Aparna Rao: High-tech art (with a sense of humor)

ABOUT THIS TALK

Artist and TED Fellow Aparna Rao re-imagines the familiar in surprising, often humorous ways. With her collaborator Soren Pors, Rao creates high-tech art installations -- a typewriter that sends emails, a camera that tracks you through the room only to make you invisible on screen -- that put a playful spin on ordinary objects and interactions.

Hi. Today, I'm going to take you through glimpses of about eight of my projects, done in collaboration with Danish artist Soren Pors. We call ourselves Pors & Rao, and we live and work in India.

I'd like to begin with my very first object, which I call "The Uncle Phone." And it was inspired by my uncle's peculiar habit of constantly asking me to do things for him, almost like I were an extension of his body -- to turn on the lights or to bring him a glass of water, a pack of cigarettes. And as I grew up, it became worse and worse, And I started to think of it as a form of control. But of course, I could never say anything, because the uncle is a respected figure in the Indian family. And the situation that irked me and mystified me the most was his use of a landline telephone. He would hold on to the receiver and expect me to dial a number for him. And so as a response and as a gift to my uncle, I made him "The Uncle Phone." It's so long that it requires two people to use it. It's exactly the way my uncle uses a phone that's designed for one person.

But the problem is that, when I left home and went to college, I started missing his commands. And so I made him a golden typewriter through which he could dispense his commands to nephews and nieces around the world as an email. So what he had to do was take a piece of paper, roll it into the carriage, type his email or command and pull the paper out. This device would automatically send the intended person the letter as an email. So here you can see, we embedded a lot of electronics that understands all of the mechanical actions and converts it to digital. So my uncle is only dealing with a mechanical interface. And of course, the object had to be very grand and have a sense of ritualism, the way my uncle likes it.

The next work is a sound-sensitive installation that we affectionately call "The Pygmies." And we wanted to work with a notion of being surrounded by a tribe of very shy, sensitive and sweet creatures. So how it works is we have these panels, which we have on the wall, and behind them, we have these little creatures which hide. And as soon as it's silent, they sort of creep out. And if it's even more silent, they stretch their necks out. And at the slightest sound, they hide back again.

So we had these panels on three walls of a room. And we had over 500 of these little pygmies hiding behind them. So this is how it works. This is a video prototype. So when it's quiet, it's sort of coming out from behind the panels. And they hear like humans do, or real creatures do. So they get immune to sounds that scare them after awhile. And they don't react to background sounds. You'll hear a train in moment that they don't react to. (Noise) But they react to foreground sounds. You'll hear that in a second. (Whistling) So we worked very hard to make them as lifelike as possible. So each pygmy has its own behavior, psyche, mood swings, personalities and so on. So this is a very early prototype. Of course, it got much better after that. And we made them react to people, but we found that people were being quite playful and childlike with them.

This is a video installation called "The Missing Person." And we were quite intrigued with playing with the notion of invisibility. How would it be possible to experience a sense of invisibility? So we worked with a company that specializes in camera surveillance, and we asked them to develop a piece of software with us, using a camera that could look at people in the room, track them and replace one person with the background, rendering them invisible.

So I'm just going to show you a very early prototype. On the right side you can see my colleague Soren, who's actually in the space. And on the left side, you'll see the processed video where the camera has made him invisible. Soren enters the room. Pop! He goes invisible. And you can see that the camera is tracking him and erasing. It's a very early video, so we haven't yet dealt with the overlap and all of that, but that got refined pretty soon, later. So how we used it was in a room where we had a camera looking into the space, and we had one monitor, one on each wall. And as people walked into the room, they would see themselves in the monitor, except with one difference: one person was constantly invisible wherever they moved in the room.

So this is a work called "The Sun Shadow." And it was almost like a sheet of paper, like a cutout of a childlike drawing of an oil spill or a sun. And from the front, this object appeared to be very strong and robust, and from the side, it almost seemed very weak. So people would walking into the room and they'd almost ignore it, thinking it was some crap laying around. But as soon as they passed by, it would start to climb up the wall in jerky fashion. And it would get exhausted, and it would collapse every time.

