“I’ve never seen color and I don’t know what color looks like. I come from a grayscale world,” says artist Neil Harbisson, to gasps from the audience. Yet this is not an “oh me miserum” story. Instead, Harbisson is here to tell us that in 2003, he started a collaborative project to create an electronic eye to […]
Think about the things you use every day — and about the people who make them. Leslie Chang is a journalist who has spent years in China to talk to the workers who make the products we use, voices that have been missing from much of the discussion about labor, global markets and exploitation. “This […]
Gerard Senehi is a performer of tiny miracles or, if you’re looking for a more formal job title, a mentalist. A mentalist is someone who blows people’s minds by doing things that just can’t be explained through science or reason and Gerard is exactly that. Be it his hands-off approach to smoking a cigarette, his […]
Anthropologist and academic Gabriella Coleman starts her talk with a simple-sounding question: “Who is Anonymous?” She promptly confesses that even after “exhilarating and extremely frustrating” years of studying the group, she still finds this question difficult to answer. First of all, it’s not an organization with one or even a few leaders at the helm. It’s a […]
What’s going wrong with democracy? Iavan Krastev is a political scientist to speak about crisis in Europe. Not, in his words, an inspiring topic. And he’s here to talk about some of the problems with openness, in contrast to most of the talks. “You people in the church of TED,” says Krastev, “are very optimistic. You believe […]
As curator Chris Anderson says, politicians don’t generally turn up on the TED stage. This year, there are two in a row, as Alex Salmond is followed by Malte Spitz, a member of the Green Party in Germany. “A mobile phone can change your life and give you individual freedom,” says Spitz. “With a mobile phone you […]
In this taste of TEDGlobal, Massimo Banzi, the inventor of Arduino, offers an inspiring word on open-source creativity: “You don’t need anyone’s permission to create something great.” Watch Massimo’s TEDTalk >>
Brief: Stylistic, symbolic and metaphoric forms creating a visual poem about Radical Openness. Director’s statement: “In our shades of openness introduction, we tried to hint at some of the factors we are culturally faced with today. The ever watching eye of both corporations and government, the secrets behind closed doors, and a continual mistrust of […]
Alex Salmond is interested in the role of small countries in the world. And, “As the leader of a small country that’s had a big impact on the world, it’s something of a specialist subject of mine.” Indeed! Salmond was the First Minister of Scotland. He points to a remarkable moment at the height of the […]
Click to watch this session’s opening animation Too often, we view “openness” as an unmitigated Good Thing. Yet, as we’ve seen up close over the past decade or so, transparency comes with consequences. Reality is neither black nor white, and until we can learn to take a nuanced view of the problems with which we are […]
Natasha Paremski started taking piano lessons at the age of 4. Having moved from her native Russia to the United States in 1995, she made her professional debut with the El Camino Youth Symphony in California. She was 9. Since then, she has played with prestigious orchestras around the world while she was named the Classical […]
Watch Andreas Schleicher’s TED Talk >> “Learning is not a place, it’s an activity,” says Andreas Schleicher. He heads up the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, also known as PISA, and he’s here to make the case that international comparisons of education systems can help to raise the global bar for students and learning. First, […]
“In System D, this is a store,” says Robert Neuwirth as he shows a photo of a woman sitting on a plank beside a canal in Makoko in Lagos, a booming shantytown built on stilts over the water. It’s a place where “there are no streets where there are stores to shop, and so the shop comes […]
Pankaj Ghemawat is the author of Global 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It, and he takes the stage to ask an important question: Just how global are we really? It’s not a new question, of course. It’s one that David Livingstone first floated back in the 1850s, and one that’s been popularized by writers such […]
Jonathan Batiste is back onstage to open the second day of TEDGlobal with a doctored burst of Chopin’s “Funeral March” on the melodica leading into a beautiful rendition of “St. James Infirmary Blues” on the piano. As the song says, Batiste really is the “sharp-dressing piano-playing man” who neatly shifts right back to conclude with an […]
Brief: Extreme sharing by being visually extremely explosive. Director’s statement: “I set out to illustrate the growing ideas by literally showing some images growing in abstract yet organic ways. It’s a give-away materialized in a pictoral explosion.” — Sophie Gateau CREDITS: Direction, Design, Animation: Sophie Gateau http://www.sophiegateau.com/ Sound Design: Michael Kneebone / Toolbox Audio toolboxaudio.com […]