World-renowned archaeologist Zahi Hawass currently serves as Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and Director of Excavations at Giza, Saqqara, and the Bahariya Oasis. Dr. Hawass is responsible for many exciting recent discoveries, including the Tombs of the Pyramid Builders at Giza and the Valley of the Golden Mummies at Bahariya. He supervised a major conservation project on the Great Sphinx and developed site management plans, including the Unfinished Obelist Quarry in Aswan and the temples of Kom Ombo, Edfu, and Dendera.

My latest CD is Areana, if you like raging guitars and a guy screaming like he has his nuts caught in a belgian waffle maker you may like it.

What is your most memorable moment? What are you most proud of? That just tells you they never listened to the CD. You predicted everything that has happened in the music industry, what is going to happen next? I didn’t predict, I mostly precursed it. I’ve been in it 40 years. I went to the the Wikipedias. The music industry is only a bit more than 100 years old. [showed video of first phonograph playing Mary had a Little Lamb.] This was the first time that music, which had been a service, became a product. Beatles, jazz, Elvis, Elvis… And then in 1979 Sony came out with the Walkman. Previous to that the music that you wanted to hear rarely left the home. this allowed you to make music part of your lifestyle, and adapt it.

I began to deduce things about how this had changed people’s music listening habits. How the impression of what them usic industry was started to change, and it was in control of the audience. People started taking the music where they were and it became background to their lives. The music was returning to their original purpose which was a service, it was doing something for you, you weren’t a slave to it.

I began to deduce that music was beginning to break down in terms of its originality, recycling was starting to happen. Most significant example of this was M.C. Hammer’s Can’t Touch This, which was actually a James Brown song. They were such a hit with this song “Relax” that every two weeks they would release a remix and it would go to the top of the charts. Got a concept, No World Order, because I was into music and computers and programming I moved to CA in the mid-80s began going to MacWorld conferences, it was technically possible for us to create a system that would allow users to completely tailor music to whatever they were doing at the time and even do it in real-time, to change it in real-time.

Philips decided to experiment with it, Andy Levine a friend of mine and anti-social, they had something called a CDI box, made music to be adaptable. I changed my ideas of composition, it was still songs, but they had to have discrete entrances and exits within it. The idea was to give people control over the music in a number of vectors, took the 1000 music bits and gave it to 4 other record producers, they all did their own version, each came up wih radically different ideas conceptually. One liked the instrumental way more than the vocals, another tried to make songs out of the pieces even though they weren’t in song form. So those were the preset mixes, but all of the rest were customizable. Program (presets), direction, form, tempo, mood, mix (take instruments in and out), and video (screensaver). Core piece is a continuously variable random generator, you have all the numbers in a hat, and you pick more and more than they’re all gone. If you want ot have something less than random but still kinda random you apply a Gallsian (bell-shaped) filter to those numbers.

Were approached by Time-Warner for full-scale experiment in interactive television, put fiber to the curb. Used a SGI Envy, almost crushed half the TVs they put it on. ’94, designed a system to have on-demand music into people’s homes, needed to get the content though. Went to 6 remaining record labels, at least half wouldn’t take a meeting, of the ones that did they were polite but nobody could wrap their minds around it, one was getting licensing from each of the artists, and second that they depended on retail. They would piss off Walmart and they would shelve their records. We couldn’t even get Warner Brothers to license a single artist, and it was owned by the same company. They decided the internet was a great way to get exposure for unsigned bands, it was an evolutionary concept. IUMA existed until just about a year or two ago.

Then came Napster. Suddenly the record industry is having their lunch eating right in front of them, 3-4 years after they tried to do the experiment. Who gets involved but the RIAA? Napster fended them off for a pretty long time. iTunes was the first program I had that allowed me to just take my entire CD collection and just automatically capture everything. My first MP3 was the Neo Jukebox, for hackers it’s great, got a regular laptop-sized hard drive, no DRM crap, about the size of a paperback book and carried it around for years and used it in live performance often. Along came the iPod, he managed to accomplish was to get the numbskulls to put their music on a server. Interesting lexographic point – server, service, music is turning back to its original purpose, which is a service not a product. A CD is a license to listen to the music, not even the industry undestands that which is why they’re so f-ed up.

RIAA started suing their customers. Is there another industry that sues their own customers? Record industry kept looking for ways to make up their money, it never occured to them that they were making crappy music and charging to much for it. They started licensing ringtone stuff. Wasn’t long before people figured out a way to take songs you had already paid for and turn it into ringtones. Here’s where it’s going. “Warner Music pushes for mandatory music tax on your internet bill.” There’s a model for the music industry, it’s the cable industry. Once you get a cable account, nobody keeps track of what you watch anymore, you can watch hundreds of hours per month, you can go on vacation and watch nothing, but you wouldn’t cancel your cable bill just because you went on vacation. It’s a great mode, which is why they come up with great programming with like Deadwood. People are still buying songs at 99 cents a pop. Music is never worth 99 cents a song, there are hundreds of thousands of songsn thta are worthless, there are hundreds of thousands of songs that are priceless. If I were to sit down the four major labels, why don’t you tell Steve Jobs where to go, get together and set up a subscription service, we’re willing to pay $10 a month to listen to anything anywhere anytime.

Music is supposed to be a service, not a product. The last 110 years of the music business has been an abberation, and it’s time for everybody to get over it.

I was a med student the topic was chaos theory and smooth tissue in the male urethra. I learned about the idea of algorithmic art. Started computing my own Mandelbrot sets. Then and even today I don’t get that jazzed looking at at computer screen. I happened upon a stepper motor, stepper motorslet you create motion pixels. Maybe by using a computer program and messing with motion pixels you could create cool things. It took me a couple of months to really understand how to make a stepper motor run, then how to hook it up, then how to program it.

