Feeling like a GeekSouth traitor, I spent my Tuesday evening in Asheville at Liquefaction, their Media Arts Project “mixer” with Meet the Geeks, the Asheville GeekChap. The drive over the hill was refreshing, gorgeous Fall colors everywhere and miles and miles of live, 3D panoramas. When I got out of the car in downtown Asheville, it felt like January, but the New French Bar was warm and cozy, and there was free food and a big room full of geeks and artists unwinding with their laptops and wine glasses. The food was a giant fruit and cheese platter and a vat (well, ok, a big bowl) of artichoke and spinach dip.

When I first arrived, I was supposed to select a nametag with either a pink ‘Artist’ or a green ‘Geek’ comment pre-written. I grabbed a geek one and the pink pen and wrote Artist too. I noticed several other people had done the same thing. Wasn’t the point of the event the commonality between geeks and artists?

They had a MAP handout booklet that was attractive, espoused in a rather vague way the notion that geeks and artists have something to do with Asheville’s future. I had the impression that since so many of both groups have and are continuing to be attracted to, and move into the Asheville area, and since there is obviously a lot of talent there, somebody ought to figure out some way to get them doing things together. Since most artists and geeks tend to be independent free agents its a task not unlike herding cats.

But there were lots of interesting people there, ranging from starving artists, programmers, and videographers to retired NASA researchers. Most of the people I spoke with were not Asheville natives, but had moved there within the last few years. There were people showing off interactive graphics widgets on laptops, a projector that kept running disconnected video snippets of an industrial/biomedical nature, and people who had never heard of Kingsport.

I’m glad I went. Geeks and artists aren’t nearly as divergent as the general public apparently thinks. Given the great resource we have in ETSU’s Digital Media Center, we ought to be recruiting more artists to GeekSouth!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 11:28 am and is filed under Geek Stuff. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.