Salon: What Remains

Most of us are known for what we build: the company, the composition, the performance. We rarely discuss the final moments of creation and their aftermath: the narrowing of our worlds as we drive toward completion, the catharsis that comes at the culmination of the experience, and the question of “now what?” that follows. Artists and founders both understand this on a deep level. We are now forced to question it more existentially: if machines can create, what does the creative process look like for humans?

On July 9, we’ll unpack these questions in the gorgeous Upper West Side double townhouse of Roy Niederhoffer. The living room seats 120, a stage rises out of the floor, and the walls are adorned with priceless musical manuscripts. We’ll have two conversations, followed by live music to end the night.

THE FIRST CONVERSATION — PATTERN & COMPOSITION 

If a machine can write music indistinguishable from a person’s, what is the composer for?

Craig Martell is the Chief Technology Officer of Lockheed Martin and, before that, was the Pentagon’s first head of AI. He’s a skeptic by temperament: AI, he likes to say, is just a statistical tool, and the hard part is knowing when it’s right. Before Washington, he ran machine learning at Lyft, Dropbox, and LinkedIn.

Joseph Branciforte is a composer and Grammy-winning producer who runs the label greyfade. He already makes music with machines, building pieces out of algorithms and unusual tunings, which gives him an unusually clear view of what the software still can’t do.

THE SECOND CONVERSATION — FOUNDERS & ARTISTS

Founders and artists both begin the creative process with a blank sheet of paper, build obsessively toward a conclusion, and live with the disorienting stillness that follows.

Jim Wiandt started ETF.com in 2001, built it into the industry’s reference point, and sold it. He’s now an investor at Stack Ventures and knows what it’s like to be finished with the thing you’re best known for.

Emily Liushen is a composer, clarinetist, and doctoral fellow at Juilliard. Her works explore somatic hyperawareness and the intimacy of human touch through musical notation. She is the recipient of a 2025 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and holds degrees from Princeton and Yale.

THE PERFORMANCE — PEOPLE OF THE EARTH

People of Earth is a twelve-piece New York band playing a fusion of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, and Caribbean music. A trio from the group will close the night.

WHAT WE'LL EXPLORE

• Whether music a machine wrote is worth less than music a person wrote, and why
• How manufacturing will impact the preciousness of handmade instruments 
• What makes a piece of work "great" - the difference between external and internal validation
• What a deadline does to creativity, for better and worse
• Who you become when the work you're known for is done

Wine and hors d'oeuvres will be served.

After Arts salons bring together artists, technologists, and civic leaders working at the edge of their fields. We’re interested in where culture meets infrastructure - and in the people building what comes next.