Here is the full text of our live blog for TEDxBrighton 2014.
It was written by TEDxBrighton Storyteller Chris T-T and initially published live to our StoryStream as each talk finished. It is here in un-edited form, so apologies for any errors or flippant comments!
SAM RODDICK
No messing about! Closing speaker Sam Roddick goes for: “I’m going to do something very naughty and throw out my carefully prepared TED talk” so anything can happen now…
Sam resented her parents growing up but is now hugely proud of them, for building their legendary Body Shop business from the starting point of “doing no harm”. Now an artist, radical activist and founder of Coco de Mer, Sam has been actively campaigning from an early age and has tackled issues including pornography, feminism, exploitation, human rights and raunch culture.
I’m pretty sure her planned TEDx talk had nothing to do with her family’s legendary ideologically-driven business. But never mind that, and never mind whatever talk Sam actually wrote – community, ethics and economics are now at the forefront of her mind; specifically how individual voices within a community can be encouraged to permeate business and bring about positive change.
She asks: what is the purpose of our economic system? Yes, it is driven by the creation of production – the generation of profit and growth. But what is its purpose?
Sam is passionately off-script, eulogising her parents’ pioneering ethical business, explaining: “This is what my parents brought me up to believe. That the true purpose of a business has to be the positive contribution to society.” That’s not a remarkable view but it was a remarkable achievement – building a company on the basis of kindness having a tangible value.
“I was five years old and by the time I was 19 they had 2,000 shops. It grew by 50% each year, was a phenomenal success. Kindness has a value. And (crucially) that value brings returns and stability. Metaphorically, my parents would’ve like to see Harvard Business School burnt to the ground!”
The Body Shop founders created a corporation that defined itself as a community. The greatest thing they built was a community of people who worked together and demanded that their moral compass remained strong. Whenever the Body Shop used to stray, their own people would immediately let them know, to keep the values of the management in line. And this was encouraged from the top. It sounds like they nurtured the exact kind of beautiful worker rabble-rousing that most business management would run from screaming.
Then Sam brings it up to date; to address the current peak in inbalance of wealth and resource. “Statistically my daughter will be poorer than me; will rely on my wealth to make her way.”
Her closing stuff is furious and joyful at the same time, book-ending an exceptional fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants talk: “It’s up to us to whistleblow on bad business behaviour.”
FOX FISHER
Fox Fisher begins with his childhood in Saudi Arabia. Playing with friends he got mildly injured and they were all made to come and apologise to him, as if it was more serious. During this, one friend said: “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you were not a boy.”
It was a moment of revelation. “Neither did I,” says Fox.
An artist, trans activist, gender documenter, Fox is co-founder of My Genderation documentary films. Since taking part in My Transsexual Summer 2011, which coincided with the beginning of his medical transition, Fox’s life has changed dramatically. He and his film-making partner Lewis, are both presenters of Transgender UK (Ch4), a 45 minute show featuring 11 of their short films.
He points out some heartbreaking truths about trans lives: 41% of trans people will self-harm or try to kill themselves at some point. This is the magnitude of the struggle. Fox talks about his own periods of dangerous self-loathing, aged 10, then aged 15 when he had very little respect for himself as a teenager. Then aged 20 and aged 29, just before beginning his process of medical transition.
Fox describes his campaigns for transgender rights and the freedom to express your gender without prejudice – and in particular tells the story of his need to make the personally tough decision to continue publicly campaigning and educating, during his own medical transition, rather than keeping his head down and resting for a time.
Audience transfixed – such a powerful testimony about a trans life. Then Fox moves onto 2014 as a vital year for trans rights. He mentions Laverne Cox (star of Orange Is The New Black) talking about this year as a “tipping point” and also highlights a Paris Lees interview where she says “2014 is the year you no longer need to apologise.”
“Though I may have the social stigma of a body that does not conform – and may never conform – to society’s standards… Somewhere along my journey, the panic attacks did cease and I stopped hating every cell in my body.”
