Miwa Matreyek: Glorious visions in animation and performance

Miwa (pronounced Mee-wa) Matreyek is a multimedia artist who blends, animation, shadow play and music into extremely surreal experiences. At TEDGlobal 2010, she premiered her piece “Myth and Infrastructure.” Now, she’s completed a new piece, “This World Made Itself,” which takes inspiration from her love of physics and natural history museums. This new piece was recently performed at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. This week, Matreyek heads to the Sundance Film Festival to perform the piece, with shows tonight, January 19, and Thursday, January 23.

The TED Blog caught up with Matreyek to ask about this new piece — and about how she goes about creating these intricate performances in the first place.

What would you say is the idea that you wanted people who watched your TED performance to walk away with? Because I think there is definitely an idea there.

Overall, a sense of wonder, magic, creativity, imagination. It’s a very surreal and dream-like thing for me. In the process of making “Myth and Infrastructure,” a lot of ideas were inspired by things in my surroundings. In a small way, what I’m interested in people taking away is the sense that it’s tinkering and invention with everyday objects. I’m using projectors and a laptop, but it’s not that different from shadow play or magic lantern shows — so there’s an old feeling, I think, to what I do. There’s a connection to the physicality of the medium and the performance that I think is often lacking in new media installation — that you don’t have this human component.

What have been the most heartwarming reactions gotten to your TED Talk?

A lot of people talk about how they just let it wash over them, and how they feel kind of taken on a journey. It’s funny, because it’s a video that’s on TED.com, but as a piece itself, it’s very much about the live performance. People who have seen it online come see me at festivals — and they’re like, “Oh wow, the video was really great. But seeing it live, and seeing your real live body…” With a real body, you can see each strand of hair moving, my eyelashes flickering, when I smile. There’s such a visceral and physical connection — the audience can get something else when they actually come and see me.

Have you gotten any reactions to the talk that you thought were a little strange?

Some comments say, “This would’ve been better if it was all video, instead of it being a performance.” Which is funny to me, because it misses the point. I could have easily made that whole thing with a composited green-screen shadow figure — it would be easier, and it would always be precise and perfect. But I really like the struggle. There are moments where I’m physically struggling to keep up, or I’m just slightly off. I like the divergence and convergence between the media and the body. There’s an uncanniness to it — the animation and my body connect to create an illusion. And I like the fact that the audience helps complete the illusions. Because when it’s a little bit off, the audience is actively watching in a way that they help me complete the illusions.

For my work, there’s the flat screen, and so the cinematic space of the animation — the body collapsed right on to the flat screen. Then there’s also the theatrical space of seeing the set-up on stage: projectors, screen, laptop, and me. They see my body get bigger when it’s closer to the projector, and smaller when it’s closer to the screen. The audience is aware of the narrative of how I’m staging what they’re seeing cinematically. I’m really interested in that dual narrative of seeing the fantastical illusion, and also seeing the technical narratives of it. I think that takes them on a journey of suspension of belief and disbelief. It creates a more active kind of viewing — they’re invested in figuring it out. I like to keep it in the mysterious space where there’s some sleight of hand and it gets a little bit tricky for the audience.

Did the experience of performing at TED and having your talk go online, inform new works in any way?

I think so. “Myth and Infrastructure” is about being taken on an emotional journey, and thinking about creativity and imagination. After TED, I wanted to make work that expanded beyond that. It was a driving force to try something different.

With my new piece, “This World Made Itself,” the first half is natural-history based. I’ve always been interested in science, and I feel like my place of interest in science comes from a very visual and physical sense of the world. I was actually a physics major for my first year as an undergrad. Once it got separated from having a visual sense and a physical sense of the mechanics of things, then it just became math. I lost interest, because I couldn’t really imagine it or feel it in my body. So I feel like with this new work, I’m trying to reconnect with that.

With my new piece that just premiered, it starts with the Big Bang and the formation of the earth, and then goes through different stages of prehistory in kind of a dream-like, abstracted, way. The Precambrian oceans, the Ordovician oceans, and the carboniferous forests. Coming from a place of imagining: what does it feel like to be the earth that’s just forming? It’s all molten lava and there’s no atmosphere and it’s just forming as a planet — and what does it feel like when the atmosphere forms, when there’s steam, when there’s the first oceans forming.

