#tedxalbertopolis

YOU GUYS.  I got to go to my first TEDx event today in Royal Albert Hall!  The event had twelve speakers and several exhibits/performances/experiments throughout the building over the course of five hours.  We were asked to move seats during each interval to meet new people, and I made a new friend who just began studying dance in Greenwich!  The event centered around the intersections of the arts and sciences and was split into three sections: Seeing things differently, Making things happen, and Shaking things up.  Speakers included Sally Davies (the current and first-ever female Chief Medical Officer of Britain), John Halpern (a cryptic crossword puzzle creator), Jess Thom (a woman who creatively embraces her severe Tourette's Syndrome), and Ryan Francois (a choreographer on Strictly Come Dancing), among many other scientists, musicians, historians, and designers.  HOW FREAKING COOL?!

Some of the exhibits during the interval:

Musical Jello

"Race for the Higgs-Boson"

Entomological exhibit from the Natural History Museum collection

I won't try to share with you secondhand the ideas I heard earlier today because (1) I could not do them justice, (2) they will all be on TED.com shortly, and (3) I am too darn slow to type all of it up and still get sleep before an early day tomorrow.  However, I will give you a preview of Roland Lamb's talk: This man created an instrument called the Seaboard, which is like a sexy piano.  Roland studied piano and wished that it could have more variety in its sound quality, so he designed a board that looks like a flat piano and has a pliable surface, whose keys respond to the quality, not just the force, of the movement of the player's fingers.  First, someone played the giant, gorgeous organ of the Royal Albert Hall.  Then, someone played the piano.  And finally, at the end of the talk, someone played the Seaboard, and it put me in a blissful trance—What a beautiful sound!  Roland describes the instrument as allowing people to "sensually express what is within and sensually experience what is without" and explains that he created it because he wanted to "infuse humanity into the digital."  Wow.

Roland Lamb and three musicians (back: organ player, left: pianist, right: Seaboard player)

I could really connect to these Renaissance Men and Women, who refuse to dichotomize two very intertwined areas of study and exploration, who love creating and examining, who communicate across disciplines and look at the big picture and the meta-pictures.  I'm not going to lie... I definitely pictured myself up there giving a talk someday.

Ever dreamed of making music in the Royal Albert Hall? On 23 September you could get the chance - if newly announced TEDxAlbertopolis speaker Andrew Shoben gets his way. In a world first, Andrew plans to turn the Hall into a giant interactive music box with the audience as the working parts..

Andrew is the founder of greyworld, a group of artists that produce playful art in public spaces. He will use a camera positioned on the Hall’s ceiling to capture the distribution of colours across the seats below. As the camera pans across the auditorium, an algorithm will convert those colours into sounds and each attendee will act as a pin in a giant music box, playing their part in a unique musical composition.

“The performance will be the first of its kind, combining mathematics, technology and creativity to turn the audience into a completely original instrument,” says Andrew, who has wanted to create an artwork with a live audience for some time. “The opportunity to work with a space as exciting as the Royal Albert Hall is a dream come true. The Hall is full of fabulous sounds, and this formed the inspiration for our idea - to treat our audience as if they are notes in a composition. The exciting - and the nerve-wracking – thing, will be that we won’t know how the composition will sound until I am on stage, conducting. It’s a really exciting opportunity for everyone to be involved in.”

As well as Andrew, we are excited to announce four other extraordinary speakers who finalise our line-up - 

Historian Deirdre Murphy, who is curator of collections at the Historic Royal Palaces, including Kensington Palace, and an expert on the lives of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria.

Touretteshero Jessica Thom, who is “changing the world one tic at a time” by challenging people to react creatively and humorously to Tourette’s Syndrome.

Architectural critic, writer and editor Kieran Long, who engages people with design by breaking down barriers between disciplines. He is senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Evening Standard’s architecture critic.

And award-winning choreographer Ryan Francois, who is one of the world’s foremost authorities on jazz dance from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. His choreography brings a unique modern approach to traditional styles and has been featured on TV shows such as ‘Dancing With The Stars’ and ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ - where he choreographed the infamous Charleston routine that earned Chris Hollins & Ola Jordan four 10s in the final.