Brought the whole family together to see, they weren’t impressed. If I want to communicate how cool motion control is, I need to have a compelling demo. My kids came to the rescue, it was a week before Easter, and created a simple easter egg colorer. If you can control the position of two motors you can draw pictures, and etch-a-sketch is an excellent tool for that.

At a 3M auction I was able to get equipment that was really high-end, spent several years building my own CNC, built a plasma cutting rig. I’m passionate about using motion control for education, not just art. Was science in resident at Minneapolis science museum, from bits to bytes to bots. We used lightbulbs in class because learned painful lesson with eggs, and you can erase lightbulbs. Been really impressed to see the number of girls increase. Also got a chance tohave a more prolonged experience with math crew a middle school.

Art machines. I got better at building my CNC machines, then eBay happened making it easier even if you don’t live next to 3M making it easier to get access to this stuff. Pipedream I had 16 pixels with bubbles going through pipes. Pipedream III was trying to capture visitors faces in bubbles. Sisyphus I is a CNC machine where a magnetically controlled ball creates really interesting patterns in sand.

This may seem unrelated, inspired by ribbon dance. Created a ribbon dance CNC in Iowa. Now going to show Undula prototype. 5 years ago I got to be a visiting artist at the exploratorium, a good friend and exhibit designer had created a table-top exhibit called rope-shooter and visitors play with it. It’s like water but it’s not wet.

We want specific solutions to easily resolvable problems. When it comes to dog trainers owners don’t just make mistakes, they just get it all wrong. For example, let’s say someone has taken their dog to the park, the dog goes crazy, they put it on a leash, rewarding the dog for going crazy, they get pulled to the park and they keep walking rewarding the dog, and then they take it off the leash the biggest reward in urban dogdom, and then they call the dog over and when he comes they punish him by putting on the leash and wonder why he doesn’t come when called the next day.

Dog feedback is binary. Differential reinforcement. Punishment is the most misunderstood tool, doesn’t have to be painful or fearful to work, all we have to do is be calm and consistent. It’s not about dogs though, it’s about people. If you can’t house-train a puppy, how are you going to potty-train a child?

Hirshberg: With Crossing Georgia you tried to do new media?

Kring: It jsut didn’t feel like it was an authentic extension of what the show was. It’s a quest to stay relevant as your audience is going away. So it was built-in from the beginning with Heroes, and that’s the whole idea behind transmedia storytelling.

Hirshberg: Compare the Heroes poster vs website. The birth was Star Wars Holiday Special.

[rolls clip]

Kring: So in the middle of this thing they run this cartoon, with Han Solo and R2, C3PO, they start to interact with Boba Fett, at that point there were probably several million 13-17 boys who is this guy and why is he talking to these characters I love? Next they started pushing the action figure, and it becomes the most fascinating thing for all these people, this strange character from outside the Lucas canon. 3 years later when he shows up in the sequel, millions of people had a personal experience with his appearance.

Kring: About three months before the show launched on TV we launched it at ComicCon, and from that an incredible viral movement launched and the early adopters went on the website, it became a phenom even before it launched.

Hirshberg: 30 years later history repeats itself, there’s a character that you built offline and then shows up on the show one day.

Kring: Hannah Gilman, the basic transmedia idea, to run concurrently with the show a series of online comic books that would carry on from where the show leaves off. And the she shows up in the show. For the fans who had been accessing the online content it was an incredible easter egg to have found. it gets to the psychology of transmedia, you get more social currency as a fan of the show, you dig deeper into the canon and mythology of the show.

Hirshberg: The NBC ad folks put together a promo of everything that was going on off-TV to say we’ve got you covered like with the Olympics. [video from the ad department] With so much canon, how do you balance people who are really into it and not confusing casual viewers.

Kring: It’s always been a challenge, we’ve tried to keep everything as additive. We want to use every part of the buffalo, in a way, nothing is wasted. If a character disappears on the show, he or she can live online, and vice versa.

Hirshberg: Part of the idea behind the show is that we’re all connected.

Kring: I started to realize how vast this online community was. The real underlying message of the show was interconnectivity and global conciousness, the fascination for many people was this connection to the message, it would be criminal not to use this tech-savvy and connected audience

Hirshberg: Here’s how a car company worked themselves into a show.

Kring: In the first season we were looking for a sponsor for the pilot and we got Nissan to do it, we came up with the idea of weaving it into the show. Our show is fairly expensive, and we need help, it’s our way of supplementing the budget of the show, and if the conversation happens early enough and we can start to weave it in like with the Nissan Versa.

Hirshberg: Shows Pinehearst commercial.

Kring: The idea of authenticity is very important, we’re connected to our fanbase by a very thin thread. Everything that is put out to the fans has to come from the writing room, during the strike there were some things put out like A Benjamin Franklin hero that electrocutes people.

I acquired the rights for a Broadway revival and began the task of getting it started, which meant we needed a director. If you have a good director, you can get the stars, and the stars make the show happen. They also had to be African American. The problem is there were only two people in the world that fit this, first is George Wolf and the second was Mariam Clinton. We had, as they say, artistic differences. Being a producer is like being a magician, you have to create the illusion for everyone that everything is moving forward all the time. White people told me it’s a black play and black people won’t come to broadway, and black people tell me the play is dated.

There was not one other African American director who had major Broadway experience. Raisin not a performance piece, it’s very well laid out by Lorraine. Isn’t the theater where men potrayed women 400 years ago, or the color-blind casting of the 70s. At the core was that story. Wilson said, “I’m not carrying a banner for black directors, I decline a white director not on the basis of race, but on the basis of culture.” We’ve heard this story before when Spielberg directed A Color Purple. We’re seeing the same story played out in the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington D.C. Back to Raisin. It’s now four years: no star, no director, there’s a possibility I’ll lose the rights.

