Unknown Origins

Hugh Forrest on Creative Event Programming

May 22, 2021 Hugh Forrest Season 1 Episode 52
Unknown Origins
Hugh Forrest on Creative Event Programming
Show Notes Transcript

Hugh Forrest is the Chief Programming Officer for South by Southwest (SXSW), where he oversees content for the SXSW Conference and the SXSW Music Festival, the SXSW Film Festival, and SXSW EDU.

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Roy Sharples:

Hello, I'm Roy Sharples, and welcome to the unknown origins podcast. Why are you listening to this podcast? Are you an industry expert looking for insights? are you growing your career? Or are you a dear friend, helping to support your old power on? I created the unknown origins podcast to have the most inspiring conversations with creative industry personalities and experts about entrepreneurship, pop culture, art, music, film and fashion. Hugh Forrest is the chief programming officer for South by Southwest, where he oversees content for the South by Southwest Conference, the music festival, the film festival, and edgy. He was named austinite of the Year in 2012. By the Austin Chamber of Commerce, along with fellow Southwest by Southwest directors, Robin Swenson, Louis black and Nick Barbaro. In 2014. They were named Austin entrepreneurs of the Year by Ernst and Young. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters in 2018. From Kenyon College, his alma mater, in addition to his work at Southwest by Southwest, he has previously served on the National Advisory Board for the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. He is currently part of the board of directors for Austin Habitat for Humanity, and serves on the board of directors for the Austin based accessibility company nobility before joining the Southwest by Southwest team, and the dark ages of 1989, he founded a small monthly alternative publication called the Austin challenger. He also wrote for several other newspapers and publications, including the Austin Chronicle, the Texas sports Chronicle, the West Austin news, roller mathy week, and the Seattle weekly today, Hugh shares his perspective about programming, creative events, Hello, and welcome, Hugh, what inspired and attracted you to film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences?

Hugh Forrest:

Well, South by Southwest, started in way back in the digital Dark Ages, so to speak of 1987. And it was a, it was pretty much a music only event at that point or is actually called music and media at that point, but very much focused on music industry. And that made sense because the music industry was Austin was very, had a very robust and vibrant music scene at that time, it still does, but that that was the basis for for starting this event. Then, seven years later 1994 we added what was a combined film and multimedia event. Multimedia being somewhat the, you know, cutting edge term at that point for technology, this emerging tech idea, and if we can remember way back then 1994 what was fairly cutting edge and certainly technology with CD ROMs, which could get hold all this data and what I think they would, you know, revolutionize so many different things. And I think they did in many ways. But so that that provided the three pillars of the event music, film and multimedia. Eventually we transitioned the name, multimedia to interactive. Interestingly enough, strangely enough, the multimedia event which I was most involved with, really, really struggled for its first you know, several years in my means that when I say several is truly 10 years, and we probably would not have survived if not we if not for this very robust music event that was kind of supporting it at the time. And I say that story because, you know, at this point, certainly multimedia or interactive or technology or whatever you want to phrase that has become more of the more of the breadwinner of the family. And that makes sense because you know, there's a technology backbone to everything we do. But I think that story also illustrates how the event is has evolved and transitioned and changed and morphed over. Its 30 plus years. In 2021, we now cover in addition to those kinds of three big pillars, we cover everything from, you know, sports, to fashion to food, government and politics, climate change, space exploration, transportation, startups, just just all these different verticals. And that's a lot, a lot of different things to digest. But it becomes a little more simple when you understand or think that creativity is the the the bottom line that connects all these fields. What we try to do ultimately at South by Southwest, is just bring together very, very creative people in a number of different fields, pursuits, industries, bring them into a very, very creative city. Bring them in at a time of year when spring is happening, and you have that whole metaphor of rebirth, and re enter design and re energizing things and just kind of sit back and watch the new connections and new ideas, new brainstorms and new partnerships and new opportunities that spring forth.