ALAN PEARCE
Journalist, broadcaster and author Alan Pearce asks us “what is the deep web?”. He challenges the audience with hard truths, in a talk about the anonymous underbelly of the Internet that aims to hide from prying eyes of government and corporate oversight, describes the good and bad sides of that anonymous Internet.
Alan’s clarity and brisk, dark humour makes these diconcerting topics clear and palatable: he unpacks some of the processes and implications of the current survellaince paradigm. “Next time you send an email for, say, mother’s day, include the words ‘bomb’, ‘kill’, ‘Obama’ and ‘Thursday’ and see what happens. And let me know!”
Alan’s core proposal is a challenge: that we embrace (and learn to use) the Deep Web, in order to protect ourselves from the Internet’s danger. He argues passionately that we are seeing the eradication of the very freedoms the Internet gave us. He presents this as a three-part overview of Internet controls.
It’s presented in a humorous, down-to-earth tone but the revelations are disconcerting and in some cases genuinely scary; like the $50 stalking package anonymously (easily) purchasable online, that accesses phone location and can even in some cases enable trolls and stalkers to switch on their victims’ cameras.
Ha, love it, he’s arrived for his concluding section at brilliant 1970s film Network. “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” – we should all be doing this, argues Alan. Yet in the film they were just worried about TV rotting people’s brains. Now, this is far more serious.
It’s a call for us, as a population, to realise the depth of trouble we’re in.
Alan is a regular speaker at events, and teaches cyber-security and counter-surveillance to journalists. He’s also the author of Deep Web for Journalists: Comms, Counter-Surveillance, Search along with a number of other books.
CAMILLE BAKER
And we’re back, with Dean Atta reclaiming the mic to introduce the final session, Going Foward.
We kick off with Canadian-born artist, researcher and curator Camille Baker, who works in participatory performance and interactive art, using a multitude of connected forms. She’s currently course leader at UCA.
Camille’s here to unpack her interest in telepathy, through creative – specifically in her case wearable – technology.
She starts describing nerves, butterflies in her stomach, for example at performance (good gag), before travelling back to her childhood where – after her parents’ divorce (and a young life that would involve a lot of travel across Canada between parents) – as a young girl she felt an intense longing to be able to communicate without any conventional means, in order to reach whichever parent she was far away from.
This is the root of Camille’s obsession with communication that we might think of as telepathy.
Over the course of her artmaking career through the 1990s (with occasional forays into indie rock, like everyone!), Camille developed her strong ideas of technology as a wearable tool for listening to whats going on in the body (and mind).
Camille’s fascination is with all things emotional, embodied, felt and sensed: the visceral, physical, relational, and participatory. As her career takes shape, her projects involve video, communication devices and biofeedback.
She says she has been on a continuous quest to work with new and emerging technologies to explore expressive methods, via art and performance, to connect people with each other, over distance better and in more embodied, emotional ways.
This sums up is the set of problems she wants to solve through wearable tech.
More recently she finds herself part of a creative community working in wearables – and she has got involved in educating in this area, because of that joyful facet of the maker world; that sharing is such a priority.
Camille’s current interest (challenge, maybe) is how to bring together all the various stakeholders in wearables and in particular highlight and welcome in the artistic voice (as opposed to the design and tech voice) to work out how to broaden the scope and imagination of wearable tech. So her trigger interest in telepathy has shaped her entire working life and still informs her art.
JIM FLEETING
The last of Marc’s Makers takes to the stage.
“Hi, I’m Jim Fleeting and I’m not a rock star. But that’s OK because I’ve become a luthier.”
Jim Fleeting is a guitar maker and repairer. Jim combines modern engineering methods and traditional craftsmanship to create both acoustic and electric guitars.
He talks about ‘Gas'; guitar aquisition syndrome. I’ve heard this phrase used widely among musicians and particularly recording studio heads and photographers (more often as ‘gear aquisition syndrome’, though ‘guitar’ works fine for me). So many arts people are addicted to collecting equipment!
Jim describes running a plain over a piece of mahogony and immediately seeing the beautiful wood emerge from beneath the nondescript surface.
A funny, endearing speaker, taking an optimstic path through his story, he proudly shows us his first ever effort at making a guitar – already it “looks like a real one”.
