Artwrld Cathy Hackl on How AI and Mixed Reality Will Spark the Next Renaissance
These days, as artificial intelligence begins to spread through society, it’s impossible not to sense that something fundamental about our reality is changing—something as encompassing, in its way, as the shift from summer to autumn. If you ask the futurist, author, and tech executive Cathy Hackl what's happening, she’ll tell you we are entering what she calls a “season of possibility.”
That’s the delicate way to put it. In her exhilarating new book Spatial Computing, co-authored with Irene Cronin, Hackl is more blunt: the combination of AI and spatial computing, she writes, will bring about “unparalleled” change to our world, “surpassing even transformative events in history, such as the advent of electricity or the impact of the Industrial Revolution.”
And it’s happening faster than we may think, with developments like Meta’s newly unveiled Orion glasses suggesting that long-term investments in the technology are starting to pay off in a big way—and that we should begin to prepare for the season to come.
So what does this mean for the art world as we know it—for the artists making art, the galleries selling it, the museums showcasing it, and the rest of us being inspired by it? Hackl believes that, far from killing creativity or bringing about a dystopia, this transition will bring about a new Renaissance.
This week, for our sixth live Artwrld conversation, we are pleased to sit down with Cathy Hackl to discuss her optimistic vision for the future of art.