Plenty of speakers and attendees at the annual GeekWire Summit are used to “drawing on their experiences” to tell a story related to whatever they do in technology and elsewhere. Visual strategist Guillaume Wiatr attends the Summit to literally draw on what he hears. And he draws. And draws.
Over two days, and through dozens of presentations, Wiatr was once again the eyes, ears and colored markers of the Summit, as he created giant murals to capture the creative energy of the Seattle event.
“For the past two days, I’ve been recording, in a visual format, all the conversations and the sessions that have been right here on stage, just a few feet away,” Wiatr told GeekWire last week in two Facebook videos (below). “This is just a tremendous opportunity to learn about what’s going on in the tech community.”
Wiatr has been a senior visual strategist at Seattle-based Point B for almost two years. He’s been practicing his alternative to traditional note taking since 2008, he told GeekWire last year, when he created murals for the 2015 Summit.
This year, Wiatr had plenty of colorful characters to draw off of, including Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold, Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi; skydiver Luke Aikins, Stack Overflow CEO Joel Spolsky, ex-Seattle Seahawk Ricardo Lockette, Clinton campaign digital strategist Terry Goff and many more.
Wiatr said he was particularly intrigued by DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar’s panel discussion on Day 2.
“There are two things that really resonated,” Wiatr said, as he showed his drawings from the session. “Her point of view on how we should restore our space capabilities and what they’re working on in that area. And also, a very moving moment, when she displayed videos of what she called “The Luke Arm,” which is basically a robotic arm that gives people the ability to use a bionic arm when they’ve lost [their own].”
Time-lapse videos of Wiatr at work add a bit of a more frenetic pace to what we was able to achieve, but it’s safe to say that you don’t have to speed up video of him in action too much — it was clear from watching him that he works very fast.
Here’s Day 1:
And Day 2:
At the end of the second day, Wiatr’s murals — which were presented by Flowroute — were all lined up in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel and the 64 feet of artwork presented a dramatic visual retelling of the entire event from start to finish.
