People, Ideas, Nature, Creativity Conference Returns to Sarasota
A $425 ticket to sit in on a single day’s worth of speakers — none of whom are offering power-point advice on how to fatten your wallet — might seem pricey at first glance. But with the event director promising Thursday’s lineup of luminaries will deliver “the most creative day in Sarasota,” the conference is anticipating a sellout for the second straight year.
Sponsored by Ringling College of Art and Design, the People, Ideas, Nature and Creativity (PINC) conference is already running out of room for its 450-seat capacity audience. PINC is moving to the larger stage at Sarasota Opera House because it booked all 240 reservations a full week before its Sarasota premiere at Florida Studio Theatre last year.
“Everybody was blown away,” says PINC USA director Anand Pallegar of the marathon session that brings an eclectic range of global perspectives to a single venue, but holds each speaker to a 20-minute engagement. “Eighty-five percent of the people who went last year have bought tickets this year
“It’s a day to disconnect and recharge your batteries; it has nothing to do with your-day-to-day job. One of the attendees described it as ‘a bubblebath for your mind.’”
Sixteen mostly international speakers with backgrounds as diverse as medical ecology, whistling, space law, cheese-cutting, neuroscience, and cloud appreciation will supply the mental bubble bath this time around, framed by a sampling of performance and culinary arts. And there’s not a household name in the lot.
“We spend a whole year looking for interesting speakers and we’re not looking for flagship CEOs and big names,” Pallegar says. “We are looking for innovators and experts in their fields.”
Consider, for instance, the focused intensity of Emar Vegt, a German musician and acoustics technician who rated a recent feature in Wired magazine. Completing a masters project titled “The Sound of Silent Cars,” Vegt is a senior sound designer for BMW and contributes to the vehicle’s sound aesthetics.
“We often think of the way a car sounds as just its engine, but it’s so much more than that,” Pallegar says. “Just from the way a car door clicks shut, Emar can tell you the make and model of that car.”
“Sound is an enormous part of branding,” Vegt told Wired. “A Mini, for example, is playful and joyful and the sound of the car has to reflect that, so we modulate the exhaust to give a sporty, impulsive sound. By contrast, a 7 Series has to be very quiet. The driver wants to be in his own zone, so there is lots of damping and insulation.”
PINC co-founders Peter and Nelleke van Lindonk drew their inspiration from the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conferences that celebrate a spectrum of ideas through storytelling. But when they hosted the first PINC event in the small Dutch down of Zeist in 1999, the van Lindonks decided to mix it up with more speakers, according to daughter-in-law Karen Fay van Lindonk.
“They didn’t want a keynote speaker, and they didn’t want listeners to get antsy, which is why they decided to keep each speaker to 20 minutes,” she says. “And they wanted to throw in some surprises during what we call the intermezzos.
PINC jumped the pond to Sarasota in 2014, thanks to the van Lindonks’ frequent visits and family ties to the area. “What they discovered,” says their daughter-in-law, “is that Sarasota has a real thirst for knowledge and the arts.”
The presence of Geert Chatrou in this year’s lineup is just one example of overlap in the shared sensibilities of TED and PINC. The subject of an award-winning documentary, the Dutch national and three-time world-whistling champion was a TED speaker who can make birds swoon by performing tunes like “Queen of the Night” from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” opera.
“We want people to come away inspired and thinking creatively about their lives or their jobs,” van Lindonk says.
The PINC conference runs from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday at the Sarasota Opera House. Admission includes gourmet meals. For more information about reservations and speakers, visit www.PINCSarasota.com online.