Why I created Beautiful Machine

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Author

Sarah Ibrahim

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3 Min

Posted

September 3, 2025

Creating a Machine

Over the past couple of decades, I've had the opportunity to work on creative projects with sophisticated technology needs from multiple vantage points. I've worked for technology vendors, creative agencies and artists. These varied roles gave me insights into each business, their operational models and motives, how they view and market themselves, how they work with their clients, and ultimately how to position each to do their best work.

In my role as a producer and technical director, I've always felt like I was creating a machine - integrating not just hardware and software, but people, businesses and even industries together to achieve a desired outcome. As once disparate disciplines all converge into "experiential", and creative teams stretch to develop work outside of their primary capabilities, it's producers - specifically technologically proficient and creative savvy producers - that hold the key to bringing transdisciplinary experiences into the world successfully.

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In the beginning

I got my first taste of production work as a stagehand in my high school theater. After working my way through school doing mostly sound engineering, and dabbling in adjacent disciplines - I eventually found my way into project management roles in the live production and AV industries.

Given my academic and creative background in integrated (read: "new") media and experimental sound (and generally wonky nature) my focus tended to be on unusual projects with detailed requirements. I grew into leading technical teams on projects with advanced technologies of the time like media servers, projection mapping, sensors, and kinetic elements in the context of live events, theater, interactive experiences and art installations - before the terms “experiential” and “immersive” had swept through and fully soaked all facets of the industry. I was not that into working on the biggest projects, but I love complexity the way Marie Kondo says she loves a mess - and I love working at a scale where experimentation is possible.

After leading a project called the Brain Index for Technomedia at Columbia University - I set out to leverage my expanding skillset as a freelance technical producer. Luckily, a friend connected me with the founders of an agency called Listen - that was looking for someone to lead a project to recreate Brian Eno & Peter Chilvers iPhone App Bloom into a HoloLens experience in Amsterdam, in partnership with Microsoft. Having been involved in experimental and avant garde music as both an artist and appreciator, I couldn't pass up that opportunity. It’s still one of my favorite things I’ve ever played a role in building and a shining example of the transcendent experiences that technology can enable.

Shortly afterwards, I accepted the job as Listen’s head of production. In my role, I built an enviable team of producers, technologists and partners that allowed Listen and A_DA to deliver technologically complex experiences that were creative use cases for Microsoft’s technology. We designed and produced experiences in partnership with artists like Brian Eno, Moses Sumney, Bjork, Julianna Barwick, Priya Aluwalia, Martin Garrix, Mel Chin and institutions like the Smithsonian, the Galerie des Plan Relief in Paris and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sport. A_DA eventually merged with its parent, Superfly, where the work continued building next generation experiences that incorporated the new, shiny generative AI tools.

I’ve led production of many forms and flavors of creative project with highly integrated technology systems. I’ve been on the ground as a technician laying cable and loading trucks, and I’ve led large interdisciplinary teams on multi-million dollar projects. I'm equally comfortable working on events as I am on permanent installations. I approach everything I work on with the mindset that I am the setter of vibes and the keeper of process that dictates how everyone that contributes to a project will feel about it when it is over.

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Digital Physical Temporary & Permanent

Anyone else who’s been at this for a while has witnessed incredible shifts not just in technology, but also in the niche industries around events, exhibits and experiences. What were once disparate industries like event production, themed entertainment, exhibit design and maybe even architecture are merging, evolving and competing against one another in the emergent business of experience design.

The same teams that might have been working on events might find themselves designing an experience center that is installed in a corporate headquarters, a ticketed activation that will run for an indefinite length of time, or a museum exhibit. Exhibit design teams are taking note of the new players in this marketplace, and finding ways to apply the mature design practices they’ve built in other contexts, like shorter term activations and experiential master planning.

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When it comes to experience design, the syntax, working methodologies and business models vary across disciplines, but the design techniques and underlying technologies are materially the same.

I have been around long enough now to witness several little gold rushes around emerging technologies and the "recently possible" among artists and brands alike. It swells, peaks and fizzles out. In the last decade, there was the blockchain/NFT moment amid the COVID shutdown, the mixed reality moment with advances made in the mid 2010’s in computer vision and spatial computing. Now “AI”, a catch-all term for a wide range of tools, captures the popular imagination while feeding our existential anxiety as creatives. We grapple with how to leverage these tools and techniques to signify relevance and create impact for our clients. Experience designers are expert at imagining how an experience should look, function and feel - but usually not in the underlying mechanisms that bring each moment to life.

But experience designers do not need to be technology experts to envision novel experiences. With advanced technologies mediating an ever increasing quotient of our life experiences, you no longer need to be a technologist to imagine new types of experiences that are underwritten by sophisticated systems. Technical feasibility used to be so much more of a concern, but with the vast array of tools available and the speed at which they are evolving, technical feasibility is less of a limiting factor than the finite nature of budgets, timelines and the will of stakeholders to take risks when the underlying technologies have not yet proven that they're ready for prime time.