Kat Austen - artist and CultureLab editor at New Scientist - tells us why multi-disciplinarity is the key to a better future ...

One of my childhood heroes was Kier Hardie. He was a beacon of humanity during the industrial revolution at the turn of the 1900s. He took up work as a miner at the age of 11, only learned later to read and write and became a journalist and then politician. He set up unions and fought for free education, women’s suffrage and equality.

Hardie was a man beyond his time. He saw importance in education, and justice in egalitarianism. I would like to think that he also saw that the whole of a society - its culture - is greater than the sum of its parts.

We haven’t quite cracked egalitarianism yet, and these days we face other problems too - ones that stem from Hardie’s time of rapid industrialisation. These problems - climate change, food security, water shortages - threaten our physical existence. All of us. The global humans. And they are too complicated, and involve the actions of too many of us, to be tackled by an intellectual few.

By the same token, they are so big, so complex, that we can’t face them with a modular approach limited to siloed disciplines. We need everyone’s minds turned to every problem, constantly communicating - an awareness of multiple disciplines and complexity held by intellectually engaged people. Luckily for - or should that be thanks to - us, that’s what is happening.

Culture is a marvellous shifting emergence out of the swarm of our humanity and the forces directing them. Now, culture is coalescing. We’re moving away from reductionism, specialism and away from an erroneous notion of two cultures.

We are empowered, and we are learned, thanks to digital media. Most of us are connected constantly to the internet. Most of the content on the internet is free. And now, the a key bastion of paid-for content - science - is becoming freer too, with open access publishing and projects like the Open Knowledge Foundation Open Science Working Group which aim to disseminate knowledge freely.

We have instant access to information on pretty much anything we would want to know, and instant access to like-minded people. And while we may waste hours clicking through pictures of kittens in teacups, we are also spending our time learning, innovating and creating.

One of the beautiful outcomes of this digital empowerment is its effect on science. As I wrote recently, getting the crowd in on science means more innovation, with the can-do, hands on and anarchic mentality of hackers and makers being injected into the discipline. These new demographics bring new perspectives and new ways of engaging people.

But with so much information out there, individually we cannot pay attention to all the stuff we think we’re interested in, let alone all the stuff we might be interested in if we knew about it. This need for good information also to be eye-catching is something magazine design departments have known for years. It’s also been a driver in transdisciplinarity. Things can’t just get away with just being functional; in order to make the cut they need to be beautiful too.

Of course the key thing is that multidisciplinarity is not new - in fact it’s where we came from before we bought into this delineated view of science versus arts, promulgated in the 50s by C.P. Snow. Now we’re being forced out of seeing the world through this paradigm, and it can only bring great things.

By Kat Austen

@katausten is CultureLab editor at New Scientist magazine. She’s interested in lots of things and phenomena, how things are connected, and why they are connected. She likes patterns but doesn’t have to have them. In the temporal melting-pot of her life so far she has been a scientist, an artist, and a journalist. She welcomes a humane and environmentally kind future. You can find her at katausten.com.

Artwork by Tomas Saraceno

We are delighted to announce that our host for TEDxAlbertopolis will be Daniel Glaser, Director of Science Gallery at King’s College London. Daniel is a neuroscientist by training, with 15 years of research experience in brain imaging. But in 2002 he was appointed “scientist in residence” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London - the first appointment of its kind in an arts institution. He also co-chairs Café Scientifique at the Photographer’s Gallery, has presented a TV series on science for the BBC and is a frequent contributor to discussions on national radio stations.

But what drew him to TEDxAlbertopolis? “The thing that excites me about hosting an event in the Royal Albert Hall is partly the scale,” says Daniel. “But it is also a venue that gives a lot of control to the audience, especially following the Proms. It’s not a hall where you can perform without being aware of that. This TEDx is about a conversation with an audience.”

