10 Mar Plutopia 2010: The Science of Music
Plutopia 2010 is an evening event during SXSW Interactive, Monday night, March 15, starting at 7pm. SXSW badgeholders get in free, others pay $15 admission. I’m part of Plutopia Productions, a local future-focused entertainment and events company that’s producing the show, which grew from an annual party thrown by EFF-Austin, the local cyber liberties nonprofit. Interesting to Econetwork adherents: the event is as sustainable as we can make it, and it features a rich sampling of local food and distilled beverages organized by Edible Austin.
Plutopia also grew from discussions Austin-based futurist Derek Woodgate and I have had over the last few years, beginning with salons we hosted about the future and about culture, and including our concept of a digital convergence "futurama" event that made me think of a think tank that produces experiences and events instead of books and white papers. Excited about that concept, we conceived a "DIY Home of the Future" installation for the first Austin Maker Faire. You can read about that installation here and here. In post meeting discussions of that successful installation, we discussed how everyone in the future could potentially create a custom and configurable environment as we get more and more control over structure and media. Someone said this sounded like "pluralist utopias," and another tossed out the word "plutopia," which we adopted.
Our next event was the EFF-Austin party at SXSW, which became a sustainability-focused jam at Scholtz Garten, with Bill McKibben speaking, and with local food and other sustainability features. Then last year we had a much larger event at Palmer Events Center, featuring many local artists and a kind of local food court that Edible Austin put together. We’re doing a similar event this year at the Mexican American Cultural Center. Our headliners:
In addition to that great lineup, we’ll have a pretty amazing Edible Austin Foodie Fest, mentioned earlier, along with Tipsy Texan and local beverages.
Also, Austin’s Green Fern Events will do recycling and composting, and post-event analysis to show how much we saved and kept out of landfills, and to create a baseline against which we can measure the sustainability of future events. (We’ll report here how it went!)
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