Bâtiment des Forces Motrices Geneva, Switzerland

Critical Junctures

Tuesday 8 December 2015

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If we put the words critical+juncture into Google Images, the first photo that pops up is that of a fork in the road. A manifest representation of a moment that requires a major choice between options.

We live in times jammed with CRITICAL JUNCTURES, bad and good. Climate change. Economic and political crisis. Rising inequality. Migrations. Insecurity and conflict. Food and water. New technologies. Access. Education. History is on fast-forward. Major global decisions lie ahead. Only those unperceptive to reality can believe that the next couple of decades won’t be decisive for the world—that the decisions we will collectively take won’t create radical path dependencies influencing the course of the long future.

Some of the speakers featured in the program of TEDGlobal>Geneva will address several of the themes mentioned above, sharing their ideas, their experiences, their analysis and suggestions, or a different perspective. This is the first official TED event taking place in Switzerland, and the choice of Geneva isn’t casual. Geneva is a small Swiss city and at the same time a global center of peace diplomacy. The Lake Geneva region is full of people working towards mutual understanding and collaboration, busy with international law and solidarity, pushing the boundaries of science and creating amazing technologies.

The TEDGlobal>Geneva audience is also full of such people. I would like to mention a few groups that are participating. There is a large contingent of TEDx organizers, who put up remarkable TED-inspired events all over the world (and who by the time the conference starts will already have been here for 48 hours, attending their own workshop at CERN and a special session at the Maison de la Paix and visiting the region). There is a group of TED Translators, who bring TED Talks to their communities by subtitling them (currently in 109 languages). There are several TED Fellows, and TED partners (a big thank you to them—you will find their names right after the speakers’ biographies), and TED Book publishers, and more. There are two dozen students of the Geneva School of Art and Design who, with guidance from their teachers, have imagined the design of the stage (more on this, too, in a few pages).

There are also about 350 people who have never been at a TED event before.

Welcome to you all.

Bruno Giussani, TEDGlobal Curator and the TED team

TED.com #TEDGLOBAL

INTRODUCTION

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15:15-17:15

17:15 B R E AK

18:30-20:30

HOST

PROGRAM

S ES S I O N 1

DAMBISA MOYO

ANTONIO GUTERRES

WAEL GHONIM

ELIZAVETA

JOCELYNE BLOCH

AUKE IJSPEERT

EMILIE JOLY

HARRY CLIFF

S ES S I O N 2

YANIS VAROUFAKIS

JILL FARRANT

CALEB HARPER

YILIAN CANIZARES

JAMES VEITCH

ELIZABETH LEV

SARAH MARQUIS

BRUNO GIUSSANI

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SPEAKERS

Today over 60 million people are forcibly displaced due to war or persecution, more than at any time since World War II. The world started taking notice this year when hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants started arriving in Europe via the Mediterranean, many tragically drowning along the route. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, ANTONIO GUTERRES, is at the forefront of managing this crisis and, with his team of over 9000, aiding refugees and advocating for their rights around the world. He recently said, “We can’t deter people fleeing for their lives. They will come. The choice we have is how well we manage their arrival, and how humanely.”

unhcr.org@refugees

Global economist and author DAMBISA MOYO focuses on global affairs and macroeconomic trends, with a unique knowledge of the challenges faced by emerging economies. A recipient of the Hayek Award, she first attracted wide attention with her 2009 book Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, where she suggested that Africans should assume full control over their economic and political destiny. Named in Time magazine’s list of “100 most influential people”, she has published two more books, How the West Was Lost and Winner Take All.

dambisamoyo.com@dambisamoyo

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Through an interplay of voice, story and soundscape, ELIZAVETA fuses opera with musical genres such as pop and electronic, creating transcendental performances. She is a multilingual vocalist, composer and producer of Russian origin with an opera background from the Prague Academy of Music and the University of Southern California. Her songs have been featured in movies, TV shows and popular TV series, and she has toured with artists like Sinead O’Connor and Morcheeba. She is now writing her first opera.

elizaveta.com@elizavetaka

WAEL GHONIM is the former tech executive who anonymously used social media to help spark the Egyptian revolution in early 2011. His arrest by Egyptian state security transformed him into a sudden celebrity —as well as a target of poisonous social media campaigns. Five years ago, the Internet helped remove a dictator from power, but then social media deepened polarization by amplifying trolling, hate speech, rumors, propaganda and filter bubbles. Ghonim still believes that the Internet can be the most powerful platform for connecting humanity, if we can bring civility and thoughtful conversations back to it. With that in mind, in 2014 he co-founded the online community Parlio.

