Maggie Duval
Maggie Duval is one of the most intelligent and well-read people I know ? no lie. I have a whole list of her book recommendations and, since I eagerly wrote down her suggestions a year ago, she?s probably read 200 more. Maggie is a futurist, a mom, a Minister of Spiritual Science and a force of nature.
One particularly intriguing bullet point in Maggie?s extraordinary resum? is that she co-managed media relations for Burning Man in 1996. That was the year the festival exploded to 10,000 attendees over 3,000 in 1995. Coincidence? I think not.?
Always at the forefront of innovation, Maggie?s company, Plutopia Productions (she?s co-founder and CEO), is putting on a Future Music Summit?with music, symposia and an interactive playground. As usual, I needed Maggie to dumb down for me what this whole thing is about.
And if you purchase tickets for the Summit by April 9th, you will get 20% off the ticket price. Just enter WIMPSMEOW in the coupon code to redeem the discount.
How did the Future Music Summit idea come about?
Two separate streams came together. My brother, Bruce Duval, is the Director of Outreach and Recording Sessions at the Round Top Festival Institute. My daughter and I have spent the last seven years staying out there on mini weekend vacations and going to concerts in their world-class concert hall.
(Our connection to the Institute is that our Aunt Lilli knows the founder, James Dick, from growing up in Hutchinson, Kansas. They had the same piano teacher! She kept telling us about this magical place for years and it wasn?t until nine years ago that Bruce visited for the first time and never left.) Festival Institute is a hidden gem, a Shangri-La, in the heart of Central Texas. I can tell folks about it until I?m blue in the face but until they experience it?? but when they experience it they are overwhelmed with awe?.)
Concurrently, our company had produced four very successful Plutopia events (with themes like ?Living Systems,? ?The Science of Music,? and ?The Future of Play?) during SXSW Interactive. These were future-focused ?sense events? that married art, technology, music, entertainment, and interactive installations. Last year?s event featured lots of super cool interactive installations including one from MIT, ?singing? hanging plants, and music including Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth with one of his side projects, Text of Light, with four musicians improvising to the films of Stan Brakhage. Also on the bill were locals Bodytronix and Total Unicorn Experience. Our keynotes were author Bruce Sterling and TED speaker David Merrill. There?s intellect involved ? cool stuff to learn and learn about. Between the four co-founders we have an amazing Rolodex of thought leaders and entertainers. It?s more like something you?d see in Europe, not the US ? unique, utterly cool, and very different from a lot of stuff you see here.
Two of the Festival Institute?s co-founders attended this event and were blown away, so they invited us to create a Plutopia at Festival Hill. Our Chief Creative Officer, futurist Derek Woodgate and I, headed out one weekend last May so he could experience the place. We tossed some ideas about and now here we are!
Mari Kimura
Who are the participating women?
We have two amazing women headliners, Mari Kimura and Nada Kolundzija. Rounding out the bill are DJ Spooky and Patrick Flanagan (Jazari). Mari is a virtuoso violinist and inventor, and Belgrade -based Nada Kolundzija is an internationally renowned concert pianist who will be presenting a musical tribute to John Cage (it?s the 100th anniversary of his birth this year). Both women are extraordinarily talented and perfect exemplars of our focus on the marriage of art, technology, and entertainment.
Both will also be presenting symposia. Mari?s symposium is entitled, Revolutionizing Musical Expression. She will talk about and demonstrate ?subharmonics,? her groundbreaking extended bowing technique performed with the help of sensor gloves. She will also explore other ways of introducing interactive and digital interfaces into future musical expression.
Nada will discuss why and how she created the hyper-interactive multimedia Cage?s Music Circus ? A House Full of Music?which she will be performing on the Friday of the Summit.
What was your philosophy in choosing your keynote?
We don?t have a keynote; rather, we have twelve symposia presented by our headliners as well as some other stellar intellects. In addition to Nada and Mari?s symposia, Derek will speak on The Future of Entertainment 2020, Thomas Fang on DIY Electronic Music (how to do circuit bending), Academy Award-winning (for Coppola?s ?Dracula?) sound designer and head of sound design at SCAD David Stone on The Art of Sound Design, Patrick Flanagan (Jazari) on Cyborg Musicality, Matt Rowles on The Sound of Interaction, David DeMaris on The Sound of Projectors: AV Narrative as Spectacle, and Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky on Social Awareness Through Music and App Mixes.