I took a risk on a regional director, who had exactly one minor New York credit. Sean P. Diddy Combs would be making his Broadway debut with us. Kenny led the cast both onstage and off, and sure enough the scenes that usually put audiences to sleep, were riveting. Each night when they got to those scenes got an ovation. Raisin would succeed in drawing huge numbers of African Americans to the theater, most performances wer 80% black.

Most memorable night for me was when Mohammad Ali came. I’ve never seen famous people get so excited about seeing another famous people. P. Diddy grabs a picture of him he had on his dresser to get him to sign it. I think about it and I try to figure out where that leaves us, I feel a great love for this play and a deep connection to it, and I think many do, when I was watching Milk last week I was so happy gay people had made that movie. But should only women direct movies about women, or Muslim people direct plays about Muslims? It was Kenny’s culture, not his race, that contributed to the success of the production amoung many other factors. If there was a black director that grew up in Beverly Hills, would he be as qualified as one from Chicago?

Lincoln theater will be doing the first major rivival of August Wilson’s play since his death. Ultimately in this age of ubercommunications, the theater somehow survives. The reason is that theater, like this, is ultimately about community. I want the communities to grow and evolve, and to this I think we have to tell each other stories, but sometimes to grow we need to really sit back and listen.

Not going to talk about Pixar.I’d like to pay homage to the theory of computability. It’s the theory of how computers work and one of the great inventions of humankind. The Turing and post research invented this theory of computation and it underlies our entire world today. But it’s recent. What I like about computability because it’s tied to what makes life tick, and what makes art tick. Everything I’ve done is tied together with living things, art, and computation.

I learned about computation theory as a graduate student at Stanford and learned it through the form of celluer atonoma theory. It turns out you can do anything in computing with it. I wrote my thesis on self-reproducing machines. These organizations of patterns, each its own computer, would over time build a copy of themselves ad infinitum. Even though I had these theories, my biggest thrill was to get the cover of Scientific American. The game of life had just come out, and it was the most popular topic that Scientific American had ever published.

I had a whole career in celluer atomona theory that most people don’t know about. I broke my leg skiing and decided I wasn’t doing anything with my art and it was time to move on. I went to Xerox PARC and talked my way into its halls at its apex, to help out with Paint. Not going to talk about it because two great books are out: Droidmaker and The Pixar Touch. Decided to go to my “old man stack” where I would put all the ideas I had but that I was too busy doing movies or starting companies. One of these was to do a mathmatical theory and have it published in a mathmatical journal. It’s a complete generation of Napoleon’s therom. It took a year.

Second thing on the stack was digital photography, spent a  year, went to Africa.

Third thing, do my Mom’s genealogy. This is a picture of New Mexico. Our version of US History was Spanish, didn’t care about back east. Our heroes were Coronado, Devargas, then there were the Pueblos along the Rio Grande. One remnant of this time is the name Pixar which is a Spanish verb meaning to make pictures, of course it’s made up. Mom was turning 80 and I decided I wanted to do something really special for her, she had given me an old notebook from a great-Aunt from New Jersrey, I deciphered it and found that it mentioned the Revolutionary War in there. I wrote up a short book and gave it to my Mom for her 80th. I sent it off to a place in Boston called the New England Genealogy Society. Lucky for me the woman who read it, one of the fellows, I wrote her saying she made a mistake, she said I didn’t make a mistake but I have a theory or your problem, and wrote it up in the scholarly way. I got a free tutorial on how to do it right. The theory is wrong, their families didn’t intersect, but you can have my Word document.

Took the 8-page document and blew it out to 583 pages. Three mentors there, one in the Great Migration which is everybody who came from England to New England between 1620 and 1640. He’s 9 volumes into what he thinks will be a 20 volume series about that period. Long story short I wrote a book for Mom, and then I noticed Dad was a little jealous so I did a book for him, over 800 pages. Now have published over 3200 pages of scholarly genealogy. Each is a footnote in each book. As one of my mentors said, “You’ll get over it, it’s not really about you.”

The Y chromosone is passed down the male chain unchanged, mitocondria is passed down the female chain unchanged. Did a DNA-enhanced descent chart, I was able to derived what the DNA of the ancestor had to be. Next thing I’m doing is going back to a paper I wrote in 1984, I generate things you can think of as genes and turn into plants, they grow, flower. That was four or five orders of computation magnitude ago, now want to see what I can do.

Scott Kim’s website is at shufflebrain.com.

For the last 20 years I’ve been designing puzzles. Have done them for books, toys, computer games, puzzle column for Discover magazine.

A puzzle is a problem that is fun to solve (as opposed to everyday problems) and has a right answer (as opposed to a toy or game).

Puzzles are an art form. It’s a small form like a joke, poem, trick, or song, and the best ones are memorable. Shows the Vase/Profile.

Ambigram, going to feature heavily in next Dan Brown movie.

Rush Hour by Nob Yoshigahara, it’s a sliding block puzzle. I saw this idea and I wanted to make a sequel, it should have its own identity. Railroad Rush Hour, new square piece that can move both ways.

Dominate form of electronic gaming is casual (Bejeweled) and interactive (Rock Band). Second trend is mental fitness, games like Brain Age, Soduku. Third trend is social media, Facebook and Youtube.

First game is called Photograb. Next game will be called Wordstream.

Second illusion shows the A and B squares are actually the same color:

Personal question, to find the best visual illusion. They run a contest every year.

These help reveal how our sensory systems work. Magicians use their intuitions to create the same things, and we can learn from them. Article in Scientific American this month.