parlio.com@ghonim

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SPEAKERS

Swiss neurosurgeon JOCELYNE BLOCH is an expert in deep brain stimulation and neuromodulation for movement disorders. Her recent work focuses on cortical cells, called doublecortin, related to neurogenesis and brain repair. In collaboration with Jean François Brunet and others, she is pioneering the development of adult brain cell transplantation for patients with stroke, using their own stem cells. She aims at gathering all these novel therapeutic strategies under a common umbrella that will optimize treatment options for patients suffering from neurological impairments. She is in charge of the functional neurosurgery unit at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV).

tiny.cc/JBloch

AUKE IJSPEERT works at the intersection of robotics, biology and computational neuroscience. His team uses robots to better understand animal locomotion and movement control, and in particular the spinal cord. In return, he takes inspiration from animals and biology to design novel types of robots capable of agile movement in complex environments. He is an associate professor and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory at the EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

biorob.epfl.ch/@BIOROB_EPFL

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EMILIE JOLY grew up as a child of the digital world, only to take this world a step further into the virtual world. With her team, she builds interactive narrative experiences that push the boundaries between the physical and virtual reality, inspired by non-linear storytelling. Her Geneva-based startup, Apelab, is now working on the first VR animated series, “Sequenced”. In it, story, characters and scenes adapt in real time to the user’s focus. It will be premiered at the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier in January 2016.

apelab.ch@apelab_ch

Particle physicist HARRY CLIFF looks for answers to questions about the origins of the universe and the laws of nature. He works on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and is a member of the LHCb collaboration, a large international team searching for signs of new particles and forces of nature in high-energy particle collisions. He is the Fellow of Modern Science at the Science Museum in London and curated their “Collider” exhibition as well as the more recent “Einstein’s Legacy”, which explores the scientific and cultural impact of Albert Einstein’s life and work.

harrycliff.co.uk@harryvcliff

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SPEAKERS

A professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, JILL FARRANT researches the remarkable (and little known) world of resurrection plants. These are plants that can survive extreme drought, “resurrecting” when moistened or irrigated. If we can better understand their natural preservation mechanisms and their key protectants, she suggests, it could help us develop more drought-tolerant crops to feed populations in increasingly dry and arid climates around the world. Her research may also have medical applications.

jillfarrant.co.za@JillFarrant

YANIS VAROUFAKIS describes himself as a “libertarian marxist”, although “it is not something that I volunteer to talk about much, because the very mention of Marx switches audiences off”. He teaches economic theory at the University of Athens, where he challenges mainstream notions—arguing that after the financial crash of 2008 we need a radically new way of thinking about the economy, finance and capitalism. He became widely known in the first half of 2015 when, as Minister of Finance of the newly formed Greek government, he was a leading, outspoken and much-discussed figure in the renegotiations of Greece’s debt.

yanisvaroufakis.eu@yanisvaroufakis

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What do we know about the food we eat? What if there was climate democracy? These and other questions inform the work of CALEB HARPER and his colleagues as they explore the future of food systems. He is the principal investigator and director of the Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAG) at the MIT Media Lab. Under his guidance, a diverse group of engineers, architects, urbanists, economists and plant scientists (what he calls an “anti-disciplinary group”) is developing an open-source agricultural hardware, software and data common aiming to create a more agile, transparent and collaborative food system.

openag.media.mit.edu@CalebGrowsFood

The albums of violinist and vocalist YILIAN CAÑIZARES express the remarkable diversity of her artistic universe, blurring the boundaries between jazz, Afro-Cuban and classical music. After completing classical violin studies in Cuba, Venezuela and Switzerland, she wandered into the world of jazz and singing, connecting them to her Cuban roots, and never looked back. She sees her music as a real portrait of herself as well as a homage to loved ones, slave ancestors, singers and poets who have influenced her. She has toured Europe, South America and Cuba.

yiliancanizares.com@yiliancanizares

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SPEAKERS

We all receive emails with offers of unprecedented opportunities to make money or bogus calls for help from friends marooned in a foreign country. We generally just hit delete. But for JAMES VEITCH, a young British writer and comedian with a mischievous side, those emails proved the perfect opening to have some fun, playing the scammers at their own game. Out of it came his first book, the just released Dot Con. In 2014, his first solo comedy show The Fundamental Interconnectedness of Everyone with an Internet Connection, premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe to wide acclaim.

veitch.me@veitchtweets

Art historian ELIZABETH LEV became captivated by Rome while completing her graduate studies. She writes and lectures on Renaissance art in the Eternal City, but is most at home in the Vatican Museums, founded in the 16th century to house the trove of art amassed by centuries of Popes. She has spent 15 years studying the vast collection, which contain not only Christian-themed works but art from virtually every other culture in the world. She consults with the Vatican Museums and wrote the film Vatican Treasures. She also wrote A Body for Glory, examining how the papal collection of Greco-Roman nudes grew into the Sistine Chapel.

