Katie Lips

Mobile Strategy Consultant

Katie is a conceptual artist, technologist and entrepreneur whose art work is focussed on the world of startups; challenging would-be disruptors to think a little deeper about what they want their impact on the world to be.

Katie came to technology in the early 1990s. It was set to change everything; it did, and she helped it. A startup founder in her twenties, she’d left her career as an artist on hold for Web 2.0, Social Media, Mobile apps, co-working, meet-ups, and the dream of making millions.

She splits her time between art and consulting (helping big businesses to define their raison d’être in today’s post digital world) but she is back making art - and to critical acclaim; being featured in recent art world publications and being selected to exhibit at prestigious art fairs.

Art Not Work

For Inspiration, Katie will present her “Art Not Work” manifesto. Undertaking commissions, often with business clients, Katie always seeks to push boundaries and so has developed an “Art Not Work” manifesto to help her and collaborators to ensure that “Art” is not “Work”. She will discuss the difference between being creative in a work context and in an artistic context. Since we can remember we are taught to ‘meet the brief’, to ‘answer the question’. Art should never just meet a brief, and should always ask more questions than it answers. (How) can we take anything from ‘thinking like an artist’ into our work; how can we go further than ‘being creative’ and make art?

By ensuring her own art is indeed art and not work, she is ruffling feathers and catching the attention both of the art world and the tech world. Her bold poppy mixed media pieces scream about topics like creative process, the cult of the entrepreneur, and the obsession with disruption.