Participating in the panel—moderated by President Shirley Ann Jackson—were Managing Director and CEO of Times Infotainment Media Ltd. and Director of Bennett, Coleman & Co., Ltd. A.P “Preetham” Parigi; Founder and Chairman of Global Business Network Peter Schwartz ’68; and Film Producer and Former Co-Head of DreamWorks Pictures Walter F. Parks.

The colloquy focused on the driving forces and dynamics of the present age that require interdisciplinary creativity, and centered on three main problems: what changes in the world are driving the need for more rounded leaders, how institutions are responding to the change, and how places like EMPAC will play into adjusting students to such changes.

Jackson opened the colloquy, stating, “We realized that for students to become global citizens in this new world, they would have to be not only technologically and scientifically brilliant, but articulate, humane, and culturally adept.” She continued that this was the idea from which EMPAC was created, to provide “a platform for engaging the full intellectual and creative potential of the human mind.”

Parks continued the colloquy by speaking about the often false dichotomies that are commonplace in traditional society. He explained that while people tend to think of art and science operating in two different spheres, as communication becomes more technology-based, the two are coming together.

When Jackson asked Schwartz to comment on his time spent at RPI in the 60s, he noted that the Institute was solely an engineering school and that the “limitation was frustrating.”

Schwartz said that he looked for places where he could find an outlet for his interest in the arts because, “Art was a thing that was quite peripheral to our lives, if at all present in any way.” Schwartz expressed his hope that EMPAC would serve to help avoid that, and would show an intersection of the arts and science for current students.

When asked about the way technology plays into the cultural intersection between the East and West, Parigi said that the interplay between technology and media became very visible after his switch from working in telecommunications to media. Parigi stated, “Media has underestimated the power and the influence it wields in terms of global and domestic policies.”

Parigi expressed his hope that there would be a high commitment to tolerance and that “EMPAC should not only facilitate a platform for the intersection of art, technology, media, and sciences, but should talk in terms of a global media collaboration.”

Jackson turned the conversation again to EMPAC, asking Parks and Schwartz their opinions on the new building that they had recently toured.

Parks described it as a “toolbox that suggested possibilities in terms of the merging of artistic forms and technology that I had quite honestly never thought about.”

Schwartz said that EMPAC will “force collisions” between spheres of art and science and will allow those who take advantage of it to have a very different experience of the reality that innovators deal with day-to-day.

Schwartz also described the studio with a 360-degree screen in EMPAC as a powerful visual metaphor. The screen can show many images at once across the screen, so that, by turning, one can experience a different set of images. Schwartz said that although you may be focused on one thing, one can still see that there is more at the edges of the frame.

Schwartz wanted to make sure that people understood that “experimental means failing occasionally and hoped that EMPAC would be able to “sustain the environment to take the type of risks that lead to both great successes and great failures.”

Jackson described the goal of EMPAC as being to “create leaders who will make a difference in a world fully transformed by new, more complex scientific and societal challenges that cross boundaries of geography, cultures, and disciplines.”

She continued, “EMPAC will open new doors; we will walk through them together, and we will be changed.”