So interesting. Was there a moment that launched this new idea?

Because “Myth and Infrastructure” was on TED, I got a lot of invitations to festivals from people that saw me online. So I was flying around a lot. Even just being on an airplane, and looking out the window, and being amazed at what the earth looked like. I noticed that you can kind of read landscapes, and how they formed is really interesting to me. Flying over the Southwest and seeing dead riverbeds and then where there’s formations of plants growing because there’s an underground river or something. You can see fault lines. That’s just takes my breath away — to look out the window. I always make sure and sit by the window.

How long does it take you to create a piece?

“Myth and Infrastructure” took me about eight months. The new piece took me about two years.

How do you get from the concept to the visual ideas?

Often, I just explore with everyday objects. “Myth and Infrastructure” started with me grabbing things from the kitchen and being like, “What are ways I can transform this? What are ways I can play with this?” With this new piece, because I was thinking about natural history, I tried to make it a point that, wherever I did travel, I would go to a natural history museum or a science museum. To get a visual reference. Though that’s always been something that I’ve enjoyed and liked a lot.

Do you do the animation first, do you think about the music first, do you think about how you physically want to do the interacting?

It’s the animation and the interaction first — the visual sense and the physical sense. I build them as many vignettes, and then figure out ways to tie it together. With this piece, I had the prehistoric timeline, so I would imagine something like being on fire. And then the visual world comes after that. Oh, there’s asteroids in the sky? I start building that and then figuring out how my body might fit into it. But it’s a very integrated process. I normally have the projectors and the screens set up in my living room so I can constantly turn it around and test it out. I build up a still image before I build animation — I build out the ground and the sky, or an ocean that I’m floating in and then try to physically figure out: Am I swimming in it or am I underwater? So it’s very physically exploring a place.

Is your animation stop-motion, or a combination of stop-motion and drawing?

It’s not really stop-motion. I’m making it in AfterEffects, so it’s more like a composited collage. It’s a lot of things that I shoot photos and video of, including just textures, that I layer on top of each other. Some found things, some things that I draw with the computer and then animate. It’s a mix of layers and layers and layers of things that are constructed with the computer.

What was the visual effect in “The World Made Itself” that was the hardest or most difficult to figure out how to create?

The hardest scenes are where I get into a battle of the laws of physics of the world that I’m in, versus the laws of physics in fantasy — where I can play with time and gravity with animation.

I have one scene where the idea was that I’m being dragged across a field of flowers, and it’s kind of me being dragged back in time in my mind. So for that scene, I’m actually lying across two stools, and just kind of holding my body up, Pilates-style, flailing. Hopefully, there’s a sense that I’m floating above the flowers and kind of weightless. By combining animation with the body, the body becomes a little bit more fantastical.

Miwa Matreyek is pulled through a field of flowers — and time — in her newest work, “The Word Made Itself.”

In your TED performance and in the trailer for “This World Made Itself” (above), both contain the image of the natural morphing into a city. Why is that something you find yourself coming back to?

It’s a strange dichotomy for humans to live in, that we are both a part of the natural world and that we build up these concrete beehives to live in. We’re drawn to both, and afraid of both. We seem unable to live without one or the other. It’s funny, because that is in every single thing that I make. I feel like it’s something that I’m still kind of figuring out.

With “Myth and Infrastructure,” because it’s 17 minutes for the whole piece — and for TED, I had a time limit of 10 minutes — it was short. Too short for me to go somewhere dark, and then come back out. So I kept it really light-hearted and magical. Whereas with the new piece, it’s something that came out of a complete history. In the second half of the piece, when it goes to more of the human world, this is the world that we’ve made for ourselves. Which is kind of dark.

You’ve lived in Los Angeles for a long time, right?

Yeah, eight years or so.

Is Los Angeles a part of your work?

I’m not sure about Los Angeles particularly, but the city thing is there. Los Angeles is so sprawled out that you mostly feel like you’re in a city, but also it doesn’t feel like a city in some ways too. I think that dichotomy is interesting. Overall, I think there’s a kind of problematic relationship being in a city. I haven’t really lived anywhere rural, so I have no reference point, but a city is a strange system to be a part of.

In an alternate universe where you weren’t an artist, what do you think you would be doing? I think I know the answer.

