The artist known as Beeple set a record in 2021 when a work of his — a collage of 5,000 images that existed only as a digital file — sold for $69.3 million in a Christie’s auction.
Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, is one of the artists participating in the inaugural edition of South by Southwest London, the music, film and tech festival. This time, he is presenting “The Tree of Knowledge,” a critique of the human addiction to smartphones.
“People don’t fully recognize how much their phone is stressing them out,” and how much they’re “dialing up the noise,” Beeple said in a phone interview. “They could make the choice to dial down the noise, and just put their phone down, and exist in a much more calm state in which technology still exists.”
The work is a refrigerator-size box containing a giant tree (recreated via projection mapping), with screens on all sides, and a large dial. When viewers turn the dial, the box is covered with live news, stock prices and data, illustrating the information overload faced by humanity.
“The Tree of Knowledge” encapsulates the spirit of South by Southwest London, which begins on Monday and runs through June 7. The event will feature a diverse group of speakers, including the ABBA singer-songwriter Bjorn Ulvaeus, the actor Idris Elba, the wellness and meditation expert Deepak Chopra, the primatologist Jane Goodall and the comedian Katherine Ryan. There will also be voices from the technology world, including Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google’s DeepMind lab and co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry; and Alex Kendall, the chief executive of Wayve, a developer of artificial intelligence systems for self-driving cars.
On opening night, participants will attend the world premiere of “Stans,” a documentary on the artist-fan relationship produced by the rapper Eminem. Also getting its world premiere during the festival: “Deep Cover,” an action comedy starring Orlando Bloom. Musicians featured in the program include the Grammy-winning Nigerian singer Tems, and the singer-songwriter Mabel (whose mother is Neneh Cherry).
Started as a music festival in Austin, Texas in 1987, South by Southwest has broadened its remit to include film and technology. The London edition is adding an additional strand: art.
Like other organizers of festivals and live events, South by Southwest suffered during the pandemic and is striving to take its profitability back to prepandemic levels. The company’s top management was recently restructured by its owner Penske Media — which also owns Rolling Stone magazine, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Golden Globes. New iterations of the event in Sydney and London are helping the bottom line, according to company executives.
Why London? “The U.K. has a huge creator economy,” said Darin Klein, an executive vice president for South by Southwest, noting that the British creative industries generated more than $100 billion a year in revenue, more than the car and aerospace industries combined.
London also has a thriving art scene, so “to not lean into and recognize the importance of the visual arts” in London “would be a missed opportunity,” said Katy Arnander, director of programming for South by Southwest London.
Arnander noted that the festival was being held not just in London, but in East London, and specifically in the Shoreditch area — “the birthplace of centuries of business and industry and factories,” but also of “a lot of modern and contemporary British art,” she said.
The organizers have chosen to hold the festival not in one giant convention center, but in distinct London locations, such as the Truman Brewery — established in the late 17th century, and once London’s largest brewery — and in Shoreditch Town Hall, which opened its doors in 1866 and was previously a music hall and a boxing venue.
Arnander said positioning the festival in these and other Shoreditch venues allowed attendants to enjoy the flavor and culture of the area and make “unexpected connections” as they made their way from, say, a visual arts exhibition to a talk on flying cars to a rap performance.
The visual arts strand of the program includes two exhibitions. “LDN LAB” (an art and technology show) will feature Beeple’s “The Tree of Knowledge,” an installation of Andy Warhol films, and work by the A.I. artists and musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst.
The second exhibition, “Beautiful Collisions,” is an immersive show of Caribbean diaspora artists, including Alvaro Barrington, Denzil Forrester and Tavares Strachan.
Roland Swenson, a co-founder of South by Southwest, was a band manager, but “could not get the music industry to pay attention to any of the bands that he managed in Austin,” Klein said. Swenson had to take those acts to New York or Los Angeles for them to be seen and heard.
South by Southwest was inspired by an event in New York called the New Music Seminar, and was established as a showcase festival and conference for Texas, Louisiana and the Southwest.
For the first six years, Klein said, it was a music conference and festival. The founders — who had backgrounds in film studies — then incorporated a film festival. Realizing that film and music were increasingly being consumed on computers, they later added technology programming to the festival.
The three strands were “a little bit siloed” in the beginning, and “it took a while to actually marry them together,” said Klein, who joined in 1995.
Today, the three strands have merged, and a lot of the big providers of music and film — Apple, Spotify, Netflix — are tech companies. In fact, technology — in the form of artificial intelligence — now “potentially threatens the livelihoods of creative people,” with its ability to write music, scripts, and all kinds of other content, Klein said. “It’s kind of like the Wild West.”
Technology “is changing, and is changing rapidly, and the regulation and what protections there might be for artists or for general society tends to lag,” he explained. Right now, people are “just trying to wrap their heads around it as fast as they can, to figure out if any sort of regulation or policy is needed to protect creative people.”
Will A.I. spell the end of festivals such as South by Southwest? Unlikely, Klein said, adding that as far as his business was concerned — a festival of musical performances, live talks, and cultural experiences — “there’s no substitute for a live show.”
“The communal experience that people have when seeing a live show, and the feelings that people get — there’s not a machine that can replicate that, and can create that energy,” he said. “Maybe some of the music is made by A.I., but nobody’s going to deliver a live experience like a human.”
Beeple said humankind’s excessive interaction with technology made it seem much more ominous than it really was.
It’s possible to have “a more nuanced view of the future,” he said, where “we exist with technology and it’s more of a balanced, symbiotic relationship.”
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