Roy Sharples:

Creativity inspires urban development, which learns Bohemians and artists. With the attraction of being exposed to innovative ideas and like minded people, innovations are more likely to happen in urban areas than in rural areas, drawing more creatives to these open minded modern and progressive communities, and the culture and amenities that come with them. Conditions need to be established for people to dream make undo as a collective eco system, architecture, the environment, incentives, and regulatory regimes must be developed to realize this, a skilled and dynamic workforce made up of dreamers makers and doers, forms a social system with distinct values, attitudes and feelings learned and transmitted from each generation were the creatives go, others follow. And Austin has been no exception to that, certainly in the last decade or so it has become an increasing hub for creativity, for example, many of the technology companies and the startup ecosystem that surrounds that have migrated from the San Francisco Bay area to Austin. And I just hope, with the influx of that, that it starts to apply a similar appreciation of how to set the right conditions for creativity and to retain that bohemian atmosphere similar to what cities like Berlin have done a really good job at doing where they've kept rent rates low. They've continued to deploy liberal policies and lower the costs of living. And that has became a key part of the nucleus that's formed the seedbed for its burgeoning avant garde art design, techno music and fashion scenes, versus see the likes of San Francisco, New York and London, where they've kind of almost done the opposite of that and priced out the market. That's made it nearly impossible for Bohemians, and creatives to to live and flourish.

Hugh Forrest:

Austin, as you mentioned, is growing like crazy right now. It's growing like crazy for the last five years, but we're having another, you know, big spike at this point, as are a lot of cities where people in California and the Bay Area realize that that as zoom world, you don't maybe don't need to you know, work. You can even work from home and that opens up a lot of possibilities. It is great to see Austin grow. But I think that, as always our greatest success as potential for our greatest failures and the growth of Austin means that the cost of living is rapidly increasing as you know, people scramble for an increasingly tight housing market are increasingly tight rental market. And I think that increased cost of living really is a threat to to creativity that that made people want to come here in the first place. I mean, I think that a lot of very, very creative places. One of the reasons that Austin emerged as such as that, artists struggling artists, struggling musicians, struggling writers, struggling photographer playwrights, whatever you want to whatever particular brand of creativity could come here and live fairly cheaply while they honed their craft. And then, you know, eventually when they found their art make this this place such a special place. And I think that, like a lot of other big cities, Seattle included, it's harder and harder to, to live in Austin, just from a cost of living perspective. A if you're a struggling artist, if you think back, you know, more than 30 years ago, the defining film of Austin at that point was Richard Linklater, his first big film, which was slacker which, you know, talked about people who sat around and did nothing all day. And it was kind of funny and interesting in the characters were rich. But it was also entirely accurate because that's what a lot of people did in Austin in the 80s, and sat around and gone all day. And guess what those those those ideas eventually hatched into really big things that made Austin so cool for so long. But again, I my worry is that Austin's not really a slacker city anymore. Lots of people here are our you know, anything, but slackers. And how does that that that that change in the personality and the atmosphere and the makeup of the city? How does that change the short term and long term trajectory of the creative class that typically made Austin, such a great place to live? And great place to, you know, practice your art, that type of thing is often losing his creative vibe. Is the city growing too fast? How will the city manage this newest wave of growth? I mean, we're debating this question for 30 or 40 years as, as the city is grown in. And so far, I think the city is largely survived the personalities largely survived. Yes, it's a very different place than it was 20 or 30 years ago, when it was more of a slightly college town. But I think that as much as the city has changed, that strong strong focus on creativity it's still very present are one of our former mayors. Is is famous for this line. And I have to credit him I can't say that I thought this myself but most people have heard the slogan keep Austin weird. And his point is keep Austin weird, really need to keep Austin creative. Yeah. And that, that, that that weirdness that creativity is the DNA that has made this city such a such a cool place to live and such a magnet for so many people?

Roy Sharples:

What is your creative process? In terms of how do you make the invisible visible by dreaming up ideas, developing them into concepts, then bringing them to actualization?