How do magicians fool us? They use special effects, optical illusions, the most powerful weapon is the cognitive illusions, the manipulation, the channeling, the misdirection of attention and even memory.

[Watch it! That one blew me away.] A driver will be driving down the road looking for cars, not noticing cyclists and such. Now a Whodunnit video:

Is everything an illusion? The answer is yes. And no one has put this better than the famous philosopher, Keanu Reeves. Even after Neo picks the red pill, everything is still the result of electric impulses being transmitted and perceived by the brain. Our perception of the world is entirely illusion, everything we see is often very far from its reality.

Before you can call yourself an artist you have to cover a football field with your work. The shortcut I took was to become an illustrator. Many of the book covers he’s done are through Simon and Schuster, they were very open to allowing him to try different styles and approaches. Editorial is another huge place you see illustration work, I had a knack for doing likenesses, so I fell into Entertainment Weekly. Ended up with Mad Magazine.

Advertising was where I began in illustration, worked for ad agencies because it was a job as a staff illustrator, the work becomes very repetitive and is very deadline-driven. I enjoy it a lot more freelance because you get a variety of clients and directions. Size limitation on stamps is 5×7, the first assignment was the Elvis stamp. They do have to be incredibly simple, where my work was often referred to as “fussy” by the art director that hired me.

Posters are probably my favorite because they feel more like you’re doing a piece of artwork, sometimes people collect it, sometimes ends up framed on a wall. Got into doing posters for David Blaine for his very first stunt, a lot of times there’s hidden imagery or things that happen when the poster is rotated or turned, latest one was Dive of Death. When you turn it upside down you see his face. Did a big mural but hated working outdoors, doubt I would do it again. To me superheroes echo that dynanism that comes from the Renaissance period.

I’ve learned so much about illustration along the way, it’s important to enjoy the journey. Did the poster for Annie Get Your Gun, biggest break in New York.

First assignment for Mad Magazine was the Starr Wars on the Starr report.

First assignment from the Postal Service was Count Basie, art director called him up said “send me your best Elvis” they ended up with 60 Elvises and narrowed it down to two, and went up for public vote and sent out ballots across the US and you could vote for young or old Elvis. Mine run 3 to 1 margin, printing over 500 million in the end, equivilent of 289 football fields with just the Elvis stamp alone. In the end I may have earned my title… of “Illustrator.”

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, not despair convincing.” — Raymond Williams

“Everything works out alright in the end, if it’s not going right then it’s not the end yet.” — ?

Some of the largest companies in the world — IBM, GE, BP, Dow — have been saving huge amounts of money by accelerating their investment in energy efficiency. If we could save 3-4% a year in energy per $GDP we’d stabilize the climate, and it’s profitable! Focus on oil and electricity which are responsible for 4/5ths of the carbon emission in our country.

OilEndGame.com is how to get the US completely off oil by 2040. In the 8 years between 77 and 85 economy grew by 27% and oil consumption went down 15%. Each day your car uses 100x your car’s weight in ancient plants into your car. 87% of the fuel you use is wasted, 6% is used to heat the tires and the road, 0.3% of the energy is actually moving the driver. Toyota went out a 1/X concept car, it has the same interior area of the Prius but with 1/2 the fuel use and 1/3 the weight.

It took the auto industries 6 months to switch from making cars to making the stuff that won the war. Boeing was in deep trouble 11 years ago and their response was the Dreamliner, they’re sold out into 2018, just took 1000th order. It’s made half out of fiber. Rocky Mountain Institute is all about institutional acupuncture. The Pentagon is now the leader in the US government in getting the US not dependent on oil.

Think of it like a Saudi Arabia just found under Detroit when we switch cars to these new materials, and it’s 12x more crash-resistant to steel. It was change the managers or their minds, whichever comes first. 70% of our electricity goes to buildings, 30% to energy. Houses comfortable at 115 degrees outside due to super-insulation, better comfort, normal construction costs. Integrative design yielding multiple benefits from single expenditures, making big savings cheaper. Now designing new chip fabs, data centers, mines. Hatching a plot for the non-violent overthrow of bad engineering.

There is not a nuclear revival because there’s no investors. It saves carbon but much slower and more expensive than efficiency and micropower. If we set a good example in our own energy policy of reducing or eliminating nuclear we could take away the cover of proliferation that countries like Iran can use to start to develop and acquire the ingredients for nuclear bombs. Micropower is beating central plants wherever it’s allowed to compete. Profitable solutions exist for a richer, fairer, cooler, safer world, allow or require all ways to save energy to compete at fair prices regardless of their type, location, or size.

Applied Hope is the latest report they’ve released.

“Only puny secrets need protection, big discoveories are protected by public incredulity.” — Marshall McLuhan

Jack McCornack. This thing is called a low-cost, it’s a high school auto version of a Lotus 7. It weighs about half as much out of a Miata, we thought it through as something that gets high performance and mediocre milage. What if we switched it around? I’m a big fan of minimalist design; optimist things the glass is half full, pessimist thinks it’s half empty, minimalist thinks we’re using twice as much glass as we need. Escape from Berkeley – year is 2020, petroleum is a controlled substance. There was a New York Times article about it. After we won it we headed back north, we had a 32 horsepower engine. It gets 70 MPG right now, more streamlined will take us to about 90 MPG.

Jim Stansbury. This is a topic about extremes, we’re addressing the opposite end, the SUV. Transformed the “Green Giant” a 1985 Blazer, turned it into an electric vehicle. Two big electric motors, battery packs, replaced shock absorbers with hydrolic pump. Take our big heavy goliath and exploit that, the pumps add power to the battery pack. [He's now explaining how the different systems feed electricity to each other.] Channels heat into a WHE, waste heat engine, like a steam engine. Put a solar collector on top of the roop, and add that heat to the waste heat engine.