elizabeth-lev.com @lizlevrome

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SARAH MARQUIS has walked around the planet once, then stopped counting. The Swiss explorer and survivalist is just back from her last expedition, a three-month, 800 km solo trek across the rugged and inhospitable Kimberley region of Western Australia. She lived off the land, battled the hard conditions of a drought, and confronted saltwater crocodiles. In 23 years of solo walks (she trekked the Pacific Coast Trail in the United States and the continental loop of Australia, and walked from Siberia to Southern Australia, among other expeditions), she says, this was her most physically and emotionally demanding trip. She is a National Geographic Explorer, and her most recent book is Wild by Nature.

sarahmarquis.ch@sarah_marquis

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WITH THE SUPPORT OF

statestreet.com

citi.com/progress

arup.com

ups.com/stories

ibm.com

bcg.com

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letemps.ch

hesge.ch/head

fondationlombardodier.org

cern.ch

graduateinstitute.ch

ge.ch

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EXHIBITS/DEMOS

The installation is an interactive audio/video experience. Using a randomized algorithm that browses through a selected media library (themed for TEDGlobal>Geneva around privacy, surveillance and the Dark Net), each time people open the door they are exposed to new and surprising content projected onto the threshold. The installation uses a representative element of daily life—a door—to create a tool of discovery, an entrance into a random dimension. It is imagined as a concrete representation of what it takes to make a discovery, having the courage to open the door without knowing what lies behind. Developed by the Studio Flair designers, a previous version was shown at TEDxLyon.

SERENDIPITY DOOR By Studio Flair, Lyon, France

The SoundDot technology enables high-quality sound to be diffused in a very directional way—think of it as a “music shower”. It has been developed in the Acoustics Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) with the support of their Metamedia Center. The innovation is based on a unique arrangement of loudspeakers, with a fine-grained tuning signal distribution to each of them. When listening to music with a SoundDot, sound envelops the listener and creates an intimate music experience, without disturbing your immediate surroundings.

SOUNDDOT By Hidacs, Lausanne, Switzerland

hidacs.com@PMarmaroli

studioflair.fr @aflairstudio

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Pleurobot is an amphibious robot that can swim and walk like a salamander. Created by the Biorobotics Lab at EPFL, led by speaker Auke Ijspeert, it has been designed to closely match cineradiographic recordings (such as x-ray videos) of the Pleurodeles waltii salamander moving in the water and on the ground. Its main purpose is to serve as a scientific tool to investigate the neural circuits controlling locomotion in the spinal cord as well as the transition from aquatic to terrestrial locomotion during vertebrate evolution. Future versions of the robot could also find applications in search-and-rescue and inspection operations.

Gimball is a flying robot (quadricopter) inspired by insects. The innovative design makes it possible for it to remain stable in flight after collisions and to reach usually inaccessible places, without risks of crash and without using complex and error-prones sense-and-avoid techniques. Developed by Lausanne-based startup Flyability, the flying robot uses obstacles instead of avoiding them. Protected by a cage, it can fly easily and safely even in confined areas, or close to people—sending back images from the onboard camera.

GIMBALL By Flyability, Lausanne, Switzerland

PLEUROBOT By EPFL Biorobotics Laboratory, Lausanne, Switzerland

biorob.epfl.ch

flyability.com@fly_ability

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EXHIBITS/DEMOS

InnovationArts’ scribes use illustrations and visualization techniques to capture ideas and themes while they are shared. This form of live graphical recording makes it easier to connect ideas and foster conversations through a highly visual approach— while injecting fun and play. Based in London, but with scribes distributed across Europe and North America, the company has visually summarized many TEDGlobal events.

VISUAL SCRIBING By InnovationArts, London, UK

innovation-arts.com@innovation_arts

“Sequenced” is the first 360-degree animated series for virtual reality (VR) headsets and mobile devices. Depending on the user’s focus on certain scenes or characters, the story takes different paths. A prototype of the project has won the Best in Play Award at the Game Developers conference in 2014 (as well as other prizes). The Apelab team has imagined a story set in 2065, in a world where resources are running out, borders have collapsed, and humanity is slowly rebuilding itself. Raven, a young orphan, makes an unexpected discovery, and the story unfolds. The first episode of “Sequenced” will be released in 2016 along with the planned release of the virtual reality headsets HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear.

