John Michael Schert works with clients to help them create and unlock customised leadership development opportunities for their organisations, communities and causes. His work draws from his experiences as an entrepreneur, artist, producer and educator. Brett Perry is a performing artist who believes deeply in the transcendent power of the arts.

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These are live-blogged notes from a session at NEXT25 in Hamburg. Posts will be improved over the next few days.

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Does the advent of generative AI herald the end of creativity?

There’s a lot of talk about AI and output creativity, admits John Michael. “Let the (AI) intern do that, let it write the report” is the refrain in many offices. But what about the input end of creativity? What do we put into the system?

What about the start of creativity, not the end product?

So, as last year, we’re going to create some dance art live on stage, but with a different goal: to interrogate the creative process, and where it starts. For example, is Brett – one of the world’s best dancers – really here to dance? Is that the only output we’re seeing here?

Brett starts dancing to John Michael’s instructions, in front of a screen:

An Accenture Song team has been building an AI model that builds a simulacrum of him based on his dance movements, and projects it onto the screen.

It also creates music…

Is our purpose here as humans just to feed this machine?

We’ve fed the beast. Now, let’s leave it, says John Michael, and Brett starts moving out into the audience:

So, now the audience is involved. They’re helping, caring, as David Mattin put it earlier.

We’re building a product now. We’re not sure what it will look like, but we are exploring the inputs we need to create it, says John Michael.

What are we creating? Art? Harmony? Connections? Trust? Safety? Help?

These are the conditions David was speaking about this morning; these are the qualities we need to focus on. That we need more of. How do we professionalise that?

What else makes us human? Our bodies. Our non-verbal communication.

How do we scale this? Things that used to be scarce can become abundant now. So what do we have to do to stay ahead of it?

We have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, but god-like technologies. How can we harness our emotions to rebuild our institutions and move beyond medieval thinking? And that’s the question we’ve started to explore through this collaborative work.

And so, here’s the world premiere of a new artwork, It’s all on us.