Welcome to 2026! Nerd Nite Kyushu is back for the new year with lots of nerdy talks with nerdy people! To kick off another nerdy year we’re coming to you from BREW with two brand new talks! Join us March 15 (Sun) at BREW from 18:00 to hear about the culture of Burning Man and how trailer music is made. Be there and be square.
Where
B.R.E.W. (Two minutes from Ohori Park station)
Entry fee: ￥1000 (comes with a drink ticket)
入場料: ￥1000 (ドリンクチケット付き)
Speakers
Gifts, Gigs and Grifts: Burning Man and the Global Tech Economy
by Ian Rowen
Burning Man — an ephemeral desert city built on gifting, radical participation, and leaving no trace — became the engine behind platform capitalism. Through the lens of gifts, gigs, and grifts, this talk traces the twinned rise of the event and Silicon Valley: how the same cultural logic that made the desert ‘playa’ feel transformative powered the gig economy, the AI data harvest, and the playa-to-White House pipeline now reshaping American and global politics. The gift economy’s surplus didn’t disappear — it accumulated, converted, and compounded into institutional power. And yet the prism that reveals all this may reveal something uncomfortable: most of us have been gifting, gigging, and grifting all along.
BIO
Ian Rowen is a scholar without a discipline and an artist who doesn’t draw. At Kyushu University’s Institute for Advanced Study, he studies how idealism becomes someone else’s business model — in Silicon Valley, in the semiconductor supply chains reshaping northern Kyushu, and sometimes by participating in the experiments himself. As the Burning Man Project’s first regional contact in Asia, he has founded festival communities in Taiwan and China and built strange, spectacular, and occasionally controversial art in the desert. His books have been published by Cornell and Columbia University Presses. He ephemerally enjoys public speaking.
@melonianian
Ianrowen.com
BRAAAWM! The Art of Making You Want to See a Movie You Know Nothing About
By John Samuel Hanson
That deep horn blast followed by sudden silence, a quiet line of dialogue and a perfectly timed bass drop. Trailer music has its own language with time-honored rules about what to reveal and what to hide. Composer John Samuel Hanson deconstructs the sonic architecture of film advertising, showing how two and a half minutes of music can build suspense, suggest a story, and make you desperate to see a film without actually telling you what happens in it.
BIO
John Samuel Hanson is a film composer and producer specializing in trailer music and film campaigns. Since 2007, his work has been featured in campaigns for Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, Stranger Things, Mission Impossible, and The Hobbit, with credits including an award for Interstellar and double platinum certification for the Suicide Squad soundtrack. He is the founder of Confidential Music, as well as STUDIO INLIGHT in Fukuoka.