“I realised it couldn’t be a hobby: I was just going to have to do it for the rest of my life. We all have in us the ability to learn the skills to change our lives.”
Jim studied his craft in America and returned to England to build fine instruments, that are both pleasing to the ear and to the eye. Although known for innovation in his work and very modern looking instruments, Jim uses very traditional techniques, so the underlying quality is sound.
His work has been featured in The Guardian, Bass Player magazine and Total Guitar.
He describes the feeling of elation seeing one of his instruments onstage in the hands of a hugely successful musician (Stevie Wonder’s bass player) and closes by holdling his handmade guitar aloft to cheers. The rock star life reclaimed.
JAMES OTTER
This year’s obligatory TEDx surf dude is James Otter.
Otter Surfboards evolved from James’ desire to marry a passion for woodworking with his passion for surfing.
He’s been on a search for a surfboard with a minimal environmental impact. With a background in designing and making award-winning furniture, as well as building traditional timber framed structures, after a single conversation and one friend asking him about making a surfboard, James turned his skills and experience to this new challenge; crafting wooden boards.
Now James makes surfboards and runs full-length workshops enabling people to make a surfboard from wood themselves, from scratch. He talks passionately about watching people’s perception shift as people re-connect with craft and using their hands.
James argues that that re-connection with the act of making, by getting people to take the time to make something they’ll love (in this case the surfboard) can have lasting, even life-changing implications. Not because they’ll carry on making more surfboards over and over again – but because once they’ve reconnected with those lost feelings and skills, in adulthood, it’s a permanent re-connection.
James tells the story of Luka from Switzerland, who spent days making a surfboard from scratch, put huge passion into the construction, then took a blowtorch to it. In Luka’s case it was the act of making, not the object itself, that gave value. He made it to destroy it.
This feels almost ceremonial to me, reminds me of KLF’s burning of money.
James concludes with what he, himself has learnt, in response to Luka, about letting people own their work; “As much as I may try to keep people on course with their creations, that’s what they are: their creations.”
TOM LYWOOD
The UK’s foremost truffle hunter, Tom Lywood, has brought Valentino his dog and some truffles which he sourced from the Sussex downs.
Tom was born in Hampshire, UK, in 1962. He studied agriculture followed by a one year cooking course. He then produced homemade cooking stock and sold it to major outlets, before setting up a spitroasting business. On the sale of that company he established Private Chef Ltd, specialising in temporary commercial kitchens for major events.
But then a botched operation on his knee left his left arm partially paralysed. Having taught himself to draw using his left hand he began to hunt for truffles – and write poetry which married themes of hares, truffles and the Little Folk.
An eccentric, blurry, almost mythical figure onstage, Tom seems to have stepped in from a different universe, more than any of the other speakers. He reminds me of people I meet in the Dark Mountain project, or in deep ecology networks. There’s even something of the Alistair Macintosh about him, although without any of that great academic’s layered pacifist sharpness.
Anyway, Tom describes how the forests used to be populated, rather than desolate as they are now. The Roman name ‘truffle’ just means a swelling in the earth. Today, there are more truffle in suburbia than in the deep dark forest, because we still footfall there. He says “Truffles are valuable but they drive us mad.”
Tom is certain Harold’s dog in the Bayeux Tapestry is a truffle dog.
At this point, his talk continues in the form of an impromptu interview with Marc, as Tom seems more comfortable answering direct questions than speaking in a formal way about his life and work. There is a sense in which Tom’s ‘otherness’ from this event and setting reminds one how conventional and within social norms the rest is, regardless of how radical the ideas presented may be. Everybody else is talking to the crowd in a standard way. In comparison Tom’s insight seems to burst out of him like a fast-growing plant, unaided by his erudition, or conventional tropes of public speaking.
Tom makes the point that the truffle cannot survive without us eating it. “The truffle is hunting us. I am the hunted.” But the forest is changing, he argues. The days have gone when we were using the forest properly, taking (stealing!) wood from it, only now coming back where we’re reviving coppicing arts.
Another head-spinning psychedelic segment for TEDxBrighton, deeply eccentric in the finest way.