I would love to be a scientist. A geologist, maybe.

Do you have a secret talent that you think most people don’t know about?

Making surprises for my friends. I feel like I’m good at getting really invested in making something that’s “Oh, my friends are going to love this.” That’s how I started making art, really. When I was a kid, I’d paint a really beautiful thing on a birthday card for my mom. In some ways, it’s a lot like my “serious art,” because I build magical surprises into it. I do that in a small scale for friends too.

Where would be your dream place to perform “This World Made Itself?”

I would love to perform it at a natural history museum or a science museum type setting. I did perform it as a work in progress at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. There’s science-based stuff in the story itself, but I’m also interested in tinkering and inventiveness within art being part of the conversation there. It’s scientific, but it’s more on a children’s encyclopedia kind of level. So I would love to perform this at museums, where younger audiences come, and can get inspired to want to learn more.

A fiery scene from Miwa Matreyek’s “The World Made Itself.”

Find out more on Matreyek’s Sundance Film Festival performances. Or find out how to see “The World Made Itself” at RedCat in Los Angeles in February.

A concept sketch of a HOLOSCENES aquarium. Image: Peter Zuspan / Lars Jan

TED Fellow Lars Jan, the director of the multi-disciplinary art lab Early Morning Opera, is seeking everyday personal rituals from collaborators — perhaps, you? — for a work-in-progress called HOLOSCENES. This public-performance installation — inspired by humanity’s relationship with climate change and flooding — will be made up of three aquariums, each enclosing a performer enacting a looped, choreographed ritual as water rises and falls driven by environmental data drawn from the internet.

Would you like to contribute? Read on.

Can you give us an example of the kinds of rituals you’re collecting?

We had a collaborator on the border of Myanmar who met a family and documented a daily face-painting ritual. It’s for beautification, but it also acts as a sunblock. It involves a kind of wood called thanaka, which is ground on a particular kind of stone with a little bit of water to form a paste, which is applied on the face. This ritual is mostly done by women, who also apply it to their children, often in beautiful patterns. This particular woman used a toothbrush to apply it every morning. That’s the thing that’s important — the ritual might be something that happens in hundreds of thousands of households, but the point of the project is not to recreate the ritual in a generic fashion. We’re making contact with very specific individuals who perform their own ritual in a very specific way. I make coffee in the morning like a lot of people, but I also have my own idiosyncrasies — a personal pattern to this daily ritual that is all my own.

Will the rituals you’re collecting form the basis of the performances inside the aquariums?

Yes. The choreography and design of the physical behaviors inside the aquariums are all sourced from people we make contact with who live near any one of the 52 coordinates that we generated randomly across the globe. Our performers simulate these rituals inside the aquariums based on documentation collected by collaborators. Sometimes the people we’re contacting are far away – I’m communicating with people who are, say, in Uganda, having been handed from one interested person to another to another to reach people who are close to a coordinate and want to collaborate with us. What I wanted to do was to create a semi-open source network, dependent on an unpredictable cascade of online and in-person encounters.

A rendering of what HOLOSCENES will look like when staged. Credit: Peter Zuspan

Will the contributors get to participate in performances?

Yes, by providing the source material for the choreography and design at the heart of the project.
The entire collection process is actually referencing 500 years of what could be called a colonialist collection process, starting with imperial menageries, cabinets of wonder or curiosity, down to zoos and world’s fairs and aquariums. And we want to depriortize catastrophe as a lens through which to look at the world.

The project is inspired by flooding. In the last decade, I’ve found myself looking at a lot of places I had never seen before, and the reason I was looking at them, by way of beautiful photographs online and in newspapers, was because they were devastated. I wanted to find a more democratic way to look at the planet and the people on it. Rather than highlight people at the extremes, at their lowest, I wanted to cultivate and collect the mundane — and sacred — everyday behaviors of people across the planet.

How do the rituals then relate to climate change and flooding?

That’s partly where the conceptual and aesthetic leap is. Ultimately, the project is putting the rhythms of daily behaviors and human-scale patterns in conversation with longer-term patterns, such as those driving climate change. That’s a question at the heart of the project: What’s the future of long-term thinking? Are we, as individuals, communities, and a global society, capable of evolution in terms of recognizing complex, long-term patterns and then adapting our everyday behaviors based on that rational understanding?