Hugh Forrest:

A while back, I realized that I have a lot of really creative ideas. But there are a lot of people out there who have even more creative ideas. And the more that, that I can tap into those, that that creative community that's that global, creative community and get them involved with South by Southwest, the stronger the event can be. And, you know, this was very much inspired by the early years or earlier years when I was involved with South by Southwest and I, you know, I'd read a story in wired, or Mother Jones or Time magazine or or the Atlantic or something like that and story about something really neat. And I'd find like five people mentioned in the story and try to track them down for a panel and be on a panel or to speak at South by Southwest. And that often worked pretty well in terms of putting in terms of creating really interesting content. But invariably, the even more interesting content was when someone contacted me and said, you know, hey, I'm an I'm an expert on quantum physics and you haven't heard of quantum physics yet, but in 15 years, it's going to completely change everything about technology. And I've got three friends are at Experts also and we'd love to come and speak and and realizing that, hey, it's it's much better if that person who's an expert recruits his or her friends. And we just kind of serve as the platform, we did the stuff that we're getting more expert at, which is organizing, and they, they pull in the speaker. So that kind of thought led to this interface, we have called the South by Southwest panel picker, which we've used for probably 15 years at this point. And it's a way for creatives of in any industry from anywhere in the world to enter a speaking proposal for South by Southwest. And again, it's a way for people who are experts in their particular field to pull in other experts in that field, leverage their expertise, we leverage our expertise in terms of organizing events. And in that sense, we kind of get the best of both worlds. So we've used this system, again, for the last 15 years or so, at this point will typically get about 5000 ideas from all over the world. And really good ideas. And it's really incredibly difficult to to, to sift through the best of those ideas, we have a community voting system where all these ideas are posted on this interface called a panel picker, and anyone in the community can vote on them, or comment on them. And, you know, uptown fashion, which is what web users are pretty familiar with, the panel picker is has a lot of benefits. Again, it leverages the expertise of people in the community, it lets us kind of understand trends that are bubbling up within this creative community before before those trends are too obvious to the general, mainstream public. It's also I think, been one of the reasons that the event is kind of, you know, expanded into all these other industries. Because all of a sudden, you know, people who were involved with, with food or again, with fashion or or with drones, or with, you know, synthetic biology or with robots, all of a sudden, they started putting ideas in the panel picker and allowed us to bring those communities in. So, you know, this is a long answer to your relatively short question, which is that I've always been a strong, strong believer in the power of community. And I think that, to the extent that South by Southwest has been successful, in showcasing new kinds of creativity, it's really largely been that we've been able to lean on the expertise of this global creative community who bring us these new ideas, and always, you know, amazes with with the kind of innovative thinking that they're working on. So again, my answer there is, you can be creative on your own you can be even more creative when you find ways to leverage and connect and brainstorm with other creative people.

Roy Sharples:

I really like the democratic approach and the more tilting towards more open innovation and always kind of looking for that outsider theme or insight that transcends that the ordinary in the routine in the status quo and not knowing where that idea might come from as well that that's really attractive rather than forcing

Hugh Forrest:

well thank you i certainly was also inspired and reflects the you know, the early ideas of the open web and open source community I think we've you know, come a long way since they're dead but always that was something that always I got inspired a lot by and we tried to incorporate this into this battle breaker interface and again it's served us really well we still you know, curate some of the content where we say hey, we really want to have you know, brock obama speak this year how do we get through to brock obama but even that is very community focused and that will inevitably know someone who knows someone else who knows someone else and those brock obama and perhaps can get an invitation to hit to him or Michelle Obama or whoever of that level that we want to our community also. So again, I can't say it enough. I'm a strong strong believer in the power and the importance of community in all, its many. And all its many, all the many senses of the word and to the extent that South by Southwest has done anything that's engaging and forward thinking, there is usually the community to credit to give much more credit than as opposed to any particular staff members.

Roy Sharples:

What are the key skills needed to program creative events?

Hugh Forrest:

Dogged persistence, and as much attention to detail as possible, what we do at South by Southwest is, you know, we spend basically 10 months working on a 10 day event, it has that long kind of gestation period, there are literally 1000s of details to attend to, we do a pretty good job of managing most of those that definitely there are some details that that fall through the cracks. And hopefully, we will address those better than next year, I often say to myself, and say to my staff, that if we ever did it year where I thought everything went, you know, right and completely according to plan that would be the the time that might drop and move on to something else. But we've certainly come nowhere close to that yet. But But, but say it said in a more positive way, we grow a little every year, and over the course of 30 years, that has amounted to some pretty significant growth and some pretty significant reach and scale and power. And it's been an amazing thing to be part of that journey.

Roy Sharples:

What are your lessons learned, in terms of the pitfalls to avoid, and the keys to success that you can share with other event programmer?