(Laughter)

So this work is a caricature of an upside-down man. His head is so heavy, full of heavy thoughts, that it's sort of fallen into his hat, and his body's grown out of him almost like a plant. Well what he does is he moves around in a very drunken fashion on his head in a very unpredictable and extremely slow movement. And it's kind of constrained by that circle. Because if that circle weren't there, and the floor was very even, it would start to wander about in the space. And there's no wires. So I'll just show you an instance -- so when people enter the room, it activates this object. And it very slowly, over a few minutes, sort of painfully goes up, and then it gains momentum and it looks like it's almost about to fall. And this is an important moment, because we wanted to instill in the viewer an instinct to almost go and help, or save the subject. But it doesn't really need it, because it, again, sort of manages to pull itself up.

So this work was a real technical challenge for us, and we worked very hard, like most of our works, over years to get the mechanics right and the equilibrium and the dynamics. And it was very important for us to establish the exact moment that it would fall, because if we made it in a way that it would topple over, then it would damage itself, and if it didn't fall enough, it wouldn't instill that fatalism, or that sense of wanting to go and help it. So I'm going to show you a very quick video where we are doing a test scenario -- it's much faster. That's my colleague. He's let it go. Now he's getting nervous, so he's going to go catch it. But he doesn't need to, because it manages to lift itself up on its own.

So this is a work that we were very intrigued with, working with the aesthetic of fur embedded with thousands of tiny different sizes of fiber optics, which twinkle like the night sky. And it's at the scale of the night sky. So we wrapped this around a blob-like form, which is in the shape of a teddy bear, which was hanging from the ceiling. And the idea was to sort of contrast something very cold and distant and abstract like the universe into the familiar form of a teddy bear, which is very comforting and intimate. And the idea was that at some point you would stop looking at the form of a teddy bear and you would almost perceive it to be a hole in the space, and as if you were looking out into the twinkling night sky.

So this is the last work, and a work in progress, and it's called "Space Filler." Well imagine a small cube that's about this big standing in front of you in the middle of the room, and as you approached it, it tried to intimidate you by growing into a cube that's twice its height and four times its volume. And so this object is constantly expanding and contracting to create a dynamic with people moving around it -- almost like it were trying to conceal a secret within its seams or something.

So we work with a lot of technology, but we don't really love technology, because it gives us a lot of pain in our work over years and years. But we use it because we're interested in the way that it can help us to express the emotions and behavioral patterns in these creatures that we create. And once a creature pops into our minds, it's almost like the process of creation is to discover the way this creature really wants to exist and what form it wants to take and what way it wants to move.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Ben Kacyra: Ancient wonders captured in 3D

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Ancient monuments give us clues to astonishing past civilizations -- but they're under threat from pollution, war, neglect. Ben Kacyra, who invented a groundbreaking 3D scanning system, is using his invention to scan and preserve the world's heritage in archival detail. (Watch to the end for a little demo.)


I'd like to start with a short story. It's about a little boy whose father was a history buff and who used to take him by the hand to visit the ruins of an ancient metropolis on the outskirts of their camp. They would always stop by to visit these huge winged bulls that used to guard the gates of that ancient metropolis, and the boy used to be scared of these winged bulls, but at the same time they excited him. And the dad used to use those bulls to tell the boy stories about that civilization and their work.

Let's fast-forward to the San Francisco Bay Area many decades later, where I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3D laser scanning system. Let me show you how it works. Female Voice: Long range laser scanning by sending out a pulse that's a laser beam of light. The system measures the beam's time of flight, recording the time it takes for the light to hit a surface and make its return. With two mirrors, the scanner calculates the beam's horizontal and vertical angles, giving accurate x, y, and z coordinates. The point is then recorded into a 3D visualization program. All of this happens in seconds. Ben Kacyra: You can see here, these systems are extremely fast. They collect millions of points at a time with very high accuracy and very high resolution. A surveyor with traditional survey tools would be hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points in a whole day. These babies would be producing something like ten thousand points a second. So, as you can imagine, this was a paradigm shift in the survey and construction as well as in reality capture industry.

Approximately ten years ago, my wife and I started a foundation to do good, and right about that time, the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas, hundred and eighty foot tall in Afghanistan, were blown up by the Taliban. They were gone in an instant. And unfortunately, there was no detailed documentation of these Buddhas. This clearly devastated me, and I couldn't help but wonder about the fate of my old friends, the winged bulls, and the fate of the many, many heritage sites all over the world. Both my wife and I were so touched by this that we decided to expand the mission of our foundation to include digital heritage preservation of world sites. We called the project CyArk, which stands for Cyber Archive.

