We have been fortunate enough to work with the insightful Author, Journalist, and Producer, Leah Hunter on a couple of occasions. She was a featured speaker at the Grit Daily Live! Miami Art Summit this year. We also worked with her at Sundance Film Festival, premiering her new docuseries, ‘Created Here’.
Hunter has spent her career exploring the intersection of technology and culture, carving a niche for herself in the world of augmented reality. Her work focuses on the avant-garde and she makes sure to follow societal trends. Even in her spare time, she is looking to the future. Hunter turned her Burning Man vacation into a cultural and business opportunity, founding the IDEATE camp.
The camp’s values are flawlessly outlined in new age tech-speak on their website. The “tribe represents a systems-thinking and values-based mindset that looks at how we can make the world work for 100% of humanity. Guided by [their] values, we seek to explore how the principles of Burning Man can influence projects, businesses and initiatives in the Default World.”
Yes, Leah Hunter is everything you would want and expect from a trendsetter in the tech world.
Bringing the Future to the Business World
Her expertise is in tech fields that most would relegate to science fiction. While the subject matter of her books and research sounds like it was ripped straight out of Black Mirror or Minority Report, they are very much a reality in our world.
Hunter’s book, ‘The Beautiful Future’ focuses on the transition we are going through as a society. This is a work that jumps into the deep end of technology, philosophy, and ethics, examining the “tech-enhanced superpowers” we are creating as well as addressing the overlap between science and spirituality. ‘The Beautiful Future’ is available via her website.
Her other two works are a little less heady. Hunter’s ‘Augmented Reality for the Industrial Enterprise’ handles AR applications. In it, she swiftly highlights all of the real world uses for the controversial technology. She outlines various practical uses of AR in the context of construction and infrastructure. ‘Changing Reality for Business’ takes a step back and functions more as an overview of AR and its business applications.
Bringing Cities’ Art to the Masses
While her books can be very high-concept and informationally dense, Hunter’s ‘Created Here’ docuseries is much easier to digest. Her Burning Man inclinations are evident in this in-depth look at artists that will have hipsters salivating.
‘Created Here’ features interviews with visual artists, musicians, and performers from twelve different cities. The episodes focus on the methods and philosophies of the subjects. It also dives into the influence that their location plays into their work. The featured guests create art using various mediums, each bringing something unique to their craft.
For an example of the material to be featured, you can check out the interviews hosted on the ‘Created Here’ website. Brooklyn based Photographer, Robyn Hasty, has an intriguing interview where she dives into the specific technological and conceptual reasons for using vintage cameras. You can feel her passion as she describes being on “the edge of chaos” while she uses a dark box camera.
Different Fields, All Leah Hunter
Leah Hunter’s work focuses on niches in the tech and art worlds that occupy many hours of cocktail discussion amongst the micro-dosing techies in my hometown of Silicon Valley. In addition to her work with Art and AR, she brings her passion to the masses with her journalistic endeavors. She fittingly covers the human side of tech for Fast Company and entrepreneurial women for Forbes.
Hunter is a talented and intelligent individual with a unique worldview. The subjects she deals with all seem very different, but they encompass everything that is Leah Hunter.