EJ OSBORN
Product designer, woodworker, and more lately spoon carver, EJ Osborn, studied Arboriculture with the Royal Forestry Society and Product Design at Kingston University.
EJ spent years exploring traditional heritage crafts and British woodland culture – before marrying the two together to concentrate on carving functional spoons and utensils, from the freshly felled wood of locally foraged and storm damaged trees.
She says her starting point was having a dire need to simplify her life, while at the same time falling for the process of doing something that previously she’d only been doing for the outcomes – hand making wooden spoons.
EJ now supplies spoons and utensils to a variety of shops across the globe. But she also teaches people how to carve their very own wooden utensils and is an advocate for the mindful, healing and empowering capabilities that making in this way brings.
She describes the class in which people commit to spending the entire day with one piece of wood, which builds into a relationship as it takes shape as a spoon. “Working with the wood,” she says, “As opposed to making the wood do what it doesn’t want to do.”
Her classes take place in The Spoon Zone, which gets a great reaction from this audience. It’s a very quiet, focused space where the spoon making takes place, with almost no talk or distraction, so people are encouraged to take their breaks outside the zone.
It’s a positive thing that often for carvers, the activity itself and the re-connection with physical making is so overwelming, it distracts completely from what is being made. “I know I’ve gone beyond carving a spoon, into whittlin’ for whittlin’s sake. But I can’t stop!”
EJ closes with: “I’m reluctant to say this, because I love spoons and spoons are my living but you could say it’s not entirely about the spoon.”
ANDOLTZ TELLERIA
Marc welcomes Andoitz Telleria to the TEDx stage. He is co-founder of Axalko, a company that specialises in creating high-quality wood frame bicycles and walking sticks.
After studying architecture at universities in the Basque Country and Helsinki, Andoitz became Technical Director of Txirbil Koop, a company dedicated to carpentry and wood processing machinery building.
He now develops cutting edge technologies to enable the making of state-of-the-art wooden products.
Which brings Andoltz to the core of his presentation; the extraordinary, elegant looking wooden bicycle, which is here onstage with him. Andoltz explains some of the challenges and techniques required to construct the bicycle so that it is viable; then moves on to a skier’s hiking pole. Such an unlikely thing to be made successfully from wood… a stick!
Together with Enrique Ardura (their passion for cycling and hiking coupled with the breadth of experience gleaned from an extensive career in the wood industry), Andoltz has been able to weave together knowledge needed to face the technological challenges to develop a workable, durable bicycle out of wood.
Expanding this idea to general walking sticks and hiking poles is the future, in other words, the potential for mainstream commercial products, produced in these new ways.
BEN EDMONDS
Walking onto the stage, one of the more popular speakers from the get-go – and perhaps the ultimate archetype for a hipster, except he’s clearly not from New York or Portland…
It’s Ben Edmonds, founder of Blok Knives, handmakes kitchen knives from his workshop in Derbyshire. Having worked in graphic and web design for 12 years, Ben stumbled upon knife making around 3 years ago, while browsing YouTube.
It’s an unlikely but inspiring journey. Obsessed, teaching himself through trial and error, books and videos, Ben soon became addicted to his new found passion. Now, Ben supplies his handmade precision knives to chefs and home cooks worldwide.
He has turned that hobby into an eighteen month waiting list.
The Blok story is full of determination, drive and enthusiasm; wanting to make a product designed to last, in what seems to be an ever growing ‘Disposable World’.
Ben is fantastically uplifting on the art of making for joy itself and – even once it has become a career – installing that sense of joy at the core of what you’re doing, so it doesn’t become a chore. His relationship with his customers is informal, cordial and personal.
“A week later, thinking I’d never hear from him again, I received a letter in the post. He’d sent me eight post-dated cheques. His letter said, please cash these, once a month, until there’s enough money in your account to start making the knife.”
JACQUES PERETTI
First up for the Makers section, a familiar face to many here; journalist and broadcaster Jacques Peretti, whose acclaimed BBC series The Men Who Made Us Fat and follow-up, The Men Who Made Us Spend examined the historical roots and true causes of the obesity crisis and consumerism.
