Little did I know that studying how my son learned to speak would come to this: a TED Talk gone viral, partially thanks to Ashton Kutcher and his 6 million Twitter followers — and a technology platform that may change the way we understand social, political and commercial communications.
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Why I taped 200,000 hours of my son
Poster the world with large-scale photos to help realize street artist JR’s 2011 TED wish Winner of the TED 2011 prize , anonymous French street artist JR’s “wish to change the world” consists of a massive humanist art project. JR grants that art, while not meant to effect change in practical terms, instead changes the way people see the world. “The power of an image is really strong,” and by “making invisible people visible” you can take the power back from the media. While the undertaking is a big one—”the world is fucked up,” as JR simply puts it—think of the interventionist artist as a master marketer, substituting such ambitious ideas as “civilization” and “culture” in place of brands, working to build awareness worldwide, one project at a time. Using cities as his canvas, JR began writing graffiti at age 17 as a way to leave his mark on society. After finding a cheap camera on the metro, he started documenting his friends on their graffiti adventures. He started pasting the pictures on the city streets, outlining them with colored paint to differentiate them from advertisements. “The city is the best gallery I could imagine,” he explained during his TED talk. JR fully realized “the power of paper and glue” during the 2005 civil unrest in Paris, when he took portraits of four residents from the poor neighborhood of Clichy-sous-Bois and pasted them around the rich areas, along with names, ages and even home addresses. Responding to media coverage of these individuals with his giant posters, JR inserted his message into the public dialog, adding his own layer of meaning to the depictions seen in the press. JR took his project and a team beyond France when traveled to the West Bank where he created his “Face To Face” project, documenting two people doing the same job—one from Israel, one from Palestine. Using 20,000 square-feet of paper, JR’s crew pasted the massive portraits around eight cities on both sides of the conflict and found most people couldn’t decipher who belonged to which country. With the success of this campaign in full force, the horrific slaying of three students in Rio’s most dangerous favela, Provid
The TED prize for 2011 will go to J R, who has made a name for himself by plastering downtrodden neighborhoods around the world with colossal photographs.
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Award to Artist Who Gives Slums a Human Face