In China bicycles are the #1 mode of transportation. One of the first products at Zap was an electric bikee, the law decided it was illegal because it was a motor on a bike, as long as it’s under 20 miles it’s still a bike, now have sold 100,000 of them. We made a 3-wheel electric vehicle, had to pass laws in 7 states to make it legal.  I did my first electric vehicle in 1973, because my professor said it was impossible. What about flying cars? THe Alias, wanted to create something that’s sexy, looks fast standing still, and that people actually want.

Airship Ventures. Story of bringing zeppelins back to the US. A shared dream with my wife, Alexander, and myself, we approached Zeppelin corporation, discovered they were still around. This is not your grandfather’s zeppelin. The ship contains the latest advancements over the past 70 years, rigid internal frame of carbon fiber, helium filled. How is the Zeppelin different? It’s much bigger. It’s about 246 feet long. The engines mounted on a blimp gondola are like a puffer fish, they’re small and not very efficient. Zeppelins have an aft engine, can take off at a 80 degree angle, more like a helicopter than anything else. Took about 18 months to build, finished May of this year, flew around Europe for a few months, and then had to get it here. Range of about 500 nautical miles, and only one month of the year it could do a crossing. Put it on a dock ship, to Beaumont, Texas. Reassembled it, and then we flew it here to California. The things we saw across the US were amazing, wild horses followed the shadow of the ship, it really gave you perspective of how darn big this country is. Eventually we reached California, went through Long Beach, came up the coast to CA, made a grand entrance over the Golden Gate Bridge, hovered, spun in place, flies at 1000 feet. Home is hanger 2 at Moffett field. Three models: flight-seeing, science missions, and advertising.

The things we need to expand the human race are in abundant supply in space.

Let me speak about what drives us to make those things happen. Eugene Cernan, the last human on the moon as he’s jumping three feet up in the air, he said “Nothing… NOTHING is impossible” if we can do that.

Gene Cerman on the moon

Everything can be done by bringing together the right people, the right capital, and the right technology. To do something fundamentally different is very risky. Society as a whole holds us back, because the goal is to maintain the status quo. If anything can go wrong, fix it! When given a choice, take both! Start at the top and work your way up. When forced to compromise ask for more. No simply means try harder. Best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.

In 1993 I walked into the offices of the FAA and they said it will never happen. Got approval 11 years later: gozerog.com. The person I enjoyed flying the most was Stephen Hawking, it was actually against the rules to fly him, the rules said they needed able-bodied people. We got permission to fly him the day before we took off, which was very convenient. Had 4 ER docs and full emergency room set up. He holds the same chair at as Isaac Newton at Cambridge. They had planned on doing one dive, maybe two if things went really well — they ended up doing 8 parabolas. They’ve been able to change the rules and have taken up a number of wheelchair bound children since then.

Next impossible thing, met Richard Garriot, said I’d love to fly into space. Went and negotiated with the Russians to fly private citizens into the space station. To date there have been 6 customers, started at 20 million, up to 35 million dollars a pop. Sergey Brin put down a deposit on an orbital flight. The idea to create a new generation of private spaceships. I had no idea that Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic to win a price.  Offered 25k to the first person to fly from New York to Paris, 9 teams spent 400k. Lindbergh was 25 years old, within 18 months of his flight passengers increased 30x, number of aircraft increased 4x, aviation stocks soar.

Aviation didn’t get easier, but that event changed what people believed was possible, it was a paradigm change. Could that bring along a new generation of private spaceships to take us into space? The X was going to be the name of the person who put up the money, eventually kept the X and called it the Ansari X Prize. 10 million dollar prize purse, privately funded teams, 3 person reusable spaceship, 100km altitude. Announced in May of 96, 26 teams spent 100 million to win the prize.

Decided to create a prize organization, the leverage of 10-40x above the prize size, and the efficiency of only paying the winners, to affect change. 10 million dollar prize ofor the first team to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. 30 million Lunar X prize, private robot to land on the moon. Will probably beat governments back to the surface of the moon. Progressive Automotive X Prize – to inspire a new generation of vehicles, clean production-capable vehicles that achieve at least 100 MPG. Will do races in 5-10 of the top US cities.

The X Prize Foundation has built and organized to identify the grand problems of our time. We’re looking forward to launching a couple of prizes a year. We’re focused underwater, energy and environment, life sciences “bionic human”, health care, global development and education, clean water, power, hunger. Every problem on this planet is solvable, and somewhere on this planet of 6 billion people there are folks who can make magic happen.

When I started out from zero, it was a pretty steep learning curve, gathered the books and DVDs and videos, dissections, but still after sketching had some leftover organs. I bought a skeleton, statred to try and understand the backbone a little bit, this magnificant column. The parts of each vertabae, nice place to attach all those tendons and ligaments. The discs, are very squishy in the middle and firm on the outside. Also trying to think of ways to present this information to everybody else after I’ve learned enough. Wanted to find a good way to explain the heart. Made something that looked like something you could make from Ace Hardware. [Shows picture of three digestive systems at happy hour.]

I would come back at the end of the day either in the hospital or with medical student and try to make drawings to see if I really was getting a sense of what was happening inside. Photographers don’t have the luxury of ignoring gravity, illustrators do. Another way to lay this out I thought about was to create a campus, a sort of world’s fair of the body. It’s really as story about cells, and I didn’t realize that when I started. I was trying to draw a double-helix in a way it’d never been drawn before, a pretty useless exercise since it’s been drawn in every conceivable way.