SEQUENCED By Apelab, Geneva, Switzerland

apelab.ch@apelab_ch

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ROCKY By the students of the Geneva School of Art & Design

STAGE DESIGN

www.hesge.ch/head/@HEADGENEVE

The TEDGlobal>Geneva stage has a name: It’s called Rocky. It is the product of a project spearheaded by a group of students of the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD in its French acronym), working under the guidance of their teachers.

Starting with a briefing by the TED team, they thought about how to best occupy the front section of the big stage of the Bâtiment des Forces Motrices, a large former power plant. Their main inspiration came from a painting by Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin in which the monumentality of rocks and trees contrasts with the smallness of people. This difference in scale became a useful device to play up the speaker on the red carpet. The scene is build with cardboard, shaped and positioned to create a canvas for light and dark contrasts. “Contrast in light and contrast in scale: those are the two key elements of the design”, they wrote in their proposal.

The students who have created “Rocky” are: Malou Siegfried, Mélanie Vallin, Paquita Barletta, Maéva Maspoli, Laura Beyazov, Déborah Zancanaro, Yann Froidevaux, Marion Vergne, Joséphine Devaud, Oriane Rajaonarivo, Camille Mayor, Léa Rime, Amélie De Keuwer, Alexis Klink, Justine Ludi, Noemie Pasqual, Laura Fleury, Weissen Maeva, Rogger Alvarado Lagos, Marine Girard. Workshop coordinated by: Youri Kravtchenko, Lawrence Breitling, Jan Geipel, Jerôme Baratelli, Sandra Mudronja, Valentina de Luigi. Construction coordinated by: Gaspar Reverdin, Antoine Guay (GALTA Collective).

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FILM

Clichy-Montfermeil, in the suburbs of Paris, was the flashpoint of one of the biggest riots in recent French history. In 2005, the death of two young men who were electrocuted trying to run from the police started an unprecedented social uprising by young people in the banlieues.

In this same territory, a year earlier, artist (and 2011 TED Prize winner) JR had begun a project with his filmmaker friend Ladj Ly, a resident of Les Bosquets, a cluster of twenty housing blocks (for a total of more than 1,500 flats) built in the early 1960s that

were going into dereliction. JR and Ladj Ly started photographing the everyday life of the young residents of the neighborhood, and pasting the images, large-format (and without permission) on the buildings.

One of these images shows Ladj Ly surrounded by youths from the housing project, pointing his camera at JR’s lens as if it were a weapon. When the riots broke out a year later, the posters, which had remained on the walls, were suddenly exposed to the world media. Journalists started using them as an illustration of current events, like an ironic mirror of these adolescents’ violence faced with the aggression of the media and of politics.

LES BOSQUETS A film by JR

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jr-art.netinsideoutproject.netted.com/participate/ted-prize/prize-winning-wishes/inside-out

Fast-forward half a decade, and part of the political response to the riots was the destruction of the housing blocks. Realising that part of the place’s memory would be lost, JR decided to capture its last moments. Just before the destruction began, he pasted a score of his portraits from 2006 on the interior walls of the apartments. As the buildings were knocked down, his camera captured these portraits of a generation, collapsing bit by bit.

A decade after his first steps in the Bosquets, JR was invited to produce a work for the New York City Ballet (NYCB), and staged the story of his friend Ladj Ly and of his encounter with a young journalist

during the riots (with Lil’ Buck playing the young Ladj Ly, and classical dancer Lauren Lovette in the role of the journalist). The ballet premiered in New York in April 2014. Reprised by dancers from the Opéra National de Paris on the actual site of those 2005 clashes, the choreography created for the NYCB, mixed with the images of the demolition, has now become the central element of JR’s new 17-minute film: Les Bosquets.

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NOTES

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NOTES

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NOTES

Curator and host: Bruno Giussani / TEDGlobal team: Elise Merhige, Jackie Assar, Ladan Wise,

Katerina Biliouri, Celia Berger, Angela Cheng, Duncan Davidson, Clark Frankel, Mike Femia, Janet Lee,

Nadia Goodman, Jenee Gilhooley, Anyssa Samari, Dan Kedmey, Eric Mueller, Sean Nieburg, Matt Curtis,

Mina Sabet, Isaac Wayton, David Waldman, Neal David Hartman, Helen Walters, Emily McManus, Anna Kostuk,

Jay Herratti, Amanda Ellis, Neal Fessler, Will Davis, Frederica Yosifov, Felicity Fellows, Saba Dilawari,

Alex Rudoff, Deborah Mattatia (KollectiveLabs.com), Claudia Marcelloni de Oliveira (TEDxCERN),

Hugo Schotman (TEDxZurich)—and the Swiss TEDx community!

TED.com