Jacques’ new series will go out in January 2015, specifically tackling inequality.
He asks: “What are hands? The things on the ends of your arms.” to lead into a discussion of our divorce from our manual skills and our brainwashing into consumers.
He argues consumerism was the conspiracy that turned out to be true. It was about making us all middle-class. Before the rise of consumerism, we could be workers, skilled with our hands. Until this thing pushed us all to the thought process “Hands bad, head good.”
Forcing us to buy stuff that we never needed before. Perettis connects that into the lightbulb cartel that is the root of planned obsolescence. Then connects forward to Alfred Sloan who invented the iPhone in the 1950s (!) by understanding how we need to “alter the psycology of the consumer”.
This talk is brilliant, reminiscent of Adam Curtis blog entries for the BBC. “Sex sells… if you’re selling sex. Sell the consumer happiness via freedom from fear.” So, halitosis was an invented marketing term, to launch products like Listerine. The Hummer / SUV was sold off the back of 9/11 at a point where you could market a military vehicle as a domestic car.
He concludes by tying that to current gross inequality. The extremes of top and bottom and then the inevitablility of how the middle-class itself is squeezed into a ‘precariat’. The solution? A return to transferable skills and craft.
Extraordinary.
Jacques has written for The Guardian, Wired and the Huffington Post. He is currently writing a book about the ideology of risk and how it changed our world.
SECTION THREE: MARC KOSKA AND THE MAKERS
For section three, taking over temporarily from host Dean Atta is TEDxBrighton’s own Marc Koska, who introduces his selection of inspiring makers to share their work.
Right, so we’re into slightly shorter talks, with a more pinpoint focus on craft, making, connecting the modern hi-tech world with important, older ideas of quality, longevity and care.
Marc begins by describing a recent visit to the Tower Of London’s nightly Role Of Honour ceremony commemorating World War 1, amongst their sea of poppies, with the reading of 180 names of fallen, followed by The Last Post.
After the ceremony Marc and his family walked amongst the poppies and he was powerfully struck by the tiny act of touching a poppy and discovering that each one was hand-made. They weren’t manufactured in a factory somewhere in the far east, they were all handmade by groups in England. Our connection with that is the crux.
Marc’s over-arching aim for this section is to challenge our gullibility towards consumerism.
These will fly by, watch this space…
CICI BLUMSTEIN
Our final talk before lunch. It’s been intense, varied and very inspiring so far.
CiCi Blumstein is about to change the game. She walks onstage in an extraordinary all-green frog outfit, introducing herself as Agent Amphibian. Dive in, people!
CiCi is a performance artist, choreographer, film-maker and, crucially for today’s talk, frog collaborator. Born in Germany, she’s been based in the UK since 1989. CiCi’s work re-codes urban and wild space through direct interaction and construction with nature. She creates new, often startling experiences and connections between people and their environment, and with each other.
Now, she tells the psychedelic, passionate tale of how she became Agent Amphibian: she’s rescuing a frog, making a personal, direct interaction with an animal in a new way to her, re-connecting to something she’d forgotten and then, in a state of inspiration, committing to provide a space for the creature and its friends.
How to build that, then?
CiCi made a temporary habitat. From a barren, urban backyard in Brighton, with nothing suitable for hibernation or hiding for little creatures, to the north-Norfolk Broads as inspiration – although impossible to achieve – instead (at least for starters) a sweet plastic frog home. And later, a miniature wildlife pond.
Frogs rule. More global background about them, including audio of their calls.
She describes how fast life will come to any place you let it. Her pond is teeming in weeks.
CiCi says that some Puerto Ricans, when they go on holiday abroad, so miss the croak call of their national frog that they can’t fall asleep properly, so they take audio recordings with them. She follows this with frog croak call-and-response with the audience. Amazing.
Also, a short audience interruption (the first interjection I’ve ever seen at a TEDx event) where someone in the crowd delightedly shouts out that they also have frog croak audio on their phone.
No Kermit, sadly.
