Ten Enlightening Vivid Ideas Events That Will Reboot Your Brain

When someone’s nailing everything they set their mind to, it’s not hard to feel just a tiny bit jealous. Good news, Vivid Ideas is inviting four of the creative world’s cutting edge icons to reveal how they achieved such enviable success.

The Game-changers talk series features filmmaker Spike Jonze on June 5 (Her, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich), House of Cards creator Beau Willimon on May 28, Orange is the New Black writer and creator Jenji Kohan on June 10 and Australian fashion influencer Margaret Zhang on May 28, all taking to the stage for what’s tipped to be a fascinating insight into their lives and achievements.

Calling all creative ladies, this ‘un-conference’ is for you. A three-day “event for creative women, to learn from creative women”, Make Nice is a brand new part of Vivid Ideas, featuring a super successful lineup of pioneering international and homegrown talent.

Limited to 150 female attendees, Make Nice is a three-day creative event that isn’t your regular conference format. Each presenter will offer practical advice for working in the creative industries, unpack the value of idea exchange and dialogue, and focus on the importance of genuine professional support. But they’ll also be sitting next to you for the conference, learning from your ideas and having mad chats.

Brought to you by the Black Dog Institute, the National Institute for Experimental Arts at UNSW and host Julie McCrossin, The BIG Anxiety Project explores one of society’s greatest (and common) mental health issues: anxiety.

According to Beyond Blue, approximately 45 percent of Australians will experience a mental health condition in their lifetime. In any one year, around 1 million Australian adults have depression, and over 2 million have anxiety.

How are we coping with the strains and stresses of city life? What does online connectivity mean for our levels of anxiety? Who does it effect, how does it feel and what can we do to address it? An interactive session blending health research with cutting-edge data visualisation tools, this Vivid Ideas event will let you see social media feeds transformed into live infographics that reveal the themes, thoughts and truth behind anxiety.

Vivid LIVE is expanding this year with its Artist Talks Program (May 27 to June 13), which will see artists taking the stage for their Vivid show and also for a special Q&A. Artists like New Order, Anohni and Wafia will be chatting to audiences across multiple Opera House foyers, as well as in the Playhouse. The talks are designed to give audiences the ability to both hear artists perform and also reflect on their creative process.

Semi Permanent, Australia’s three-day touring seminar that covers big ideas around design, tech, digital landscapes and the future of the internet, has a straight-up cray-cray 2016 lineup featuring speakers from Google, Uber, Netflix and Facebook.

If you’re in the market for some solid advice from the new generation of entrepreneurs, this is the event for you (you know you’re growing up when the idea of a three-day seminar is more exciting than the idea of a three-day music festival, hey). Carriageworks is hosting the epic annual event in May and while tickets are a little pricey ($340 for a general admission single day ticket), but they always roll out mind-boggling content and installations — plus, the networking opportunities are worth their weight in gold.

Amnesty International may have been around for over 50 years, but that certainly doesn’t mean they’ve lost touch with how to move people to action. Run by this renowned world leader in social justice and human rights issues, Amnesty International Australia is running a two-hour seminar to reveal the potential of art in public action.

Indigenous rights campaigner Roxanne Moore will lead discussion about creating innovative ways to tackle one of Australia’s toughest social concerns: the treatment of our Indigenous peoples. In line with Amnesty’s current campaign ‘Community Is Everything’, this talk unpacks the power and creativity of Indigenous people, showcasing the various ways art serves to voice their rights, passions and abilities. Expect to leave this one pretty inspired.

There’s also an exhibition to run to with this event, showing at Work-Shop in Redfern.

Do you sweat good ideas through the day? Do you have the a major game-changer on some napkin tucked into your pocket? Or have you the savvy eyes to spot fantastic innovation before the mainstream? If you even started to nod silently to any of those questions, then you will have a ridiculously good time at the REMIX Sydney 2016 conference — a maelstrom of keynotes, panels, masterclasses and mixers centred at the nexus of creativity, technology and entrepreneurship.

The REMIX Sydney schedule is silly with inspiring sessions across many platforms. Hear keynote speeches and round-table conversations from around 100 leading creative pioneers onstage, including Secret Cinema founder Fabien Riggall, director of the Cirque du Soleil Creative Lab Gillian Ferrabee, president and CEO of NYC’s Governor’s Island Leslie Koch  and many more.

Your mates Concrete Playground will be there too, introducing you to Sydney’s most successful new entrepreneurs — the businesses we couldn’t write fast enough about — with a special curated session on ‘How Long Does It Take to Become an Overnight Success?‘ featuring Kristen Francis (festival founder and director of Wine Island, winner of CP’s Best New Event of 2015), Georgia van Tiel and Carla McMillan (co-founders of citywide gym class pass Bodypass, winner of CP’s Best New Product of 2015) and Michael Chiem (co-founder of Sydney’s first ever soda factory bar PS40).

You know that thing you’ve been thinking about doing for ages, but never had the guts to pursue? Those wild, seemingly unrealistic ideas we all have are what a brave few have used to shape their entire careers. And Jack Smyth and John Dawson from the team at Mindshare want to bring you an invaluable insight into how this can all come true.

With a diverse panel of speakers, from scientists to reality TV producers, this Vivid Ideas event focuses on how creativity serves as one of the most valuable resources in today’s modern economy. Feeling like you’re stuck in a rut? This one’s sure to fix that.

Let your inner child run wild with this one. For one day only, bots from around the country will descend on The Rocks for an unmissable display of mechanical ingenuity — in a legit tiered arena in the Cargo Hall of the Overseas Passenger Terminal.

There’ll be everything from tiny remote-controlled figures to the premiere appearance of the 150 kilogram crocodile ‘Deathroll’ robot (direct from the set of hit LA show Battlebots). Ever wanted to see what the world of bot building is all about? This destruction-packed clash is the perfect place to start.

Living in the big smoke has more perks than just an abundance of all-night convenience stores. But what makes a liveable, smart city? This year, the fifth international Media Architecture Biennale wants to focus on just how cities like Sydney will evolve in years to come, focused on the theme ‘Digital Placemaking’.

Hosted at The Concourse in Chatswood, MAB16 is a four-day lineup of conferences, workshops and even an award ceremony, presenting the best future ideas in architecture, media and design. Exploring everything from the role of urban screens to local media interventions in cities, global industry leaders will open your eyes to potential of what’s to come in these bustling metropolitan spaces.