbar Yunus from Yunora, with the venue space sponsored by Gary Hong, the founder of TENSQUARE. It was a casual meet-up to help people make new friends, connect with old ones, and build a sense of community. 

“One of the things we want to do is to bring everyone together and to discuss how to move the community forward. I think it’s important for us to have more of these events for us to find a sense of purpose within the community.”
— Jake Tan, SERIAL CO_

With a mix of close to 100 attendees (i.e., artists, creative technologists creators, designers, researchers, etc.) from various institutions and organisations, the event started with a fun icebreaker before a town-hall session facilitated sharing of thoughts on the creative tech industry.

You can view the archived comments here.

Several problems highlighted the challenges of the “creative technologist”. For example, one attendee commented, “I don’t think there is enough representation of Creative Technologist in the public sector, as such they do not understand either the nuances of design and art or the intricacies behind engineering, science, and programming.”

However, as the conversations started to flow, this young community also shared ideas of what they wanted to see and get out of a Creative Technology Community. 

The conversations will continue on Telegram.

While this was only a “pre-Alpha”, the organisers emphasised that they were not figureheads of the industry, but simply wanted to create a diverse community in this industry that can organically grow, evolve and choose its representatives. 

“We wanted to do a DAO, which may be a bit ambitious, but essentially we want it to be decentralised, as having energy from different people and different contributions brings a totally different perspective.”
— Christine Chong, Publisher, Tusitala

As the night ended, curious passerbys peeped in wondering if this was a new club venue, only to find a weird mix of creatives and techies discussing serious things, such as the future of the Creative Technologist.

Special thanks to all the amazing volunteers and supportive sponsors for making this happen.

Photo credits: Vivian Fung