More seriously: since June 2013, CiCi has been Artist-in-Residence at the FuseBox in New England House, where she is co-designing, developing and delivering FuseBox24 – a program of radical start-up business support – building a unique innovation model and supporting & challenging the creative start-ups who are taking part in the program. All of which sounds nothing like she’s coming across right now, as a frog-obsessed performance genius.
She closes with the story of Tuffy, the loneliest frog in the world. My head is spinning. I’m strongly reminded of 52 Hertz, The Loneliest Whale In The World, writ tiny.
Ha, I’m SO glad I included Paul MCartney’s ‘Frog Chorus’ in the TEDxBrighton Spotify Playlist.
RUTH ANSLOW
Ruth Anslow, co-founder of hisBe is up now; a very popular choice of local speaker, she gets a big reaction at the mention of her business – it’s a local, independent, fiercely ethical supermarket, the development of which is the subject of her talk.
Her first slide is a chicken pie. Ruth’s career developed inside mainstream retail and she shares the classic horror story of the supermarket buyer fighting against quality in order to reduce costs, which then aren’t passed on to the consumer. Shocking (though sadly unsurprising) it brings home how bad this marketplace has become, relying on business models that intensify agriculture and food production… mind you, I could really do with a pie now.
“The big supermarket bosses have made profit their goal and their god.”
Ruth, along with her sister Amy decided to build a new kind of superstore; an independent supermarket built on ethical and transparent trading practises and sustainable sourcing policies.
Their joint professional experience spans the private, public and third sectors including global companies like Unilever, Sara Lee, Innocent and Nestlé, at the London Fire Service and the Metropolitan Police and at two charities; Groundwork and The Prince’s Trust. This wealth of experience now turned its gaze onto social enterprise.
hisBe stands for How It Should Be. Planning started in August 2010 and they took three years, starting with a blog before anything else, building a loyal following of eager customers before they opened. Their strong focus was to start with how it should be. Three years of business planning, crowdfunding,
hiSbe exists to make good food more affordable. Ruth and hiSbe are on a mission to take on the mainstream supermarkets and make the food industry fairer and more sustainable! Their ambition is to spend 30 years turning hisBe into a national supermarket chain, competing with the traditional big brands. They’re 11% ahead of their targets, giving 68p of every £1 to their suppliers.
“Change comes in two forms: you can slowly steer towards change, or you can break completely with the current form and find a new way. But both forms are useful. Innovators need to start somewhere new.”
Ruth asks innovators to build your lighthouse, even if you start small, get the word out. She closes: “This is what it took: a sense of indignation, a vision and a lighthouse on full beam for all to see.”
MEGAN LECKIE
Megan Leckie is here to talk about finding innovative ways to engage young people in participation and creativity, in particular through BlockBuilders, which she co-founded with Joe Palmer.
She starts off with an account of growing up in Dubai and the parts of life there that were startlingly un-normal, yet with nothing to contextualise against, she’d not really become aware of. The shock of realising you’re not in a democracy, or that the way certain people are treated is regarded as terrible in other parts of the world. This became the root for Megan’s engagement with social projects, once she got to the UK.
Megan came to Brighton as a teenager and she graduated with a BA in Film and Screen Studies.
Confronted by British young people’s apathy, contrasted to her own engagement with political process, having grown up in a place without where people have no say, she sought to find ways to engage young poeple with social issues.
Her key discovery was the omnipresent online blockbuilding game MineCraft – and a realisation of how that could be utilised as a fantastic starting point (an unequalled modern engagement tool) for kids, reaching them at a young age.
Relating to this, Megan talks about how she co-founded BlockBuilders with Joe Palmer, working with youngsters on an industrial site in Lewes and relating that work to urban regeneration, for example in the London Road area in Brighton.
Powerful argument that technology can be used to create a positive impact within society, and that it is the best way to engage young people.
PETER JAMES
The second session is entitled Drawn Together.
A big name for this year’s TEDx; walking onstage now is one of Britain’s best loved writers of crime thrillers, the mighty Peter James. As Dean says in his introduction, James’ series of Brighton-based police procedural detective novels about Roy Grace have sold over 15 million copies worldwide and his books have been translated into 36 languages.