The aquariums flood and drain with water at varying speeds. What drives the hydraulic system to make water going up and down in the tanks is environmental data scraped from the internet and other sources. Sometimes it floods incredibly slowly, sometimes very quickly. It’s a material data visualization: the water level goes up and down, but rather than seeing it from a remove, the data driving the water movement flooding and draining is dramatically affecting the ritual being performed, and dramatically changing the environment of the person in the tank. I’m curious to see the visceral empathic response viewers will have seeing the water flooding and draining, flooding and draining while a person — a performer — copes with the very mythic yet increasingly present-tense condition of deluge.

This visceral, visual metaphor — a person fighting through flood in an aquariam — is partly about our collective myopia in the face of these changes and our persistence and adaptive capacities in response to our changing environment — a multi pronged, complex visual metaphor that radiates out and connects with all kinds research and thinking, from behavioral science, climate science and palaeontology to questions like “What’s the neurology of long-term thinking? What’s the evolutionary future of empathy in an increasingly mediated world?” All those things are woven together in the project.

Where will HOLOSCENES be performed?

The full public, three-aquarium iteration of HOLOSCENES will premiere at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco in 2015, and likely premiere in a one-aquarium iteration sometime in 2014. Ultimately, it is meant to be a public performance intervention in an urban environment, running 24-hours a day for 7 days. The intention is to become a pivot for a public discourse and awareness outside of an exclusively artistic context. My collaborators and I are interested in reaching a far broader audience.

To find out more and contribute a ritual to be considered for HOLOSCENES, visit the website »

“An extended illness had changed the way I could access the world … I’d seen my life slip away and become restricted,” explains Austin in today’s talk, which was given at TEDxWomen in December. “When I started using the wheelchair 16 years ago, it was a tremendous new freedom … I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again. Just being out on the street was exhilarating.”

And yet, Austin noticed that people started treating her very differently.

“It was as if they couldn’t see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended,” says Austin. “They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like ‘limitation,’ ‘fear,’ ‘pity’ and ‘restriction.’ … I knew that I needed to make my own stories about this experience.”

In today’s jaw-dropping talk, Austin explores how the divide between the way she sees herself and the way others see her inspires her art, which challenges the traditional notion of disability and shares the joy she feels experiencing the world from her chair.

One of Austin’s first series in this vein was called “Traces from a Wheelchair,” created in 2009. For the work, Austin used paint on the wheels of her chair to create glorious loops — both on enormous sheets of paper and on the grass outside the gallery showing the exhibit.

“The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with,” explains Austin. “It was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people. It seemed to open up new perspectives.”

Austin went on to found Freewheeling, an initiative to expand the bounds of Disability Arts with fellow creators Jack Morris and Shirley Phillips. The group soon staged the three-part installation “Freewheeling: An Absent Presence or a Present Absence,” also in 2009, bringing the same concept to the streets of the town of Plymouth.

While many loved the installation, though, some locals saw the exhibit as graffiti — leading the BBC to cover the exhibit. “Some people may see it as vandalism,” Austin says defending her work. “But it’s the thought and concept that makes it artwork.”

Next, Austin had a crazy idea: to use her wheelchair to explore underwater. In 2010, with a grant from the Arts Council England’s Impact program, she began building an underwater wheelchair for a work she called “Testing the Water.”

“I realized that scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way that a wheelchair does,” explains Austin in today’s talk. “But the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure — completely different to people’s responses to the wheelchair. So I thought, ‘I wonder what will happen if I put the two together?’”

“When we started talking to people about it, engineers were saying it wouldn’t work, the wheelchair would go into a spin, it was not designed to go through water — but I was sure it would,” Austin told the BBC of the chair. “If you just put a thruster under the chair all the thrust is below the center of gravity so you rotate. It was certainly much more acrobatic than I anticipated.”

Austin had hugely ambitious plans for her underwater wheelchair. She applied to be part of the Cultural Olympiad, the art extravaganza surrounding the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games. The plan: to take the underwater wheelchair to the ocean.

The incredible work above, which Austin called “Creating the Spectacle,” not only required months of intense physical training — it also necessitated a creative and technical team. Trish Wheatley, co-producer, shares in a blog post that the crew headed to Egypt to film Austin exploring the Red Sea in her wheelchair. The location gave the tropical backdrop and marine life that make this video so magical. And, because the water was warmer, Austin could dress in everyday clothing. The video took six days of filming, Austin going under for multiple 20-minute dives.

