Happy Tuesday everyone!
The 2012 Bi-annual TED conference started today!
My facebook news feed and blogger reel have exploded with updates from TED, and it's great. It also means I've spent close to three hours watching TEDtalks today. It was wonderful and awful at the same time, because I know how much homework I'm putting off right now. It's even worse that I can write off watching so many TED videos as "doing homework" for this blog.
Most of the TEDtalks I've watched tonight pertained to dance, or music, or the arts. They were brilliant, interesting, and captivating. I even found that if there was a speaker involved with the dancing, or with the music-making, I was more prone to remembering what they were saying, even if the talks themselves were over 30min long.
I guess there's an element of hybridity that's encouraged in TEDtalks. We've moved beyond that phase of Orator + Powerpoint = presentation. (thank god)
TED encourages creativity and hybridity, and more than anything, the spread of good ideas. In one of the Talks that I mentioned above (the "dancing" one), John Bohannon suggests that scientists ought to hire dancers to do their explaining for them. Personally, I think we could all benefit from our own personal interpretive dancers. It would make your stories WAY more exciting (and just imagine what it would be like if you set your story and their dance to epic music!)
I thought his little physicist bit about photons and lasers was danced out particularly well. (1:00)
In the 30 min presentation I watched, Evelyn Glennie taught me how a deaf person "hears" music, and how it was that she came to teach her music instructor that you don't actually "hear" music through your ears...you "experience" it through every nerve inside you. (7:50)
I've seen lots of deaf musicians perform--in fact, Britain has its own paraorchestra which will definitely go global if they get invited to play at the Paraolympics in London.
They've got a blind sitar player, an electronic DJ with cerebral palsy, and ex-trumpet player (disabled by a car crash) who makes synthetic music by blowing through a tube to control his computer mouse, and a blind recorder player who plays all his music from memory.
BUT, I've never heard any of them talk about what it's like for them to experience music. It was eye-opening to learn what that was like from a woman who has been deaf since age 12.
To bring up hybridity again: humans have an excellent ability to synthesize what goes on around them (their input), and combine that with their personal experiences (memory) to produce something completely new (output). To me, that signifies growth. This assimilation style of learning and creating really makes us a different sort of creature here on Earth.
The video I have for you all today (aside from the three I listed above) doesn't have words at all. It's a dance company called "Quixotic Fusion", and I believe they're based out of Kansas...I haven't checked my facts on that one, though.
This piece was part of a TEDx event, and I think it illustrates hybridity really well. The fusion between dance, music and electronic media creates an artform unique in and of itself where the line between the technological and the organic, reality and dream, really becomes blurred.
This is augmented reality as you've never seen it before. Enjoy. I love it. =)
The 2012 Bi-annual TED conference started today!
My facebook news feed and blogger reel have exploded with updates from TED, and it's great. It also means I've spent close to three hours watching TEDtalks today. It was wonderful and awful at the same time, because I know how much homework I'm putting off right now. It's even worse that I can write off watching so many TED videos as "doing homework" for this blog.
Most of the TEDtalks I've watched tonight pertained to dance, or music, or the arts. They were brilliant, interesting, and captivating. I even found that if there was a speaker involved with the dancing, or with the music-making, I was more prone to remembering what they were saying, even if the talks themselves were over 30min long.
I guess there's an element of hybridity that's encouraged in TEDtalks. We've moved beyond that phase of Orator + Powerpoint = presentation. (thank god)
I thought his little physicist bit about photons and lasers was danced out particularly well. (1:00)
In the 30 min presentation I watched, Evelyn Glennie taught me how a deaf person "hears" music, and how it was that she came to teach her music instructor that you don't actually "hear" music through your ears...you "experience" it through every nerve inside you. (7:50)
I've seen lots of deaf musicians perform--in fact, Britain has its own paraorchestra which will definitely go global if they get invited to play at the Paraolympics in London.
They've got a blind sitar player, an electronic DJ with cerebral palsy, and ex-trumpet player (disabled by a car crash) who makes synthetic music by blowing through a tube to control his computer mouse, and a blind recorder player who plays all his music from memory.
BUT, I've never heard any of them talk about what it's like for them to experience music. It was eye-opening to learn what that was like from a woman who has been deaf since age 12.
To bring up hybridity again: humans have an excellent ability to synthesize what goes on around them (their input), and combine that with their personal experiences (memory) to produce something completely new (output). To me, that signifies growth. This assimilation style of learning and creating really makes us a different sort of creature here on Earth.
The video I have for you all today (aside from the three I listed above) doesn't have words at all. It's a dance company called "Quixotic Fusion", and I believe they're based out of Kansas...I haven't checked my facts on that one, though.
This piece was part of a TEDx event, and I think it illustrates hybridity really well. The fusion between dance, music and electronic media creates an artform unique in and of itself where the line between the technological and the organic, reality and dream, really becomes blurred.
This is augmented reality as you've never seen it before. Enjoy. I love it. =)
awesome. thanks for the post, ashley :)
ReplyDeletewhich video/link did you watch?
Deletethe last one on this page. I confess I'm not much of a video watcher on blogs
ReplyDeleteThat's fine. =) That's the one I wanted most people to watch anyway. I just wanted to see which one you picked.
DeleteI watched the dancing one. Fantastic! I especially liked how he says that sometimes fewer words have the most impact, and it reminded me of how in blogging we often have to lower our word count to make the biggest impact. And to put artist's back to work in lieu of Powerpoint, brilliant!
ReplyDelete