Phil Hansen has tattooed bananas, drawn a portrait on stacked Starbucks cups and created a Jimi Hendrix portrait out of matches, which he then burned. In other words, he isn’t the kind of artist who feels bound to paint on canvas. So how did Hansen happen upon such fascinating methods? By embracing a major limitation […]
On Thursday at TED2013, Chinese artist Liu Bolin talked about his remarkable photographic installations, in which he paints himself (and sometimes other people) with perfect camouflage to disappear into a busy background. His talk closed with a photo of Liu in the theater at Long Beach, disappearing himself into the stage with paint and pattern […]
In an extraordinary finale for TED2013, Eric Whitacre stages a type of performance that has never been seen before, with a choir assembled to sing his composition, “Cloudburst.” It’s not just any choir. He’s joined on stage by 100 live singers formed from choirs from California State University, Long Beach Campus, California State University, Fullerton […]
Spoken-word poet and artist Shane Koyczan is onstage at TED, sharing his own experiences and charming us silly. This is an intimate, heartfelt look into a life that has not always been easy. “I’ve been shot down so many times I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself,” he says. Being told to stand up […]
Can a person disappear in plain sight? That’s the question Liu Bolin‘s remarkable works all seem to ask. The Beijing-based artist is sometimes called “The Invisible Man” because in nearly all his art, Bolin is front and center — and completely unseen. Bolin aims to draw attention to social and political issues by dissolving into […]
No stranger to the TED stage, Raghava KK returns with exciting updates on his work. Raghava is experimenting with EEG headsets that use brain waves to bring new, dynamic perspectives into his work. His upcoming works include: Mona Lisa 2.0, whose face changes based on Raghava’s mood; a depiction of Gandhi that changes based on […]
Fever Picture is a collective of scribes and graphic facilitators who translate the words said in conferences into comic form. With this graphic method of note-taking, they’ve illustrated several talks given so far at TED2013, highlighting main points through speech bubbles and quotes. Here, we’ve gathered some of these illustrations from their Facebook page. And stay tuned to […]
The Korean education system is famed for its high levels of scholastic achievement, but as 15-year-old Seoul native Dong Woo Jang professes, not everyone responds to this kind of “pressure cooking” in the same way. His response to the high-pressure environment was an unusual one: to make wooden bows. Why? He’s not sure. Perhaps all […]
Many of you have already watched Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize talk, posted on TED.com earlier today, calling for the building of the School in the Cloud. Others of you may have read our written recap of his talk. And now we get the talk, rendered by an artist, cartoon-style. This visualization of Mitra’s talk was […]
Lesley Perkes walks onto the TED stage to tell us about her birth in 1961 in inner city Johannesburg. Her mother said she looked like a toilet brush, her hair standing on end. “I think I saw the future,” she says. Her story centers around Hillbrow Tower, the iconic, 268-meter-tall building built in 1968 […]
In art school, Phil Hansen developed a shake in his hand. He couldn’t so much as draw a straight line anymore. After years of excelling in pointillism, his tight grip of the pen had caused permanent nerve damage. “To me this was doomsday. This was the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist,” says Hansen in […]
Clouds. We think of them as light and fluffy, sometimes a touch menacing. But TED Fellow Camille Seaman sees something even deeper in the clouds above her. Seaman, who is known for her stunning images that give personality to icebergs, was raised as a Shinnecock Indian, in a culture that taught her that everything is interconnected. “When I […]
Blue whale researcher and TED Senior Fellow Asha de Vos unveiled her TED-Ed lesson today on the TED Fellows stage. The video — “Why are blue whales so enormous?” — stars a puppet version of de Vos, which she had been coveting for weeks. So Fellows & Community Director Tom Rielly presented her with it, hand-carried from […]
Amanda Palmer — performer, writer, former Dresden Dolls frontwoman — speaks at TED2013 on Wednesday morning. And to prep, she rendered her talk on paper in Sharpie. She writes on Tumblr, “It is about eight feet long. I am taking this as a good omen.” Back in Boston, the “Queen of Kickstarter” also held a prep […]
Each week, TEDx chooses four of our favorite talks, highlighting just a few of the enlightening speakers from the TEDx community and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Below, give this week’s talks — all about music — a listen. Learn 100 songs in five minutes: Jordan Hume at TEDxMacquarieUniversity The structure of music might seem […]
Young-ha Kim has a simple message for us all: get out there and create some art. Are you getting tense, just from the suggestion? In today’s talk, given at TEDxSeoul and TED’s first ever in Korean, Kim says, “You think, ‘I’m too busy. I don’t have time for art.’ There are hundreds of reasons why […]