In this episode of Culture Code, Alex sits down with Otto Plesner – director, writer, musician and co-founder of RenaiXance, a studio creating immersive experiences and installations that turn emotion and data into art.
Otto literally grew up backstage. With a lighting designer father and a visual-artist mother, his childhood evenings were spent among theatre rehearsals, drawing and dreaming up worlds. That imaginative start ran through everything that followed: a spell as a lounge pianist in Sweden at nineteen, a crash course in immersive theatre in New York, a cabaret in Paris, and finally a degree in performing arts, leadership and entrepreneurship back home in Denmark.
He trained as a producer, then realised he had too many ideas to stay behind the scenes. A job directing large-scale shows in the Netherlands pulled him into the world of kinetic light systems, projection mapping and sonography – and when AI arrived, he dove straight in and experimented as much as he could. By posting his work on LinkedIn he started to make a name for himself and the speaking invitations and conference stages started to follow.
Today he runs RenaiXance with his wife Miroslava Arangutia, a sculptor and visual artist, on a simple conviction: the commercial and the art world can live and breathe together. The studio has created work with the likes of Vodafone, BMW and Steinway & Sons – translating biometric data into visual art and syncing installations to a crowd’s heartbeat at a music festival.
Otto also gets into why he thinks that artists can be bigger catalysts for change – from The Art of Memory, a multi-sensory installation about Alzheimer’s, to his forthcoming book, The Creative Renaissance.
For more interviews with the designers and artist who create with tech, check out the Culture Code series.