“Creating the Spectacle” was performed on August 29. For it, a swimming pool was transformed into an unconventional stage, with 23 scuba-equipped spectators (several of them disabled) going underwater to watch Austin dive in live. The performance was synthesized with the footage of Austin in the Red Sea and with the video above, called “Finding the Flame,” which shows Austin discovering the Paralympic torch in a cave

We can’t wait to see where Austin’s wheelchair will take her next. We place bets on: the sky.

ABACUS, performed at The Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center in Troy, NY. Photo: Lars Jan

Lars Jan, a TED Fellow, creates multimedia performances that probe the ubiquity of screens and propaganda in our culture. Today, his show ABACUS—billed as “a multimedia talking tour of our hyper-networked world to come”—opens at BAM’s Fisher Fishman Space in Brooklyn, New York. It’s a show delivered by his invented persona, Paul Abacus, about the future of national borders and the workings of contemporary persuasion—with a giant panda appearing overhead on occasion. It’s a show that Jan first gave a sneak peek of back at TEDGlobal 2011. Below, the edited transcript of a conversation we had with Jan about his work at the time.

Tell us more about ABACUS.

I want ABACUS to start a conversation about our relationship to screens and about how, in our culture, propaganda wins over content so much of the time. It’s a very visual, sixty-minute direct address to the audience. One of the big things that ABACUS is about is increasing visual literacy, so that people are better able to discern good content from bad — and truths from fiction or propaganda — more easily.

We performed ABACUS at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012, as part of New Frontier, and we launched a successful Kickstarter campaign for it as well. We did some public performances on the streets, some choreographed paparazzi, and some impromptu press conferences and choreographed protests, which were also part of the piece.

A lot of your work explores our screen-based culture. How did you become obsessed with this theme? 

I think it came on slowly. I am an only child, raised by my mom, and like a lot of kids growing up in America, I watched a lot of television. I was also part of that generation where personal computers first came into the home.

Technology, computing, and screens are completely central to my work. I’m ambivalently obsessed with screens: I love how democratic they are, in the sense that they allow all this information,  and intelligent, aesthetic vision to travel the map in no time. At the same time, I’m very curious about screens as they relate to how we gather, and relate to live events.

Ever since cinema was introduced, screens have been kicking the teeth in of live performances. And I think that there’s something that has been a little bit lost because of this. Screens encourage people to stay in, and screens encourage people to look at an object in a public space as opposed to another person. The pendulum is swinging so far in favor of the screen, and it’s going to swing even further. Screens are going to be all over our public and private spaces, mapped onto cars, trees, architecture. Futurists talk about embedding them into contact lenses.

Unfortunately screens have become primarily created in the service of advertising. Executives want television shows to be good so that they can sell the advertising slots for more money. And now the same thing is happening on my cell phone and on the Internet.

I think it’s a really impoverished way of thinking about what’s possible with screen space, and what we could do with it educationally, culturally, and communicatively — in terms of encouraging diversity of aesthetic experiences, but also in terms of encouraging something that is closer to what a true democracy might look like. I think screens could be integral to that. But because of the direction screens are currently heading, I think live events and live gatherings are going to emerge as incredibly important in the next decade.

Above: A trailer for ABACUS, created for the Sundance Film Festival.

In promoting a renaissance of live performance, do you hope to see the prevalence of screens decrease?

It sounds like I’m damning screen culture or something, but I’m not. I love screens. Screens are in my work. Technology is in my work. Our lives have so much to do with that relationship. In the way that you would inoculate somebody with a vaccine by taking in a small amount of the virus into your body, in my work, screens are sort of like the vaccination. I use screens in order to put performers and the audience in relationship to the screen. It enables a very active dialogue that’s not formally about screens, but that somehow makes that relationship resonate with whatever the content is. It allows us to meditate on that very contemporary experience.

There’s a lot that’s happening in our culture right now that the screen-based media is not able to critique, because it’s working at the service of a lot of people who are actually causing the problems. I think working from the artistic and the financial fringe is the only real way to keep a separation between something like advertising or a corporate interest, and real artistic freedom. I believe the live event is a platform for artists to have a much higher level of true conversation within society.

