The bold, audacious, grand phantasmagoria of eg '07, the entertainment gathering, has just kicked off with the strings of the violinists of the Colburn School here at The Getty Center, perched in its sunshine-bathed peak overlooking the City of Angels.
We are delighted to bring you coverage of this second edition of the conference created by TED founder Richard Saul Wurman and presented this year by Michael Hawley, who has announced he intends to make it an annual extravaganza delivering magical moments from an ecclectic mix of creative minds and performers.
As a classic reacquaintance with the spirit of discovery that had inspired TED over two decades, Hawley has assembled a wondrous constellation of familiar and new. In his first session alone, he followed the superb violin strains with an update by former Microsoft CTO and gourmet chef Nathan Myhrvold of his reflections on the meaning of "cute" in the animal (and human!) kingdom, then turned to two 'newbies' UK Royal Calligrapher Donald Jackson and snow crystal photographer Ken Libbrecht, a physicist at Caltech.
Jackson had the whole, packed auditorium waving our arms and 'feeling' the motion of calligraphy in reproducing a stylized "A" in the air, while Libbrecht's photographs of single snowflakes ranging up to 10 mm in size, as well as exotic crystalline shapes.
Following this were some animated New Yorker cartoons sketches from the site ringtales, and a discussion of how they came to being, and Golan Levin's observations and experiments with media formats - ranging from concerts of attendees' cell phones as the sole musical instrument, but choreographed and seeded with ringtones supplied as they arrived at the concert, to voice-generated environments and self-creating face montages.
Jonathan Harris, who also spoke this year at POPtech, closed off the first session with his terrific presentation on the emotions and demograpics of people's feelings as expressed on the Internet. His parsing allows one to search, for example, for women who feel lame in their 30s when it's raining, as well as individual statements like "I feel as though I am diagonally parked in a parallel universe." Harris focusses on small scale personal stories, as well as diving into larger stories in the physical world, such as a narrative-selectable rendition of a whale hunt in Alaska. Harris ended with a superb series he had collected in Bhutan capturing people, their life's wish, and their sharing of what makes each person happy.
Last year's assembly at the nearby Skirball Center boasted a sense of irreverence and punctuation for RSW, who had vowed it would be a last shebang of his virtuoso gatherings, scheduled as it was practically on the eve of TED. This year, TED helped promote the conference to its own community, and committed to distributing videos of some of the presentations down the road, in a manner presumably similar to the popular TEDtalks.
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