Whenever I got despondent about this book being too much for me I’d discover something like the eye and how the cells bend and stretch in the lens. [He's now going all the way through cells, RNA, DNA replication, the nervous system, a fast-paced serious of illustrations. This is one to wait for the video for!]

This is my trusted Hasselblad camera, that I’ve used since I was 23 or 24. I got my first job photographing factory workers for a computer company called Quantum.

You must all be wondering why a Jewish girl from a Republican tribe in Los Angeles found her way to Africa. I am not going to talk so much about my photography, but I want to tell you about my lifelong journey to portrait indigenous people struggling all over the world for their land, their air,
their water, their rights. Many of them will disappear. I want to capture these tribes in transition during this fleeting period of history.

Although I came from an affluent family, two of my father’s sisters had a terminal illness and so we had an early understanding of mortality. My father’s middle sister died when I was 12 and was my first mentor, the first person to really influence me. When I was 19 my dad’s second
sister died of breast cancer, and that really changed me because I wondered if maybe my life would be short and I had to live every day to its fullest. So I went back to Stanford and decided not to study psychology but to follow photography.

The next transitional part of my life was in my late 20s. I had the privilige of studying with the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. for his work during the Vietnam war. It made me realize that even though I had been in advertising, art could transform people in a more meaningful way.

Shortly after, I had a dream that I was swimming with an ancient pod of dolphins and I heard the direct words imparted to me that my mission in life would be to work with the ancient ones, and that my job would be to be their voice. Traditional people are inherently close to the earth. They are the keepers of the dream. They are also the canary in the mine, if they perish so do we. For example, if we are dealing with nuclear issues all over the planet, tribal areas are also impacted. I hope when you feel these images that what you feel the essence of the person – a homeopathic healing dose of their DNA that is being transferred to you. In this photograph, her spirit is going out to millions of people.

I feel very much that this work is starting to be a voice for people that don’t always have that voice. I want to tell you a little bit about a project that is my life’s passion and dream that comes from my still photography work with indigenous people. About ten years ago, I read a book
“In the Absence of the Sacred” by Jerry Manders and in that book there’s a chapter where he talks about Hawaii. I learned about young people that gave their lives to stop the bombing of an island called Kaho’olawe that was never on the maps, I was so fascinated I flew up to meet the author and he introduced me to the people in Hawaii. Their story was one of a culture nearly decimated, and it was right in our backyard. We stay in the hotels, we see the dances, but we don’t realize that Hawaiians were beaten for speaking their language, the hula was outlawed because it was too sensual. President Bush Sr. returned the island, Clinton made an apology for all that has been done.

I am in the process of making a feature film of this story based on the life of George Helm, Jr. who was the Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Native Hawaiian people. Many believe he was assassinated in the 1970s. Hawaii is the epicenter of the rainbow melting pot where Barack Obama had his coming of age. Like Obama, George was a powerful visionary and his legacy helped shape Obama’s view of the world.

My images are about the divine breath. We are becoming one tribe. The true meaning of Aloha is the divine breath of God. The word for foreigner means to be without breath. I truly believe that our world is merging and we are connected in so many ways. I would like to leave you with a very brief clip of George Helm. I want you to see that the indigenous story is here in our own backyard. This feature film will tell a universal story of peace.

One of the things that happened this year because of the exhibition is that I was urged to form a non-profit organization called Tribes in Transition to further this historic work of documenting cultures in transition. I look forward to speaking to you in the days to come to hear your ideas and thoughts. I hope you will help me in this endeavor.

Tempo. Some towns people walk around slow and easy, in NYC it’s a race. Same thing with ants. Slowest ant is the mud ant, it chases snails in super slow-motion. You speed up things as they get bigger. We go faster in bigger cities because we learn more, same thing with ants, they learn from the streams as they go through. You look at a big society, you see ants going the wrong direction sometimes. Error in big societies can lead to innovation.

Communications. Smaller societies are simpler communications, one ant will lead another to the food. The army ants of Africa, had swarms of these coming at me that are 100 feet wide with millions of ants. In these situations there’s a huge amount of redundancy. They don’t tie up cows in Africa because the army ants can kill them, they wander around with good reasons. There are beetles that pretend to be ants.

Specialization. Bigger socities get a lot more division of labor. They send the “cheap” ants first, the bigger ants come later, they’re 500x the size of the smaller ones. Lake Tahoe is the center for ant slaver in the US.

Assembly lines & teamwork. A big one starts dragging a piece of food, and a smaller one comes under it and picks up the end. There are other ants that serve as living roadfill, they lie down in the holes along the way. Ultimate assembly line is leaf-cutter ants, they take the leaves back to the nest and then grow fungus. They mash it up and different sized ants do different duties until it gets reduced to a pulp and they plant. They do everything human farmers do, including antibiotics, pesticides, fertalizer. Leaf-cutter ants will bury their garbage in a container the size of a human casket 20 feet down, they also put diseased organisms down there, the workers that do that are the old ones that are going to die soon anyway. They used to grow fungus on stones, about 10 million years ago they figured out to grow it on leaves and now the fungus is no longer biodiverse so it’s vulnerable to disease just like we have.

Infrastructure. They have nests 40 feet wide, underground beltways between the nests.

Warfare. Ants and humans are the only species with long-term warfare. You work out things with your neighbor until you have a no-ant-zone between you where no ant will tread. This is the terrorist ant from ??? it literal blows up when another ant approaches it, explodes and exudes this poisonous liquid. Army ants are so good at killing they have a sort of detente, but they’re civilized in that they won’t kill each other. Honey ants in American Southwest checking out each other’s size out, they look at each other and whoever is bigger wins.