Everything is carefully designed to augment the theme of the summit. We specialize in creating and producing inspirational, participatory experiences, and this sense event aimed at providing multi-sensory stimulation and the thrill of discovery. It is designed to be a spectacular extravaganza of intense pleasure and intoxication of the senses created by some of the world?s most influential and inventive virtuosos.
How did you become a futurist and what does that mean?
A futurist is generally defined as someone who analyzes trends and makes suggestions as to the direction a person or company should go based on that analysis. Our Chief Creative Officer, Derek Woodgate, is a professional futurist ? he is also the President of The Futures Lab, Inc. (I serve on the board) ? and I know that his view is that if you?re analyzing trends only, you?re already analyzing the past as a trend is an already ossified future marker by its very nature (i.e. people have already embraced it). His approach is to embrace discontinuous change, uncertainties and emerging issues. I resonate with that because I consider myself a hypermedia thinker ? that is, I easily experience seemingly random leaps of insight and see connections that others don?t. Derek does as well. Since he?s insatiably curious, he constantly scans just about everything: art, science, music ? not just business ? and that multidimensional insight makes him one of the top futurists out there.
I am not a futurist by training; rather, I am a futurist by osmosis and predilection. My mother raised me on emerging technology, cutting edge thinking, metaphysics, and philosophy, as well as instilling in me a deep love for and appreciation of art and music.
Also, one of the only good muggle jobs I have ever had was for an electronic engineering start up in Berkeley in the early ?90s. Because they dealt with the development of software for chip design, I worked with research scientists from all over the globe. If things were not particularly flowing at the office sometimes, our founder/CEO (an activist at Berkeley in the ?60s) would have us close down for the day and we?d head to a local watering hole or even better ? to somewhere like Stinson Beach over in Marin to chill with some beers and chat about anything and everything.
Because they were research scientists existing in the realm of the theoretical made manifest, I was privy to a wealth of info on emerging technology. (I would tell my friends about this stuff and they?d respond with a complete blank!) All of this stuff has manifested and then some! The bonus was all of the scientists also had a deep love of art, music, and philosophy. It was really a dream job.
For whatever reason, I have always been able to see what?s coming down the pike a lot earlier than most people tend to, so there?s a visionary aspect, but I also have a passion for the new, the cool, and abhorrence for dwelling/living in the past and dream worlds of some perceived ?the past was so much better? paradigm. Blech. I just watch ?Mad Men? to get rid of that perception!
How did you get the Burning Man gig??
I got the gig because my social networks overlapped with that of the founders in the Bay Area. As I previously mentioned, I was involved in tech at the time. Our company was bought out, which meant the suits and cubicles took over and all that fun went away. I was casting about for something to do when a friend of mine in PR (a boutique firm focused on Apple-related startups) hired me to do tactical implementation of online campaigns since as an early adopter, I lived and breathed the Internet and the recently emerged World Wide Web.
My friend ran the press for the organization the year before and as it was experiencing exponential growth, she asked me to co-manage in 1996. One of the things I did was manage Larry Harvey?s interviews. I also suggested compelling stories to the press. It was fantastic fun.
Are there similarities between Burning Man and the Future Music Summit??
Plutopia and Burning Man are completely different in approach and concept. It?s like comparing apples to oranges. Plutopia is more similar in outlook and execution to V2 Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam, which is an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology that organizes events such as presentations, exhibitions, festivals, and workshops, as well as engaging in research and development. To that point, Plutopia?s business plan includes the vision for an Institute of the Future.
Burning Man, although overseen by an LLC, is a participant/volunteer created and run event. It too is themed every year but you never fully know what the creative urge will create for the event whereas Plutopia productions are carefully designed and executed. Plus, Burning Man has around 50,000 participants, it lasts for a week (our events are usually one day), it costs much more, and you have to pack in and pack out your own supplies.
Some Burners participate in Plutopia and vice-versa, but the entities are two completely different animals.
What do you want attendees to take away from the summit?
We want attendees to be fired up and inspired to see entertainment ? creation and delivery of ? in a wholly new way. So many artists are very flat and feel really 2D in the presentation of their vision. We hope to demonstrate a more multidimensional approach and way of seeing the world, which all of our headliners and presenters embody.
If you?re not an artist, we hope to send you away humming with excitement about all the possibilities the future holds ? which underscores our main mission: We are unique in our ability to artfully weave together culture, the arts, and entertainment to offer attendees exposure to and direct experience of amazing emerging innovations and cultural developments. Our ultimate goal is to encourage a positive feeling about the future.
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