Hugh Forrest:

Anything of value takes a long time to, to build and a lot of effort to build. You know, there are a few brilliant people, amazing people, incredible people who can build something in the space of one or two years that that gets the national international attention that completely pans out as you want it to pan out, most of us aren't like that. And we're definitely not like that at South by Southwest, what we've done again, is is, you know, build slowly, organically over the space of 30 years and always tried to have kind of a long term vision of this and and not try to get too far in front of our skis in any one given year. But again, you know, take a long term approach, this is what we can realistically do better this year, next year, we'll attack those things and get better at that. And again, if you had if you're able to maintain that long term perspective, and that is incredibly difficult, because we all want more instant gratification. You can I think, really achieve some amazing things. What's your vision for the future of creativity, stating the obvious the world is changing at warp speed now with with the various technologies that we're employing now, and again, the technologies that are on the immediate horizon? Certainly one of the most important of these technologies is is AI, artificial intelligence, which is already so much a part of so many things we do in our day to day lives, but we'll continue to have greater influences on us in the future. There is certainly massive potential within our AI future of job displacement of, of just a different different approaches to humanity than what we've known before, because we've never had, quite frankly, machines that could think as as quickly as deeply as what we have now and what we will continue to have in the future. But I think the glass half full, or more than half full perspective here is that humans are no longer needed to do the rote things of, you know, adding things together of, of things that that, that that, again, don't take a whole lot of creative power. What we are needed for is adding in that special sauce of creativity that machines just can't do. So I think creative, create creatives, creativity, creative thinking, creative approaches are going to be even. More important as we move forward, I think that that learning to think creatively to think to to approach problems in entirely creative ways to take the data that we have that machines can put together and apply that creative ways is going to be or is, is quickly going to be the most valuable skill we have. And that and it is it is definitely a skill. I mean, I know for for my own self and my work. I'm really good at answering emails are I'm pretty good at answering emails pretty quickly. But I constantly have to remind myself that, you know, I should really be spending this time thinking about creative things, as opposed to answering that email, which takes time but doesn't mean that require the most brainpower possible. So again, another long answer to a short question. Creativity is not going away creativity is we're going to be going to become even more important. The most creative thinkers in our society are going to be the the most important people as we as we move forward,

Roy Sharples:

Creativity will continue to be the difference humans make and the future, intelligent technologies are increasingly able to expedite the majority of roles a human can. The future workplace is where humans will work in unison with artificial intelligence, or the technological equivalent. robots have already multiplied productivity and replaced humans, and many work lines, just as the automobile replaced horses, dramatically impacting life and society. A plane can be flown without a pilot cars and trains driven without a driver, brain surgery without a doctor, fleets of vehicles produced without factory workers freeing up humans to perform more creative and self fulfilling roles that have yet to be defined. digital literacy, computational thinking, judgment, decision making emotional and social intelligence, critical thinking, problem solving, and having a creative and innovative mindset will continue to be more critical than ever.

Hugh Forrest:

The whole reason for South by Southwest is creativity. Again, as much as the event has changed, being a music focused event in 1987, to be an event that focuses on dozens and dozens of different verticals and 2021 that has world leaders and bands from Norway and China and Japan and filmmakers from every corner of the earth. You know, that's that's huge change over 30 plus years. But the common thread there is celebrating creative thinking, bringing creative people together, to interact with other creative people, and see what happens. And I think what's particularly special about what we do now is that that, you know, we're not just to event for creatives in one industry, we're an event for creatives in many different industries. And I always encourage people coming to events like SXSW, to, you know, to the extent possible and to the extent you have courage or whatnot, ditch your friends ditch the people that you usually hang out, it's the your your click, ditch your, your your tribe, and go try to meet other people, other creatives, that's the absolute most value, you will get out of an event like South by Southwest and all the other cool events out there when you when you realize that other industries have other people who are thinking creatively who are looking for new solutions to their problems that you may have thought of that someone else hasn't thought of, again, venturing outside your comfort zone at events like South by Southwest that is where the the people who do that successfully make the absolute most out of event and again, that's really hard to do because as humans we're, you know, kind of hardwired to stay with our friends and stay with our circles and stay with what we know. But again, when you venture out and see creatives and other other verticals. That's when the real real real magic occurs.

Roy Sharples:

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