Art meets Technology the Day after the Centennial
2015-04-27
News
Over 600 people came flooding through Tumo's doors on the first day after the Centennial of the Armenian Genocide. April 25 will go down as one of the most inspirational and creative days in Tumo's history, where half a dozen of the world's top software engineering leaders and four of the most notable Armenian musicians gathered at Tumo to lead parallel technology and music events.
The Musical Town Hall Meeting with panelists Tigran Mansurian, Serj Tankian, Tigran Hamasyan and Lilit Pipoyan had over 400 attendees, a hundred of which were Tumo students interested in the discussion on new approaches to Armenian music following the Centennial. The four musicians discussed music and collective identity and spoke of influences ranging from Komitas to Armenian cuisine. They demonstrated their conception of what Armenian music constitutes by playing musical excerpts including Tankian's arrangement of "Der Voghormia", Mansurian's "Testament" and Pipoyan singing Komitas's "I came from the mountain" accompanied by Hamasyan on piano.
Following the Q&A with members of the audience on the topic of taste in music, Mansurian concluded the discussion with the opinion that instead of trying to improve the quality of popular music through censorship, we should improve our lives, because music is a reflection of the daily life that surrounds us.
The Engineering Leadership Summit, organized by HIVE, a Hovnanian Foundation project, brought six of the world's top software engineering leaders to Tumo. David Singleton, Google's engineering director for Android Wear, Facebook's Dale Harrison, Twitter's David Loftesness and Issuu VP Alexander Grosse among others joined Tumo board member and Uber engineering director Raffi Krikorian and Reddit co founder Alexis Ohanian. They delivered a series of talks on leading edge topics ranging from managing distributed teams to Android development at Google to a 200 strong audience including a group of Tumo students.
The luminaries speaking at the Engineering Leadership Summit were joined by their Tumo counterparts Abel Ghazinyan and Vahe Muradyan, 16 year old students and founders of Marimba Games who talked about their first mobile game on Google Play and how they learned to code. The summit speakers and participants toured Tumo at the end of the day, seeing the center in action and interacting with students who were there for their regular sessions.
You can watch the Musical Town Hall Meeting and Engineering Leadership Summit at www.tumo.org/april25.