You have a pretty strong stance on the ways you will fund your art. How do you manage to do it?

Well, I lie, cheat and steal. [Laughs]

The problem is, there’s not a single pathway. It’s always an improvisation. Being an artist in this culture, you have to use a tremendous amount of your creativity just to find a way to do your work with integrity. That means producing your work and aligning yourself with institutions, supporters, and festivals that you respect. It’s also about finding a way to bend what I’m interested in to the contexts that are available. It’s about jumping on those opportunities, and looking at them as interesting platforms that I didn’t necessarily conceive of in the first place.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?

Anybody focused on increasing the quality of face-to-face human interaction is going to be riding a growing wave in the next couple of decades. Do everything you can to increase true face-to-face encounters and the quality of those interactions — whether it’s investing in community programs or international exchanges, in rethinking public space or public transportation. People are going to be hungry for that social contact, in order to counterbalance our increasingly mediated lives. Leverage that trend. I believe it’s going to be a very profound one, and will apply to a lot of different businesses.

You’ve said that before realizing you were an artist, you dedicated yourself to more conventional ways of working for social causes. When was the moment you realized you were an artist?

I took a directing class in college, and that was the first moment I realized I was able to collage a lot of different things I was interested in. I made a piece in the class where I integrated some short clips of videos from La Dolce Vita, which is one of my favorite movies, some poetry from Paradise Lost, which is one of my favorite works of literature, played with light in the classroom, and I performed a bit myself.

I don’t think I knew what I was doing, but I think I became aware that there was an impulse that was guiding choices I didn’t know why I was making. I think the moment that I realized I could stop making “logical” choices and just make instinctual choices, was when it occurred to me, “Oh, maybe that’s what it means to feel like you are inspired.”

That type of work made me so much happier than writing a paper or constructing an argument with three bullet points. I think what I recognized was that even though I love language and I love ideas, I feel like the way that we structure most of our arguments is far too literal. With my art I am able to express feelings in a way that is both more vague, and simultaneously more specific.

ABACUS, peformed at The Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center in Troy, NY. Photo: Lars Jan

What other pieces can we look forward to seeing from you?

I am working on a dance video installation with Nichole Canuso Dance Company. It’s called “Takes.” It’s a really beautiful dance video installation, very emotionally and visually driven, with no language.

The art lab I direct, Early Morning Opera, also just signed on with a new producer, MAPP International Productions, for a piece that I’m deeply excited about called HOLOSCENES, which is about global rituals. The name is a play on the current geologic epic that we’re in, the Holocene. We’re making a computer program that generates 24 random land-based GPS coordinates, and we’ll research rituals starting as close to those 24 points as possible.

The work is going to be a big outdoor installation in three giant acrylic aquariums. A custom hydraulic system will modulate the level of the water in the aquariums, according to environmental conditions around the world, in real time. It plays on the theme of popular water spectacles — the fountains in front of the Bellagio, for example — but primarily, the piece is about flooding. It’s about global catastrophe, the persistence of human behavior, and habits in the face of larger systems. It’s about our inability to change quickly — something that is both really gorgeous and so frustrating at the same time. (Read more about how Holoscenes is progressing. It was funded via Kickstarter in June of 2014.)

Why is being part of the TED Fellow community important to you?

The thing that’s most exciting to me about the TED Fellowship is communicating and working with creative people. I don’t really care if they are in “artistic fields” or not. The abiding commonality of TED Fellows is that whatever they do — if they’re astronomers or doctors or in some research field — they are just incredibly, hellaciously creative. The TED Fellowship has been the single group that I’ve been most proud to be a part of. They are truly smart, inspiring people.

America into the 20^th century was really about specialization, and I think we became overspecialized. That hinders vocabulary exchange. It makes certain things too complicated and opaque for other groups to understand and have a dialogue about. The finance system is a very good example of that. Systems have gotten so byzantine that only a few people know how to navigate them or even talk about them. I love being part of a community where a person like a TED Fellow who’s doing very, very complicated work in biotech, for example, makes it a point to communicate in a compelling way to people who don’t have that expertise.

Above: A look at HOLOSCENES.

Note: This piece was originally published on Nov. 4, 2011. It was updated on September 24, 2014, as ABACUS opened at BAM.