In thinking about the evolution of technology alongside culture, one of the lectures that stuck with me from undergrad was about how pedestrian objects we take for granted like pencils and chairs are, or maybe were, technologies. The humble pencil was, at some point, the new hotness in human innovation and "revolutionized writing" by allowing people with limited means the mechanism to write, and the abiity to edit their writing. Pencils were less expensive than ink, and erasing saved time and paper since you didn't have to start over when an error was made. As time marches forward, new generations enter the creative marketplace - vibe coding with Copilot or Gemini, or prototyping in TouchDesigner are the new Photoshop; skills that most new graduates of the ever expanding roster of art & technology programs universally graduate with. Thirty years ago Photoshop was the new darkroom, where 100 years prior photography had begun to replace painting and drawing in image making. Now Photoshop is not a skill even worth mentioning on your resume, but is a critical skill for basically all image makers.

As new technological tools emerge and become part of a medium, it doesn’t diminish or even really change the role of creative humans in imagining and articulating new worlds, telling impactful stories and architecting novel experiences. In the technological era we are in, this means working across several disciplines to create a highly integrated final experience - the demand for this kind of trans-disciplinary storytelling is greater than ever. But the novelty of new tools will fade and they become as common as a pencil. Human creativity and the desire to communicate and innovate is hard coded in us and endures.

It stands to reason then, that designing with "emerging technology" won't be an exclusive skill for much longer, but at some point we will have decided that these technologies have decidedly emerged and they become part of the creative toolset. I would argue that this has already occurred with many of the technologies that may not have reached wide public adoption, but are stable and commercialized even if a bit exotic. You no longer have to have a degree in electrical engineering to dabble in audio, video or control system engineering. The role of the technologist in an ever evolving technology landscape is to be an arbiter of what is possible now to create a desired effect, to stay aware of these shifts and lead others in navigating them with tried-and-true methodologies for navigating ambiguity. A technologist functions both as designer and producer of the technical aspects of a project.

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Transdisciplinary Technical Leadership

There are many styles of technical leadership across the creative and entertainment fields, and the roles are context dependent.

Events utilize technical directors in a similar way to theater - they manage the technical design process and bring together all disciplines like audiovisual, lighting design, IT, fabrication, rigging, staging, labor management and logistics. It is a production role that encompasses technology, strategy, design, budget management and project leadership.

In digital production, technical director is like the CTO of the project - they develop the tech stack and guide development and like everyone in creative technology, their backgrounds vary.

In coming from content production, the technical director can sometimes act more like a VFX supervisor - taking responsibility for the pipeline, and process by which the media and underlying software is made, often working in tandem with a counterpart that might be a more hardware-focused technical director.

In a permanent architectural media installation, there often isn’t a singular technical leader that takes responsibility for and provides direction on the entirety of the engineering aspects of the project but more a broad construction management apparatus. There are project directors, project managers, creative directors, designers, technologists and consultants - but no one person leads or watches over the full technical scope of the project at the executive level, and often technical resources are tapped later in the process, to help identify build requirements and design systems.

I so often see producers and technologists on LinkedIn, in their blogs, and in person - perhaps recently off an improperly scoped project - basically pleading to be “brought in early” or at least earlier… to identify and rectify the scope gaps and overlaps that they had been tasked with resolving before they had the opportunity to imperil the project. More often than not, this peril is due to an absence of meaningful technical leadership in the early stages of project development, or at least technical leadership that had major blind spots, having hailed from the digital side or the hardware side, in a project that requires savvy across both. Without the foresight of an experienced technical production resource - a technologist or technical producer - that can see the future of how the process of building an experience will play out in a material way - projects can and do fail to meet their budgets, timelines and creative objectives.

A vision for a modern technical production resource, then, is a person or small team that works fluidly between digital & physical elements - and excels at harmonizing between them, rooted in the notion that their role and their discipline is to provide the interface, or make the integration, between creative teams and the technical disciplines needed to build the project. To know how different kinds of resources like software developers, structural engineers, and integrators are going to work together to achieve a unified hardware & software system - steering a project towards elegant solutions under the hood from the beginning. A technical producer or director is a technologist and a producer - providing early and ongoing technical consulting. But, as producers do, they would also take responsibility for the outcome.

In the emerging future where experience design and build sits at the intersection of creative and technical disciplines that all work in different ways, and have different process expectations, technical directors and technical producers are the key to leading multifaceted teams across various industries and disciplines, in service of achieving the desired creative output. Their role is creative, strategic, technical, and operational. They should have enough material expertise, broad exposure to existing and emerging tools, and the experience to execute a vision faithfully.

Who We Are

Beautiful Machine is a production company that serves this emerging future, where our team creates bespoke technology solutions for creative projects. Technology isn’t a specialty design niche any longer, but a component of every exhibit and event. I envision Beautiful Machine as a team that can meet the needs of experiential creatives now, so creative teams can imagine and design freely, with the ability to easily access consultants and producers that can assess, engineer and execute.