He is also a fan of bringing together cultures that at first glance seem to have little in common. “Juxtaposition is the key,” he says. “The combination of art and science is very exciting because of the interplay between the two. Putting science on a stage in what many would think of as the world's most famous concert hall allows you to look at it anew. The science will be altered by being put into this position and the art too.” And he expects that thrill of rediscovery to flow both ways. “The speakers and I are as excited by this as the audience, because it’s about casting knowledge in a new light.”

  All good tales have a beginning. Ours starts with an event in the summer of another age. In 1851 the Great Exhibition brought not only a celebration of the best of human creativity to this small corner of London but an ambition and idealism on which a community like no other was built.

Art and science have often been regarded as somehow divided, two cultures with mutually irreconciliable views on the world. But Albertopolis is a community that shows how wrong that is.

The two cultures do not split Albertopolis, they coexist in the minds of its occupants. The people who live and work here - and those who flock to the neighbourhood in their millions each year - cannot help but be representatives of both.

Albertopolis is a community of arts nestled inside one of science, a community of science built within one of arts. The two are intertwined - erected on the same foundations and without borders. 

It is also a community that joins our past to our future, two cultures in time. Walk among the local buildings and you will see the past preserved in the present, but step inside and you will see the future happening today.

TEDxAlbertopolis brings all of this together in the Royal Albert Hall. The arts and the sciences, the ideas and the people, on a shared stage at the heart of the story.

Why did the chicken god cross the Exhibition Road? If you picked up London’s Metro newspaper last Wednesday you may have a clue - or 30 of them.

For 20 years TEDxAlbertopolis speaker John Halpern has set cryptic crosswords for UK newspapers under various aliases. Maybe you know him as ‘Paul’ in the Guardian, ‘Dada’ in the Daily Telegraph, ‘Mudd’ in the Financial Times, or ‘Punk’  in the Independent. In the Times he sets anonymously and in Viz, well, we’ll leave that one as an exercise for the reader. It’s a fun but lonely job, he says.  But this year crosswords turn 100 and John’s hitting the road in celebration.

In our build-up to the 23 September event, the Royal Albert Hall hosted a crossword setting evening. With John’s generous encouragement, the TEDxAlbertopolis committee joined forces with representatives from the Royal Albert Hall itself, the Royal Geographical Society, the Natural History Museum, and the V&A to distil the essence of Albertopolis into a 15-by-15-letter grid. Hence “A chicken god! (6).” No? Have a go. The crossword is below! (Or click here for the .jpg of the grid)

  The Metro published the result a few days later alongside an interview with John, in which he makes a compelling case for the power of puzzles: “I want to get crosswords on the school curriculum. Lots of teaching is about success and failure. Playing puzzles is a great way of saying failure is okay actually, failure is just the next step on the way to success.”

Here's what John had to say on the night itself: 

TEDxAlbertopolis crossword evening with John Halpern from TEDxAlbertopolis on Vimeo.

Word play and puzzles perfectly embody our human love of mixing up logical rationality with free-form creativity. In September John will be speaking about the power of words and what words can do to bring communities together - a truly Albertopolan ideal.

By Douglas Heaven

@strwbilly is the Storyteller for TEDxAlbertopolis and a reporter for New Scientist.

Images: Natascha Mehrabi

Video: James Mossahebi

Clues

Across

1 Science and Natural History, for example (7)

5 Harmonious connection (7)

10 Faint streak (of smoke?) (4)

11 Resident dinosaur in one of the 1 acrosses (10)

12 A one-liner? (8) [Cryptic]

13 Sheltered (in prison?) (6)

14 Second Greek letter (4)

16 Church keyboard musician (8)

19 Mickey Rourke grappling role (8)

21 Talks with Tibetan animals? (4) [Cryptic]

23 Haphazardly (6)

25 Naive romantic quality - Bowie's Ziggy? (8)

27 Parseltongue pond in Hyde Park? (10) [Cryptic]

28 __ and flows, moves like the tide (4)

