For TEDxLSU 2016, a group of artists asked themselves, why should TEDxLSU talks exist as only spoken communication? Why can’t these talks also be translated into visual pieces that still communicate ideas worth spreading?

Supporting the theme of “why” and our thirst for discovery, TEDxLSU was excited to host this group of artists who painted each talk as they happened live! Initiated by Chris King of the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts (LSMSA), alongside TEDxLSU Creative Communications team member Ashlyn Verrette, this project set out to communicate this event from another perspective. For this project, there were twelve artists grouped into four smaller groups of three. This included four professional artists from across Louisiana: Alex Harvie (New Orleans), Pat Phillips (Alexandria), Joshua Chambers (Bossier City), and Chris King (Natchitoches). As well as four collegiate artists from LSU (Lindsey Chaplain, Suzannah Burke, Amelie Provosty, and Hannah Lemoine) and four high school artists from LSMSA (Ella DiResto, Ellie Williamson, Dale Campo, Desiré Johnson).

During the event, the artists painted alongside the audience from a balcony in the theater. Each smaller group of artists included an artist in high school, college, and a professional artist. “The way I look at it is that it’s teams of three people that are at various stages in their art career,” noted Chris King. “So we all could learn from each other and contribute from different directions.” So not only did the artists have to create the pieces live, but they also had to collaborate. Reflecting on the experience Joshua Chambers, one of the professional artists, also shared that this was great for a bunch of artists because they didn’t even have to talk to each other; they could work together in the moment and use the medium as their tool for collaboration.

For each speaker, one team of artists created a mixed-media piece on paper that visually captured the messages in order to share how the artists perceived the ideas visually. King noted, “I hope that it reveals a little bit about how artists interpret things and how visual artists understand things and use the language they’ve learned. Whether it’s high school or college level, the idea is that art is a visual language.”

Through this collaborative experiment the artists worked together to combine their specific talents and perspectives across age ranges to capture the moods and abstract ideas from the talks. And in doing so, provided a new perspective to appreciate TEDxLSU while fostering collaboration, discovery, and innovation. According to Chris King, “In a lot of ways that’s what we all hope for -- to create thought provoking art. For a piece to be thought provoking you have to demonstrate a skill level, and then that skill level defends the idea or the information you’ve put in the piece. We want to make some things that look skilled, that look contemporary and relevant to the issues that will be discussed.”

When asked about the experience Amelie Provosty, one of the LSU artists, stated “I strongly believe that LSU students are a great resource for the greater Baton community. Events like TEDxLSU allow the university and community to connect, and this merge results in empowered people, who create, share, and inspire within their neighborhoods.”

Ready to see active community and collaboration visually communicated? Check out some of the artwork here, and compare notes with fellow attendees or prepare yourself for the video reveals later this spring.

How do you experience poetry? Why can’t we listen, feel, and write poetry collaboratively? What would happen if you could experience not only the words of a poem but also the sounds and even add your own words to the mix? These are just some of the questions one group of 2016 TEDxLSU presenters hoped to explore in the interactive poetry experience during the event.
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The poem “Diamonds in Dystopia” was a visual, musical, and imaginative journey in which the audience added to the poem during the live performance with an interactive live-streaming poetry web app. But as we ask why interactive poetry, we want to know how this poem and the interactive app were constructed.

Recently, I connected with performer and CxC Art + Design Coordinator Vincent A. Cellucci, so that he could explain how this piece was created.

What audience members may not know is that this piece was created from a sampling of several of Vincent’s favorite TED talks as well as transcripts from this year’s TEDxLSU speakers. Vincent used an algorithm called Markov chains to cull words and themes from these TED and TEDxLSU talks to generate lines of text. Then, as a poet, Vincent arranged these lines into stanzas with clear structures. Vincent called this process “found text” since he used words from various TED and TEDx talks to get the language for the poem to create his own piece.

Normally, this is where the creative process would end, but “Diamonds in Dystopia” takes the writing process one step further, asking “readers” to become “writers.” At TEDxLSU, attendees also added their own lines to Vincent’s poem.

How did this work? Jesse Allison, Professor of Experimental Music, and Derick Ostrenko, Professor of Digital Art, with poetic input from Vincent, created an app that uses advanced coding techniques that pulls found text (just like Vincent’s poem) from transcripts of TED Talks to accomplish a process they refer to as “creative data mining.”  Attendees connected to the web app to access the poem on their phone. When they saw a word they liked during the performance, they clicked it. When they did this, a voice repeated the word with a unique pitch from each phone. Each word they clicked on was run through the Markov chains against approximately 2,500 TED Talks to create four lines which Vincent added seamlessly into the poem he was delivering on stage--talk about instant gratification! These lines, built from the combination of the audience selecting words and their relationships to former TED talks, project on the screen during the performance and essentially write a new poem particular to the TEDxLSU individual performance.

During this performance, the audience experienced the poem visually on their phones, physically as each person clicked on the words, and musically as each click emitted a certain pitch unique to their user connection. And, by interacting with the poem, the audience engaged more fully their imaginations. In this performance, Vincent hoped to show the audience that poetry is still thriving today and more than that we can use everyday technology, like our phones, to be creative.

Vincent says, “Poetry is an experience of sound, and it’s a visual experience in the imagination.” And for Vincent, this poetry experience is “about how you feel in the moment, the associations that it brings up in your mind. It’s an imaginative activity. I hope that it is a revolution for what people think contemporary poetry really is.”

There was a little bit of something for everyone in this performance. Whether you enjoy poetry, music, digital media, or simply stretching your imagination muscles, you would enjoy “Diamonds in Dystopia.” Want to continue the experiment? Check out tedxlsu.emdm.io and join Vincent, Jesse and Derick as we dive into the questions of why poetry, why digital media, and why not now together.