FXL (FutureXperience Lab) is a subsidiary of The Futures Lab, Inc. based in Atlanta, GA with a number of global partners and offices. It is a transformation by futurists Derek Woodgate and Helga Veigl of earlier iterations such as Plutopia Productions and FEEL and our successful collaboration with Maggie Duval, Jon Lebkowsky and Bon Davis and a fantastic group of Austin creatives, which started in 2006. The new enterprise has stepped back from the production side of the entertainment and events business, focusing on our proven strengths in conceptualization, thematic structuring, designing experiences and curating future-focused content that is production-ready. Consequently, we have constituted a highly inventive team of futurists, content curators, programmers/coders, experience designers, visualizers, technologists and narrative explorers, supported by our vast network of inventive minds. Designing experiences is about creating sensation, multi-sensory discovery, and a sense of the encounter, leading to personal ambience. We call these “sense events” which enable attendees to “live the future”. Developing the necessary research and metrics to understand and integrate the feedback from our creations is a critical value-add.

FXL’s origins can be traced back to the early 1990s with the creation of Lee Rock City – a project Woodgate curated and designed together with MTV Europe, involving major music performers, interspersed with local acts. It later went global and was a major success for best part of a decade throughout some of the world’s major cities. Simultaneously, we launched Fringecore – creating, curating and designing alternative, progressive events at the other end of the spectrum, introducing to the public the best of spoken word, plunderphonics and electronica…

Upon moving from Europe to Austin, TX in 2000, leveraging our earlier ties with SXSW, we started a series of future salons, which brought together a group of forward thinking progressives, amongst whom was Fringeware and the Well instigator, Jon Lebkowsky. Out of these salons grew our earliest event – The Future of the Home, as part of the Austin Maker Faire, which was the first held outside of California. Its success became the inspiration for Plutopia Productions, named by one of our key collaborators at the time, David Demaris, which with early help from SXSW, personal sweat and equity by it founders led to some of the most exciting future-focused events, involving revolutionary innovations, awe-inspiring content and world premieres, ever seen. Our ability to create the unexpected, design unique experiences featuring the latest inventions from labs as far reaching as MIT and Beijing, or corporations like Disney and Hitachi, and to leverage a network of participants as diverse as the creators of robot soccer and the AI-aided violin led to collaboration between transhumanists and bio-artists, world renowned DJs and classical or even a robot orchestra.

Our mission is to provide the general public with exposure and experience to the amazing emerging innovations and cultural developments that help generate a positive feeling about the future.