29 Composer in this country, did you say? (7) [Cryptic]

30 Some art moving for 7 down conductor (7) [Cryptic]

Down

2 Only boy child, in harmony (6) [Cryptic]

3 Shackleton and Livingstone, for instance (9)

4 Newspapers, TV etc (5)

6 Yo darling (anag) - how V & A shared their affections? (9)

7 Last Night of the ___ (5)

8 Shaped a bit like the Royal Albert Hall? (8)

9 A chicken god! (6) [Cryptic]

15 Pocket money (9)

17 Nudity (9)

18 Impressive or awesome quality (8)

20 John __, art critic (1819-1900) - ski-run (anag) (6)

22 Weather map line connecting points of equal pressure (6)

24 Get lost! (3,2)

Tucked away in the shadow of the Albert Hall, the Royal College of Arts (RCA) is perhaps best known for its famous alumni from the worlds of art, fashion, and film. Art-world heavyweights such as David Hockney, Tracey Emin, Christopher Bailey, and Ridley Scott are all graduates of the RCA.

It is therefore no surprise that the 2012/13 end of year show – which features the final projects from its latest wave of graduates – is one of the best places to experience some of the most exciting and fresh ideas to come out of the contemporary design world. But amid the creative outputs of these more established schools, students from the innovative design engineering (a joint degree from both the RCA and Imperial College London) and design interactions courses have found some powerful new ways to bring art and science together.

This much is evident when I visit the show on a grey and drizzly Sunday afternoon: the part of the exhibition which houses the work from these two courses hums and buzzes with an atmosphere that seems more like a room at the Science Museum than a traditional art gallery. There is a reason for this; most of the projects are interactive and are often accompanied by their creator, who is on hand to chat to members of the public and demonstrate how everything works.

Packed with weird and wonderful devices, many of the projects push the boundaries of what is technically possible using today’s technologies. A futuristic-looking water bottle dispenser catches my eye, with its promise to make use of the thousands of plastic bottles that we throw away while on the go by using a new way of washing them so that they can be reused.

There’s also DesigNA by Millie Clive-Smith, a physicist who has applied the principles of synthetic biology – using living cells as factories to produce useful materials – to create a way for scientists and designers to use DNA in the designing process. To demonstrate this she teamed up with a synthetic biologist from Imperial College, and by selecting the light-absorbing properties of genes found in the DNA of jellyfish and coral, they created a new material that can generate power by absorbing visible and ultraviolet light.

But alongside the weird and wonderful creations, there’s also the downright creepy. What looks like an elegantly set table with three-course meal, on closer inspection reveals plates of twitching (there really is no better way to put this) food. Living food, a project by Min Su Kim, explores the idea of ‘tactile gastronomy’, where food becomes alive to create a hyper-sensory dining experience.

If possible, even more bizarre is an exhibit titled Transfiguration, which features waxwork models of newborn babies, each with a designer ‘improvement’ carved into their bodies. Although it seems more of an exercise in following plastic surgery to its extreme conclusions, the designer Agatha Haines provocatively suggests that if we can use surgery to improve ourselves, why should this stop us searching for a higher level of function than we already have now?

While some exhibits push at the boundaries of what is theoretically possible, others aim to tackle problems that are grounded in the present.

One of the most striking of these is a project called Blastproof by Chris Natt, who used his experience working in the developing world and a degree in engineering to create a set of tools he hopes could improve the lives of people who have to defuse land mines by hand. As Natt explains, despite the huge investment in developing mechanical landmine defusers, the vast majority of the work is still done by local people, and by hand, often with the most basic of tools – something very similar to the common garden trowel and spade.

To develop Blastproof, Natt spoke to individuals from the UN and Mine Advisory group with first-hand experience of defusing mines, which he used to create some small but significant changes to the current set of tools. The new set of prototype tools are better adapted to the job as they give the de-miner a longer reach and lower angle to get at the landmines, as well as providing better protection from losing a hand or limb in the process.

There was also an opportunity to try these tools out at the simulation mine site, complete with a set of different mine-types that ‘explode’ on contact. With a strangely aesthetic beauty, Natt hopes that the simulation mines could be used to train or give new insights into defusing different types of mine, as well as providing a deadly reminder of how sensitive these mechanical soldiers really are.

By Flora Malein

@floramalein is a freelance science and health writer.