Transcriber: Chryssa R. Takahashi Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
Hi there.
It occured to me a while ago
that for me to move forward with my work and in general,
I had to acknowledge where I am first.
I had to acknowledge the present. I had to be present.
I had to look at the world around me with open eyes and an open mind,
αnd to not immediately attach all the labels
that I've been taught to attach to things: this is a chair, this is a flower.
I wanted to see things as they are.
And then see the possibilities within them.
Because I believe if yοu can do that, then reality becomes negotiable.
And I want to propose two ideas.
The first idea is that the mundane can be beautiful
and magical, and it can be surprising.
And the second idea is that I think sometimes it's better to be stupid,
and sometimes it's good to not know what you are doing and to just play.
And I'll illustrate that a little bit by telling you about
how I came to be here today.
So it all started in London, 1999.
I moved to London then, almost 15 years ago,
without a job, without looking for a job,
without really having enough money to sustain a life in London.
I came originally to make music.
And, you know, if I look back now, I would go "what a stupid move that was".
But when you are the stupid bit in the middle,
you don't realize and that's a good thing
because you don’t know you're stupid so you just do things
that you think are right and that you should be doing.
And you look at things and you go, "What if I try this", "What if I try that?"
And this idea of "what if" has become such a guiding principle in our work.
So the first question we asked ourselves was, "What if we made a website?"
Now I have absolutely no idea how to make a website.
My background is in film and music.
But it became something that we were interested in it.
And you have to remember, this was 1999,
probably the worst time to enter the digital space,
because, really, the dot-com bubble was bursting in front of our eyes.
And this new medium was really failing quite miserably.
But I think within the ruins of it all,
we thought we could propose a different idea.
And the idea we proposed was called Soulbath.
And it was the first website we made.
And really what we wanted to do was to set
a counterpoint to the web we were seeing.
So it was void of color,
it had an interface that was virtually impossible to use,
because things would just suddenly go away.
It threw out error messages when you rolled somewhere
and you had to go yes, no.
When other things were flat, we proposed depth and we would say,
"You know, how would this be if it was three dimensional."
We also thought, for example, what would a lonely computer want to play.
Maybe they would want to play single player pong.
So it just became this playground for us.
We were just experimenting with ideas.
And one of the ideas that we wanted to experiment with
was the idea of what would happen
if we took the failing space of the dreaded banner ad,
and we filled it, not to fuel consumerism,
but to sell an idea, to sell an emotion, to just be experimental.
So we created this exhibition of banners which was an open submission call
and it produced results like this,
which is such a beautiful disobedience with the space and the medium,
and just shows you how far you can go with all these things.
Here's a selection of the different banners
and what happened next was something --
I mean, we were working from our bedroom.
What happened next was something we couldn't have expected.
One was that suddenly we had an article in the New York Times about this.
And secondly, that the young director
who has just finished shooting his second feature film,
contacted us and said, "You know, I see something in your work
that I think really resonates with this film that I'm doing."
And it was a film about addiction, and about dependency, and about decay.
And he said, "I think you could do this justice."
So we asked ourselves, "What if we made a website fall apart?
What if we made a website that doesn't do
what you expect it to do, that plays with your perceptions,
and actually the longer you stay on it,
the more it disintegrates to follow the narrative of the film."
So we created a website that basically follows
from summer to fall, and eventually to winter.
And the longer you go through the different narrative strains,
the more it just falls apart.
And here's a short run-through, one of this different paths
and to illustrate a little bit better, here’s the video that plays it.
(Music)
So this idea of playing with what people expect something to be,
of taking reality and sort of adding something to it
or taking something away from it, or just recontextualizing it,
became something that was such a big guiding principle for our work
that eventually we thought we could propose it as a metaphor,
as an idea in our work itself.
And we asked ourselves what if we hijack reality?
Now, someone asked us,
a company that it will be quite obvious who they are,
asked us to create a style guide.
And it was a style guide for people who don’t read style guides.
We thought, OK, where a normal style guide would give you tools
to know which font to use, and which color to use, and where to place things.
We wanted to give people tools to be creative
and so to recontextulize reality.
So, we basically created this box which is called "Reality Hijack Set".
And let me tell you, post-9/11,
sending out 120 boxes that have "hijack" written on them,
not a good idea.
But at the center of it all was a book.
This was our style guide.
And it starts off as a Swedish science book.
And then suddenly it gets hijacked
by lots of crossed out words that only leave the text you want to read,
and basically where other people say no entry,
we said just cross out the first bit, let's try.
Justin Timberlake is suddenly an office clerk,
and in the middle of it, the book is hijacked by yet another book.
We produced so much content that eventually we thought,
"Wouldn't it be nice to apply this to a digital style guide as well?"
So we produced this weird car crash between Windows XP and Mac OSX.
Basically, we just took all the things that you’re used to in your daily life,
and we basically just brought them all together and mash them up.