Peter explores the formation of his Brighton-based character Detective Superintendent Roy Grace through stories of real policing here in Sussex.
“Nobody sees more of human life in a 30 year career than a cop.”
Peter is both funny and thought-provoking. For example the story of the armed officer who is shot in the knee while chasing a criminal, rolling around in the worst pain of his life, effing and blinding, before the ambulance arrives. He’s OK in the end. But the next morning an old lady from the same street goes to the police station to complain about his language.
James gives an unabashed positive, admiring account of police officers’ working lives, reminding us of the incredible, often heartbreaking work they do, day in, day out. James works very closely with specific officers in the planning and plotting of his novels.
This is a deft blend of the comic and tragic, often within seconds in the same anecdote. The underlying picture is of huge admiration for the day-to-day work of the police – and especially the human insight and understanding of human nature, in very experienced cops.
They do jobs that nobody else would cope with. Climbing a tree to find bits of brain and bone when someone’s shot themselves. Last night we searched a Hove domestic waste site for a murder weapon, where the waste was literally steaming and rats the size of cats were running everywhere.
The coping mechanism of the police is gallows humour. Rescue helicopter staff have to check the base of Beachy Head once a week. It’s the second most popular suicide spot in the world. One officer told James that many bodies they find at the bottom have chalk under their fingernails – they’ve changed their minds halfway down. She said she was thinking of starting a bunjee jumping business at Beachy Head, called Try Before You Die.
Peter James closes with a simple reminder of how important their work is: “They are the glue that holds society together.”
DEANNA RODGER
An ace closing speaker for section one, before the first break: actor and prolific spoken word poet and events organiser Deanna Rodger is next up, she’s the youngest ever UK Poetry Slam Champion, which she won in 2007 / 2008. She is co-founder of two successful spoken word events, Chill Pill and Come Rhyme With Me.
Deanna kicks right in, in verse. Says she’s mainly going to be reading poems because when she does public speaking “I tend to go off in tangents… like I am right now.”
She speaks about how to encourage young people to use technology such as iPads to do more than just play games, to create and communicate beyond their boundaries. Choose your location, film it, upload it, share your thoughts and images of ‘home’ with people around the world. Ideas like this can enable young people to “be their own protagonists”. Deanna is currently working on a one woman show called LondonMatter inspired by and built from her time in South Africa on this project, with support from The Roundhouse, The Albany and the Arts Council.
Example of the Internet as the sharing space: Deanna’s angry response in poetry to a Lily Allen video that went viral and triggered a huge amount of discussion around the subject, culminating in a Twitter conversation with Allen herself, who ended up sharing her video and praising her courage for the poem, despite disagreeing with Deanna’s reaction to the video. “I said, I don’t think you don’t care. I just think the video misjudged. Because it was.”
“This is called ‘How To Be A Feminist’. If I was to become a politican, this would be my opening speech.”
Astounding poetry. And the dropped-in line “Wake up and fuck everyone… at TEDxBrighton,” draws a particularly warm response from the audience.
It is your right to get home safe.
Write it: it is your right to get home safe.
But don’t read the comments.
Never read the comments.
STEFANIA DRUGA
Stefania is a former Google employee and a graduate of international Erasmus Mundus master of Media Engineering for Education (France, Spain, Portugal).
Here’s her starting point: imagine you could spend one month to work on something you really care about. This is a passionate, focused talk from the set-up.
In summer 2012 Stefania was Education Teaching Fellow at Singularity University where she worked on a project to advise and coach 80 students from 36 countries. Stef introduces this hugely inspiring tech-based education work across the developing world, drawing on examples with children across Tanzania, Botswana and Ghana, across the African subcontinent to Rwanda.
She’s salvaging bits from donated computers and using them as raw material for kids to build and construct and create. Expecting resistence, Stefania is particularly impressed by how open minded all the schools are towards kids learning. There’s a powerful sense of appreciating the support.
The way people perceive ‘making’ (as well as educating) is different around the world. So how do we create consistent approach? Stefania finds her answer in shipping containers. They’re everywhere, all around the world, standardised structure, ready to be placed and kitted out wherever needed.
