Beneath the towering screen of the Sony IMAX theater in New York City, rows of new- and old-media mavens huddled with their teddy bears. For anyone who might have wandered in from the street, it was like catching the communal epiphany of a Robert Bly happening. But for everyone inside, it was just the start of the latest TED (thus the ted-dy bear souvenirs) conference: the annual and every-now-and-then retreat for the intelligentsia of technology, entertainment, and design.
Through Saturday afternoon, 600 attendees will be gathering to explore what TED's chairman, Richard Saul Wurman, is calling "technotainment ... a parallel system of learning that will be created by the technology and entertainment industries."
The goal is no more ambitious than the menu of speakers. There are the entertainment gurus (Tom Freston, chair and CEO of MTV), the online moguls (Bob Pittman of AOL), and the visionaries (Andy Lippman of the MIT Media Lab). Fortune magazine has described TED as "My Dinner with Andre multiplied by about 50." Wurman considers it his "ultimate dinner party."
To understand TED is to understand its 62-year-old creator. After graduating at the head of his class from the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, Wurman spent 13 years in a stifling architecture firm before setting off for the wilder West. Once there, he devoted himself instead to what he called "information architecture." This meant reorganizing everything from city guides to telephone books so that the information could be conveyed in the simplest, most direct manner. "I start every project from the perspective of not knowing," he says.
Thus in 1984 came TED, a learning conference born from Wurman's belief that "the most interesting people were converging in technology, entertainment, and design." Now, TED has become the gourmet mind-meld for the country's high-voltage digerati. Even Marvin Minsky, who spoke at last year's conference, wields unusual hyperbole when he describes the TED experience: "It's one of the best parties in the world," he says.
This week's TED is turning out to be no different. Just as in the past, one might catch Bill Gates sharing a cocktail with Timothy Leary, this year affords hallway schmoozing with the unlikely combo of Viacom's CEO, Sumner Redstone, and VR'tist Jaron Lanier. So far, there's been plenty to chat about, from the talk by MIT's Seymour Papert on the future of education (and, yes, the radical pedagogy of Dirty Dancing) to Marney Morris' demo of her inspired new edutainment CD-ROM, SprocketWorks.
The biggest hit of Wednesday's opening day, however, was a machine. After the premiere of a short behind-the-scenes film about their Mars mission, the Pathfinder team rolled out the second-string Sojourner: a twin of the world-famous rover. "It looks much smaller in person," remarked an IBM executive in the audience. To the crowd's delight, Wurman stretched out on stage and let the shiny bot traverse his stomach. "We'll drive this over to the party when we're done," he promised.
The next few days promise more razzle dazzle, including tonight's IMAX festival. Though this marks the first TED in New York City (they're usually in Monterey, California, but Wurman felt a conference on technotainment should be in NYC, "where the content is"), it probably won't mean much to the people toiling away in Silicon Alley. With all the troubled start-ups in town, it's doubtful that very many of them can afford TED's US$2,500 admission. The commemorative CD-ROM, though, will only be a couple hundred bucks.