To date, with the help of a global network of partners, we've completed close to fifty projects. Let me show you some of them: Chichen Itza, Rapa Nui -- and what you're seeing here are the cloud of points -- Babylon, Rosslyn Chapel, Pompeii, and our latest project, Mt. Rushmore, which happened to be one of our most challenging projects. As you see here, we had to develop a special rig to bring the scanner up close and personal. The results of our work in the field are used to produce media and deliverables to be used by conservators and researchers. We also produce media for dissemination to the public -- free through the CyArk website. These would be used for education, cultural tourism, etc.

What you're looking at in here is a 3D viewer that we developed that would allow the display and manipulation of [the] cloud of points in real time, cutting sections through them and extracting dimensions. This happens to be the cloud of points for Tikal. In here you see a traditional 2D architectural engineering drawing that's used for preservation, and of course we tell the stories through fly-throughs. And here, this is a fly-through the cloud of points of Tikal, and here you see it rendered and photo-textured with the photography that we take of the site. And so this is not a video. This is actual 3D points with two to three millimeter accuracy. And of course the data can be used to develop 3D models that are very accurate and very detailed. And here you're looking at a model that's extracted from the cloud of points for Stirling Castle. It's used for studies, for visualization, as well as for education.

And finally, we produce mobile apps that include narrated virtual tools. The more I got involved in the heritage field, the more it became clear to me that we are losing the sites and the stories faster than we can physically preserve them. Of course, earthquakes and all the natural phenomena -- floods, tornadoes, etc. -- take their toll. However, what occurred to me was human-caused destruction, which was not only causing a significant portion of the destruction, but actually it was accelerating. This includes arson, urban sprawl, acid rain, not to mention terrorism and wars. It was getting more and more apparent that we're fighting a losing battle. We're losing our sites and the stories, and basically we're losing a piece -- and a significant piece -- of our collective memory. Imagine us as a human race not knowing where we came from.

Luckily, in the last two or three decades, digital technologies have been developing that have helped us to develop tools that we've brought to bear in the digital preservation, in our digital preservation war. This includes, for example, the 3D laser scanning systems, ever more powerful personal computers, 3D graphics, high-definition digital photography, not to mention the Internet. Because of this accelerated pace of destruction, it became clear to us that we needed to challenge ourselves and our partners to accelerate our work. And we created a project we call the CyArk 500 Challenge -- and that is to digitally preserve 500 World Heritage Sites in five years.

We do have the technology that's scaleable, and our network of global partners has been expanding and can be expanded at a rapid rate, so we're comfortable that this task can be accomplished. However, to me, the 500 is really just the first 500. In order to sustain our work into the future, we use technology centers where we partner with local universities and colleges to take the technology to them, whereby they then can help us with digital preservation of their heritage sites, and at the same time, it gives them the technology to benefit from in the future.

Let me close with another short story. Two years ago, we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site, a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda, the Royal Kasubi Tombs. The work was done successfully in the field, and the data was archived and publicly disseminated through the CyArk website. Last March, we received very sad news. The Royal Tombs had been destroyed by suspected arson. A few days later, we received a call: "Is the data available and can it be used for reconstruction?" Our answer, of course, was yes.

Let me leave you with a final thought. Our heritage is much more than our collective memory -- it's our collective treasure. We owe it to our children, our grandchildren and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and to pass it along. Thank you.

(Applause) Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, I'm staying here because we wanted to demonstrate to you the power of this technology and so, while I've been speaking, you have been scanned. (Laughter) The two wizards that I have that are behind the curtain will help me bring the results on the screen. (Applause)

This is all in 3D and of course you can fly through the cloud of points. You can look at it from on top, from the ceiling. You can look from different vantage points, but I'm going to ask Doug to zoom in on an individual in the crowd, just to show the amount of detail that we can create. So you have been digitally preserved in about four minutes. (Laughter)

I'd like to thank the wizards here. We were very lucky to have two of our partners participate in this: the Historic Scotland, and the Glasgow School of Art. I'd like to also thank personally the efforts of David Mitchell, who is the Director of Conservation at Historic Scotland. David. (Applause) And Doug Pritchard, who's the Head of Visualization at the Glasgow School of Art. Let's give them a hand.

(Applause)

Thank you.

Allan Jones: A map of the brain

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How can we begin to understand the way the brain works? The same way we begin to understand a city: by making a map. In this visually stunning talk, Allan Jones shows how his team is mapping which genes are turned on in each tiny region, and how it all connects up.