The Argentine ant extends from San Francisco all the way down to Mexico. It’s a single social unit. If you go to the right suburb of San Diego, this is a pile of ants going on continously, million of ants are dying every day there are no truces, they just keep killing each other in the backyards of these houses and appear to have been doing so for about 100 years.

The second was a clip from an intreview done only a few days before George passed away, which I believe I’ve found on Youtube here:

New York Times declared it almost a perfect piece of internet art. If you Google for “matt” there’s 174 million hits on the internet, I’m the first three.

He’s now going through a fake explanation of how the whole thing was a hoax, like people on Youtube think. Recently declared by Time magazine as the best viral video of the year.

At the end everyone went up on the stage and danced!

At the same time I fell in love with NYC and started to realize that I could look at the whole city as a living organism. I wanted to dissect it through artistic means. I became interested in creatures that dwell in hidden parts of the city.

In NYC rats are part of everyday lives and most people ignore them, I took a liking to them. I started looking around and trying to photograph them. One day I was snapping picutres of the tracks trying to catch a rat or two, and a man came up and said you can’t take photographs here the MTA will confiscate your camera, and then started going into the tunnels and following the rats. There’s a whole new dimension to the city.

I started meeting “urban explorers” who regularly explore urban ruins like abandoned subway stations, factories, hospitals, and so on. When I took photographs in these locations, but I felt there was something missing in the pictures, simply documenting these wasn’t enough for me, so I wanted to create a fictional character that dwelled in these spaces. The simplest way to do this was tho model myself, and decided to do it without clothing because I wanted the figure to be without cultural or time-based indicators.

[she's now going through pictures from factories, aqueducts with herself as the model inside and around the area.]

When you go into spaces like this you’re directly touching the past because they remain untouched for decades. Instead of looking at reproductions at home, you’re feeling the bricks, the cracks, getting wet and muddy and walking in a dark tunnel with a flashlight. This is a tunnel underneath Riverside Park, the murals were done by graffiti artists to commorate the thousands of homeless people that were displaced when the trains started to come through.

I decided to title my series Naked City Spleen. Naked City is the name for New York.

The tunnels were once built for the prosperity of the city, but is now a sanctuary for the outcasts.

This is underneath my alma mater, Columbia University, and the tunnels are famous for being used in the Manhattan Project.

After exploring recently abandoned buildings I felt like things could fall into ruins very fast. I was reminded by how fragile our sense of security is and how vulnerble people truly are. I love to travel and Berlin is one of my favorite cities, it’s full of history and full of bunkers and tunnels from the war. I explored the catacombs in Paris extensively in the off-limits areas and fell in love right away. There are over 180 miles of tunnels, and only about a mile are open to the public as a museum. The remains of over 6 million people are housed in the catacoms, some over 1300 years old.

There are phone cables that were used in the 50s, and many bunkers that were used in the World War 2 era. I found a lot of grafitti from the 1800s. After exploring below decided to go up. In all this time I never saw a single rat in any of these places, until recently in the London Sewers. This was the toughest place to explore, had to wear a gas mask and when the tides of waste matter come in in sounds as if a storm is approaching you.

The last place I visited were the Mayan ruins in Honduras. This was taken in an archeological tunnel in the main temple. I like doing more than just exploring these spaces, I feel an obligation to animate and humanize these spaces to preserve them in a creative way before they’re lost forever.

I’m a producer. I have a company called Radical Media: tv shows, documentaries, advertising. We work with NGOs and very eclectic projects.

I got a call from Richard (founder of EG) – I can say it in 3 words:

19-20-21

What does that mean?

The amazing thing is this goes back to something he did all the way back in 1961. One of Richard’s first books was maps of cities done to scale. Anyway, he brought us in to help realize it and reveal what this concept of mass urbanization would mean in our everyday lives. This is a work in progress, going to share a little teaser film we put together because every time we show it to people they get inspired.

[The film has started, talking about how 1.4 million people are moving into cities each week. How will we care for our children? Our aging? Ourselves? How will we live? How will it change the way we work, invest, trade, learn, eat, consume, recycle, power, engineer, innovate? 19 cities with over 20 million people in the 21st century. Understanding lives in the world's largest cities. Finding the future first.]

The concept of finding the future first was born, and it was based very much on the understanding of the way we live in cities. By 2050 2/3rds of the world’s population will live in cities, up from about 50% right now. The data around that becomes incredibly important in the future. Some people say the world is flat, but it’s actually rising, the rise of supercities.

It’s a 5-year project, but we’re going to share it as we go along. It’s technology, education, health care, crime. Something that will affect every city, and that every city needs to share with itself. Choosing the first 19  cities just as a template, just as something to compare, a benchmark.

Before I begin, we have to take a look at the history of cities. This will be Planet Earth but for people. It’s about the migration. In 1000 A.D. Cordova, Spain was the largest. By 1500 Bejing started to rise , and 300 years later was the first city to be over a million people. By 1900 London became the center of the universe with over 6 million people, then in 1950 New York was pronounced the first megacity with a population of over 10 million people in the greater metropolitan area. Now the US has fallen behind and population centers are shifting to Asia.

It’s a planet of water. That’s why these cities pop up where they do. One frightening fact: if the rise of water continues at its current pace, all 19 cities we’re studying will be at least partially underwater by the time we’re done with the project. Cities may be part of the solution though, as vertical living can be a lot more efficient. There’s a placeholder website up at 192021.org. They’re currently looking for a broadcaster to support 30 minute shows culminating in a 12 hour project much like Planet Earth, then books, exhibitions, and finally ending in summits and conferences.

