iLiv Team
Andrew Culver | Founder & CEO
Andrew has 25 years of experience creating software and databases for music, museum installations, operas, hospitals, architects, ecommerce web sites, and online communities. He has founded two previous startups, one a web consultancy, the other an online publisher, both based in New York.
Andrew graduated from McGill University with a Masters of Music Composition, and composed computer music at MIT. In 2007, Andrew returned to MIT to complete the Entrepreneurship Development Program at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Since the age of 14, Andrew has derived inspiration from the work of Buckminster Fuller. He invented, built and performed all over the world on musical devices based on the tensegrity structural principle. He performed for Fuller's last big public event: Integrity Day in New York, just a month before Fuller died. In those days, Andrew saw himself as a sonic designer in the Fullerian design scientist mode, and Fuller endorsed the concept. Fuller devoted his life to helping us see Spaceship Earth and all that we need to do to keep it habitable.
Andrew spent 11 years totally involved in the work of the composer John Cage. He was Cage's sole artistic assistant, deeply embedded in the aesthetic, creative and philosophical ideas of America's greatest artistic thinker. Andrew was also Cage's chief implementer during the last decade of his life, moving Cage's processes into computer programs and databases, and directing his operas and many installations worldwide. During the years they worked together, Cage came to describe his work as exemplifying an "anarchic harmony". The Internet can be described exactly the same way.
iLiv is Andrew's vehicle for bringing processes and tools based on anarchic harmony to the solution of climate change via buildings. Take the shelter of Fuller and combine it with the anarchic harmony of Cage to enable individuals to work together until we all live better and more cleanly than any of us have ever lived before.
Andrew remains active in avant-garde music. His very-large-scale orchestral music Ocean is frequently performed in major venues such as Lincoln Center and La Fenice. Many of the user interface and organizational metaphors in iLiv's products derive from his work re-imagining the creative ensemble.