CERN Physicist @TEDFestNYC 2017

I’ve just returned from TEDFestNYC, a TED Conference where 500+ TEDx Organizers from 60 countries (I organize TEDxECUAD) gathered at and around TED HQ for a week in conjunction with TED2017 (“The Future You”). There, I was pleased to meet Amin Ghiasi, an experimental physicist who is a Co-organizer of TEDxCERN and other events. At CERN he’s working on supersymmetry, and he was intrigued to hear about LOoW and riff on Ewan Hill’s idea about the “bump” in the plot and seeing art as a manipulation of data. He chuckled as he mentioned what it might be like to persist with physicists to explain and re-explain until we understand! At the same time, it was interesting finding common language between he, myself and a designer who joined the conversation, which evolved to include thermodynamics and reversible jackets among other things. That’s part of the spirit of TED — discovering fresh perspectives and ideas at the intersection of disciplines — and it’s exciting to come off of that experience just as I enter the LOoW production phase. I was able to chat with Amin a couple times this trip, depicted here this time along with the organizers of TEDxTUWien and TEDxNihonbashi — fascinating what happens when you put a physicist from Iran, a chemist from Austria, a real estate developer from Japan and an American media artist (in order left to right) in a conversation together on their way into a theatre full of equally curious people to watch and reflect on TED Talks themed “The Future You” covering A.I., climate, bugs, refugees, music, African American art history, neuroscience, a talk by Pope Francis, and more. As Chris Anderson (TED’s curator) described it in a video hangout with us organizers, “contributing to what a globally connected world could look like and how beautiful and special that could be.”