And we thought, OK, we need to transport all these ideas.
So we took different applications and we just reformed them like this one.
(Laughter) I'm not going to read this out.
Which then ended up being sort of a fully functional version of Microsoft Word.
But it's all hand drawn.
We had another piece of text that we had to put in there.
We decided to hijack yet another one of Microsoft's applications
which ended up being this. (Laughter)
And it just became such a fun thing to take these mundane things,
these tools that are used every day,
and to suddenly give a twist to them that makes them interesting again.
So much that we eventually thought
what if we take the most mundane thing,
sort of transit point for us every single day.
What if we hijacked Google?
What if we took this and added something to it
that elevates it above just being that point where you type something in
and you go somewhere else.
So we made this, which is called Google gravity.
And basically, as soon as you use it, it falls apart.
But it remains fully functional so you can type in TED,
it'll give you wrong TED, TED Athens, there you go, add my name to it.
And sudenly is something that is -- something you don’t even pay attention to
becomes something that is entirely playful,
something that you want to play with and you want to move around.
And I think this idea of taking the mundane and elevating it
and bringing back to you the magic that's within it, was something
we were so interested in that we thought what if mobiles were magic again.
And really, I remember the time when I had my first mobile phone,
and I would just be baffled by the idea that I could sit on a beach
and talk to someone in a taxi 1000 miles away.
That it had this ability to connect people on such an amazing level.
But you know now it's this dreaded thing that you switch-off
and you carry on you all the time, you have nomophobia,
you need the phone on you, I'm the worst offender.
But, it just becomes this annoying thing.
We wanted to create something that was magical again.
So we took the most basic form of communicating via a phone
which is a text message.
And we proposed, what if this could be transformed into something.
So you send a text message to a number
and suddenly all the words become fish.
And they swim around.
And in the end, they look something like this.
Now, I've been fortunate to work on these things with
a business partner of mine, Andreas Mueller.
We’ve been working for 14 years.
This is one of the things that he did.
It's based on the idea, what if computers could dream.
What would they dream of?
And it’s also based on the idea
that some of the most beautiful things on earth are flowers.
And he read the sentence which says, "The earth smiles in flowers."
And he wanted to help computers dream of flowers.
And he created this piece which is called Hana.
And it basically creates the beauty of nature
but it creates it entirely from code,
and only for the computer to see.
And the thing I love about it so much is that for this
to be really really consistent, we shouldn't even be able to see it.
This should just run within the computer.
And you should never be able to see it.
But then, sometimes this happens.
This is an actual slide that I put in on Tuesday,
and I was hoping I would be able to exchange it yesterday,
and it didn't happen, because sometimes you fail.
Sometimes you try something and it doesn't work.
And this is one of these things. I was hoping to finish it on Wednesday.
It didn't work.
And it just shows you that failure is good.
Failure is an option.
And it’s something that I believe very strongly in.
But no matter how often you failed,
I think for me there's always the biggest fear
that at some point I will become an expert.
I'll be the guy that knows what he is doing,
and people come to me because of that.
And I think the worst thing for me is the thought
that if you know what you're doing,
you might end up doing only what you know.
So how do I really instill this little bit of naivety and stupidity,
and so seeing the world differently.
What if I could see the world like a child again?
Now I found a solution which is have your own children.
So those are my children.
And they have actually helped me see the world very differently.
They've taught me to play again.
They have taught me to look at things differently.
For example, my boy, he can literally be Buzz Lightyear in the morning,
some sort of made-up Storm Trooper in the afternoon,
and then some evil emperor from outer space in the evening.
And it's all these things coexist for him
because he's got no context,
he doesn't have to be that person or that person.
He can be any of them.
And it really sort of hits you that they start playing,
and I bought them Itchy and Scratchy dolls.
And I know I’m going to pay for therapy at some point.
(Laughter)
But they have no idea who they are.
So they dress them up as Bulgarian folklore dancers, whatever.
(Laughter)
They can be whatever.
And it’s beautiful.
And I think the thing I learned I like most,
is to look up and to look at the world differently.
This is a tree close to my house.
I walked passed it for years.
Never looking at it, because we're so focused on where we are going
that we forget what's in between,
the place that you left, and the place where you are going.
And it was not until my daughter said, "Daddy, look, shoes."
Then I looked up and I saw the tree is full of shoes
and it’s something otherwise I would have never seen.
But it’s something we are used to all the time.
Everyone remembers lying on the grass, looking at the sky.
These are three pictures that I took within about a minute.
On the left, I think, we have Goofy.
In the middle, it’s the dragon from the "Neverending Story", I forget his name.
And on the right, it’s a horse's head.
I think the important thing is,
it’s not so much what you look at, it’s what you see.
And I think maybe if you install that in your mind,
then one day, like me, you are going to make a pancake
that looks like Alfred Hitchcock.
(Laughter)
And maybe you're actually going to notice it before you eat it.
Thanks a lot.
(Applause)