Brighton is ahead of the curve on the shipping container multi-use revolution – this point in the talk reminds me of the block of heavily subsidised ‘half way’ housing, recently built from a bunch of shipping containers, just off New England Street. It’s this kind of outside the box re-purposing that enabled Stef’s work.
She’s is a fiery, driven presence onstage. Inspiring stuff.
Stefania shows us video of installing a shipping container. Turning it into a learning space. “It wasn’t sexy in the first week,” she says, “Smelled bad!” She details re-making that kind of raw space potential into a social, education environment in a fast turnaround time. Sourcing materials, grabbing donations wherever possible and, with everyone pitching in.
Stefania tells Bokamoso’s story. In Botswana her name means ‘Future’. She studied science, very hardworking, good English. Stefania tried to convince her university to give her a fellowship to travel to Berlin, support her education. They said yes but cancelled at the last minute, deciding that it was more important for her not to miss a semester at home. Someone else intervened, trying to persuade Bokamoso’s mother not to let her attend. Stefania managed to book Bokamoso a last minute flight and convinced her Mother to let her daughter come (in a two-hour conversation on a bad phone connection). She shows a video that vividly testifies to the immense value of Bokamoso travelling. It’s fascinating to see, when they open up to these kind of experiences, how lifechanging it can be.
Nice touch; a quick aside is a moving photo of Indian women, engineers, who sent the first Indian space mission, with a budget, as Stefanio points out to decent laughs, that was smaller than the budget for the movie Gravity.
JU ROW FARR
Next up, Blast Theory founder Ju Row Farr.
Blast Theory is a leading digital and interactive art collective, which will be familiar to many people in Brighton and has been active since 1991. Ju Row Farr studied textiles and fine art at Goldsmiths and trained originally as a dancer. Blast Theory is increasingly acclaimed worldwide for adventurous immersive works. In 2011 Ju took a sabbatical to do her own work which includes painting, writing and occasionally singing. She is based in Portslade.
She starts with the pacifist community the Hutterites and connects this to Dunbar’s Number of 150 people, making up the theoretically ideal sized community.
She brings in the interactivity of Blast Theory’s major projects and turns to Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built In Hell which influenced Blast Theory’s work at this crucial point. She touches upon the unexpected, wide-ranging positive outcomes, especially in communities, from structures set up even for cultural reasons.
KARL MATTINGLY
First speaker, first session.
Karl Mattingly founded London based Internet platform slowXchange, which uses crowdsourcing to forecast information about financial performance, creditworthiness and management quality of the world’s biggest companies. Karl’s a CPA with an MBA from Columbia University.
Karl is a “wisdom of crowds” guy, big-time. He’s speaking about using Internet communications and social media. He’s an inveterate optimist when it comes to the capacities of people and technology to solve today’s problems.
Karl was convinced that he could use the internet and software to harness crowds and improve upon the assessments made about how robust companies are, beyond what was already being done by standard organisations such as credit ratings agencies. And he found himself with the time and resources to take on this huge problem.
He tells us the story of hundreds of people guessing the weight of a dead ox at a county fair – and how accurate the guess becomes, if you average out everyone’s answer. Karl built a team of 20 academics around the world to help him investigate the problems in judging companies’ durability.
Great slide about the old systems, he’s challenging: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary relies upon his not understanding.” – Upton Sinclair
Karl great on the positives and negatives of trust-based online platforms, from Indiegogo to Tripadviser. The slow rise of reputation versus conventional contracts.
“It’s pretty simple: my forecast is that these networks are here to stay. My forecast is, there is another way, it is the crowd and it’s here to stay.”
HARRY WALKS OUT…
First of all, here’s singer and virtuoso guitarist Harry Keyworth, who will be opening each of the four sessions with live original music. Harry’s a percussive looping songwriter with a bunch of effects pedals, producing beautiful noise from the acoustic guitar. He sounds fantastic, chiming out into the auditorium as the audience continues to pile in.
Harry’s got a new EP coming out in January called The Fine Line EP, his debut The Flux EP came out earlier this year, so check that out too. http://harrykeyworth.com.