Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to the Creatives with AI podcast. I'm your host, David, and on today's show we have Lena Robinson. Hi, Lena, how you doing?

Good, thank you. How are you?

Yeah, very well. We met at a communications event a few months ago and hit it off like a house on fire. And I've been wanting to have you on the podcast ever since. So I'm glad to have you here today for everybody listening, Lena is from New Zealand, so for my american listeners who don't really know what a New Zealand accent sounds like, you're about to find out. And, yeah, welcome.

Thank you. It's nice to be here. I'm really excited. It's going to be an interesting conversation today, I think.

Yeah, I hope so. We always end up chatting for ages and saying totally outrageous things, so we'll see how it goes. But maybe start off by telling. Yeah, maybe start off by telling us sort of how you got here. I mean, obviously, you know, you started off in New Zealand, but how did you end up here and doing what you're doing at the minute?

Sure. So the New Zealand bits always going to be obviously quite pertinent because, you know, that's my background and it kind of gives me a view on the world, which is maybe being open to things a little bit more. Had quite a unconforming upbringing, I guess. And as a result of that, I've always liked to look at, you know, being attracted to the arts and literature and all that kind of thing, but also was always open to lots of science and technology and that kind of thing. Although I do not pretend to be a technologist at all, but I do, I'm excited by curiosity and all the rest of it. So what brought me here to the UK was my grandmother's from Scotland, and I kind of wanted to have a go see what was going to happen from a career perspective in the UK. And I ended up being in the advertising industry for a really long time, doing global and uk based new business and marketing for big agencies on their behalf, not their clients, and had a great career in that. And then set up my own agency eventually, which was an agency for other agencies, so doing branding and marketing for them, but.

And that was 2014, then 2018, I set up a new business, decided to sell that to my partner, and that was called FTSQ, which stands for fuck the status quo. So you're gonna get an insight into who I am, kind of like challenging things a little bit, and then got ill for quite a long time. And then during the recovery and part of the pandemic sort of recovery for all of us. I really looked at the world that I'd always been passionate about because I took art and photography and design at school and I kind of went back to that and just sort of thought, I'd really like to help the nonconformist micro group, which is big of artists. So in 2022, I set up a online art gallery and I'm running both businesses. But, you know, the gallery, I think, is probably more what we'll be talking about mostly today. That's kind of what's brought me to here and kind of, kind of why I've got the foot in both camps from the corporate marketing business side as well as the art side, with what probably we're going to be talking about today. So that's why AI is really interesting for me in the creative world of both marketing, branding and advertising, as well as art.

Corin, when you say you had an unconventional upbringing, what does that mean?