Video footage from the Plutopia event, along with commentary from Plutopia technical producer Bon Davis.

BusyGamer describes Plutopia as “the mother of all parties.” They ran into Plutopians Bon Davis and Shanta Stevents at a SXSW pre-party:

I was not only intrigued by the event, but by the enthusiasm both of them seemed to have for the event. “Myself and the other Plutopians have very wide social networks and are always out at different events looking for kindred spirits,” Bon Davis, Techinical Producer said, “We try very hard to make our events appeal to a wide variety of people and are always trying to get the word out. Amongst other things, we try to promote Social Sustainability, so the more people we talk to the more people hear about our participants and what they have to offer. Hopefully we get more converts to our cause. I think personal verbal invitations are so much more valuable than mass market media advertisements.” The grassroots approach worked, while we discussed the event, music and playing in bands (both Shanta and Bon are musicians like yours truly), you can’t help but be intrigued what kind of party two guys drinking beer in a comic book store would help throw. “I work professionally in Theater and Event Production and am always looking for ways to combine my interests in Futurism and Technology and Art with my Production efforts,” Davis continued, “These Events at SXSW are a Great opportunity to present to a National Audience while keep trying to keep true to our local roots.”

Stanza is a London based British artist who specializes in net art, networked spaces, installations and performances. His award winning online projects have been invited for exhibition in digital festivals around the world. All his work can be found at www.stanza.co.uk

Stanza travels extensively to present his net art, lecturing and giving performances of his audiovisual interactions. His works explore artistic and technical opportunities to enable new aesthetic perspectives, experiences and perceptions within context of architecture, data spaces and online environments.

Recent exhibitions have included the Venice Biennale: Dislocate. Koiwa Art Space Tokyo Japan: Mundo Urbano Madrid: New Forest Pavilion Artsway: Haifa Museum Israel: Novosibirsk Festival Exhibition. He has also won numerous awards and prizes, such as AHRC Creative fellowship 2006 – 2009: NESTA Dreamtime Award 2004: Clark Digital Bursary 2003: Future Physical Grant for Genomixer 2002: D.T.I. Innovation Award 1997: Videoformes Multimedia First prize France 2005: Art In Motion V First prize USA 2004: Vidalife 6.0 first prize 2003 : Fififestival Grand Prize France 2003: New Forms Net Art Prize Canada 2003: Fluxus Online first prize Brasil 2002: SeNef Online Grand Prix Korea 2000: Links first prize Porto 2001: Videobrasil first prize Sao Paulo 2001 : Cynet art first prize Dresden 2000.

Stanza’s work crosses borders between artistic, technological and scientific sectors. Stanza creates participatory digital artworks that invite viewers to guide data flows or to simply observe self-generating compositions. His digital paintings shift through abstract and iconic patterns, which people can explore akin to virtual environments. Interactive and visually appealing, his style also maintains the substantive power through multi-facetted content. This artist has won international praise and awards for his new media works that invite collaboration.

Stanza is currently a recipient of a AHRC creative fellowship 2006-9 for a project called The Emergent City, researching sensors and the impact of live data in the architectural and urban environment and is based at Goldsmiths College University Of London. Stanza was also awarded a NESTA dreamtime fellowship in 2004. This prestigious award provided incoming investment, allowing allowing experiments using new displays, sensors, and live data to make responsive spaces and interactive installations.

Work has centered on the idea of the building as a new display system and various projects have been made using live data, the use of live data in architectural space, and how it can be made into meaningful representations. see ‘publicity’, ‘robotica’, ‘sensity’, as well as a whole series of work manipulating real time CCTV data to making artworks with them: See, ‘velocity’, ‘authenticity’, ‘urban generation’. These works reform the data, work with the idea of bringing data from outside into the inside, and then present it back out again in open ended systems where the public is often engaged in or directly embedded in the artwork.

At Plutopia 2009, he will have a live, real-time interactive installation and performance of this work.