Imagine a half hour show on things like transportation, what’s it like getting to work in Bangladesh, in Tokyo, what’s the average commute time? (25 minutes in LA, 79 minutes in Dacca.) If you look at healthcare, it’s about the pulse of a city if it compares to life in the city. (200 patients per doctor in Berlin, 3800 in Decca.) Life expectancy is longest in London at 87. In 1950 Lagas had a population of 200,000, today it’s at 11 million and counting. Energy per capita, and eventually guides to the different cities, and someday the cover of Time and National Geographic. The exhibitions are going to become urban observatories, want the first one to be in Shanghai in 2010, if you look back at the history of expos in difficult economic times they tend to be very influential. In Shanghai there’s currently a museum for urban planning, they currently do balsa wood models of the entire city, but it’s changing so rapidly they can barely keep up.

Rick Smolan opens by thanking everyone who helped contribute to his project, and for being here at the EG conference.

We all live in really  tough time right now. The world has become a scary and unsettling place.
We shouldn’t leave the opportunity of any crisis unmet.
This is the time to look at things with a fresh start.
This is the time in American history to change the way that the world lives.

At times like this, when you’re concerned about the world, it’s when you look at the friends and family around you.
My daughter Phoebe went to her first sleepover last spring, she was very nervous about it.
The next morning we picked her up and walked home hand in hand.

We asked Pheobe: what’s the one thing you’ll remember for the rest of your life about this sleepover?

Dad, she whispers, did you know other people’s lives are different then ours?

It was the first time she’d realized that what you do in your house, the rituals, the ceremonies are different.
Pheobe asks: Dad, do you remember your first sleepover?
I respond: funny – I just had a flashback. I was young and I was at my first sleepover and the family I was with, they held hands and prayed before dinner.

Pheobe: Dad, you and mom should do a book on how different people have different lives at home.

So we decided to do it and called it America at Home. We hired a 100 of the best photographers of America and spread them throughout the country. We did our best to get the photographers out in various locations, to make sure we captured as much as we could.

There are 4 things that are meaningful to me about this project:

1 – the time we live in
2 – the 100 photographers
3 – we invited the public to participate as well, as photographers
4 – letting the public customize the covers of their book – professionally produced content skinned by the public.

Amy Tan, David Pogue, wrote personal essays on the concept of home. thank you.

Our projects have been featured by Time and Newsweek.
Custom covers was the first time in history in publishing that the public was able to customize, personalize their books.
“America 24/7″ – featured on Oprah

We also created UK at Home

From BBC clip:

Find yourself a camera and you might become part of history.

Capturing images for posterity. Alongside leading photographers, people will be encouraged to take photos that showcase snapshots of contemporary British life.

Imagine you found a book in your attic from 100 years ago, telling what everyday life was life. not told by media but by everyday people.

Slideshow of book covers:

• people performing in second life at home, making a living.
• homeschooling.
• a picture of a man in a cluttered home, looking for his wife’s ashes among the mess.
• near Rigly Field, people build bleechers on their roof.
• the morning routine of shaving.
• a 10,000 playhouse with electricity and hardwood floors.
• a woman who lives in an 84 square foot cottage on wheels.

The book is not a hallmark card. it’s showing real people, with real problems.
The changing face of american society is really fascinating.
None of the people in this book are strangers.

Image: a vietnam veteran that takes apart his makeshift home every night and remakes it every day, per the city of NY.

Closing.

I’m honored to be back and covering the event again, and to help out we have a new blogger Janetti Chon.

In another EG2007 story of kismet, John Abele, who spoke about his family’s submarine search, has decided to provide substantial funding to the film so it can finish production.

Read all about it in the Baltimore Sun.

I wonder what connections will be made next year?

Now she’s compiled a 5 minute video showing “the brass band that opened the conference; shell art; a speech by Wurman; some piano playing by Hawley; former Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold making VP Dick Cheney “cute” (no easy task!); Royal Calligrapher to Queen Elizabeth II Donald Jackson teaching the audience some moves; some amazing pictures of real snowflakes; “Heroes” creator Tim Kring talking about the intersection of television and the Internet; and a bracing violin piece.”

Check out Kara’s video on AllThingsD.

For the record, here’s their favorite episodes:

Sophie (11): the one where they try to quietly break into a building
Ben (9): the one where they shoot a hole in the ground with a machine gun
Owen (6): the one with the yodeling avalanche

Thanks again Adam, you’re a true gentleman.

Want to tell three stories that were under appreciated by my editors. I think I’m the longest surviving technology reporter in Silicon Valley. Peter Kerry is at the Merc and one of my heroes, but he’s mostly an investigative reporter. Went to school with William Hewlett Jr., grew up in Palo Alto. Was the paper boy at the house where Steve Jobs lives now. A few years ago Larry Page moved in the hacienda behind my mother’s house. One coda to the pretexting HP scandal, which is using social engineering techniques to find out what numbers you’ve called, I’ve never been a privacy stickler, but what really pissed me off was that Jay Keyworth (is that right?) was talking to 8 other reporters and not just to me.

About 5 months ago my wife tried to pay her phone bill via phone, it had a password, it turns out that HP had gotten his wife’s phone records!

What newspapers might have given us that the web hasn’t yet. All of my computer friends promise me agents that will do the kind of meta-information like things that will recreate the newspaper-like experience, we have torrents of information that’s not the same, like the front page of the New York Times. It’s very carefully crafted.

Why is the New York Times like the Metropolitan Opera? Average age is 60 and increasing by one a year.

Why are these stories not on the front page of the NYT? Sometimes acts of God. Too early. He wrote a story on the world wide web in 1993, he said think of it as a map to the buried treasure of information. When there was an explosion of economic activity I sulked for 5 years. Sometimes it’s Politics inside the NYT. He broke the Poindexter story twice, he was going to do Total Information Awareness. It got stuck on A-11, Washington Post did the story the next day but didn’t front it because the Times didn’t front it.