Since 2004, Alphachimp has created on-site paintings live during each presentation. These are the results. Enjoy. Individuals and small groups have the power to shape the future. All of us together are smarter than any of us alone. Good ideas should trump ideologies. Progress is possible. Tomorrow will be more surprising than what we can even imagine today. See all images on Flickr.
First inspired by the mysterious and mathematical qualities of a caterpillar’s crawl, artist Reuben Margolin creates large-scale kinetic sculptures that use pulleys and motors to create the complex movements and structures we see in nature. Margolin takes to the PopTech stage to share some of his extraordinary mechanical installations.
As a child, he started playing with stilts and was enamored with math. After going in a few different directions in school, he set out with a typewriter strapped to the back of a motorcycle to write poetry as he traveled across the country. This resulted in the creation of a mobile, which he drove for five months in order to have deep, meaningful conversations with people he met along the way.
Soon after, on a hike, he saw a transparent caterpillar that inspired him to try and replicate it as a machine. Although the finished product didn’t move as elegantly as a caterpillar in nature, it fueled his interest in examining movement in the natural world. Still seeking a way to perfectly capture the wave of a caterpillar’s motion, he demonstrated on the PopTech stage a much sleeker machine made of wood, thin rope and metal that did indeed undulate like caterpillar creeping. He’s now exploring applying this principal to giant circles, wooden frames and other forms.
Margolin ended his presentation by revealing a gorgeous, sparkling sculpture suspended from the Opera House Ceiling, which swung gently above the crowd as though wind was blowing through a giant, gilded glass net.
Margolin noted that there are two ways of looking at things: one is at the sparkle and the dawns and the beauty of the world, and one is at the structure and the meat and the math. His art brings both of these elements together in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and intellectually interesting.
Robert Guest writes the Lexington column in the Economist. “I’m going to talk,” he says, “about America and why I think it is uniquely positioned to be not merely the current superpower but the next superpower. I’m going to focus on one very narrow aspect of this. America’s greatest strength, in my view, is that people want to live here. That’s something that the people who already do live here take for granted” — maybe because we haven’t visited the other countries of the world and seen how much they suck?
Senior Advisor on Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Alec Ross, says it’s time to reboot US diplomatic efforts abroad. Ross calls for 21st century statecraft based on the innovative use of new media. Previously, Ross co-founded One Economy, a nonprofit devoted to closing the digital divide, and brought his expertise to then Senator Obama’s presidential campaign.
Erica Williams is a Washington DC-based activist who works to get under-represented communities to take part in the political process. She asked the PopTech crowd to put aside any pre-conceived notions about her generation (the Millennials, born in 1978-2000). Williams was raised by two pastors and defines her childhood by two things:faith and church.
Marije Vogelzang runs her own food-design laboratory, Proef, in the Netherlands. She is inspired by everything that surrounds the act of eating – from the stories and rituals surrounding food preparation to the emotional impact of the texture and color of specific foods. The result? Edible art installations that are at once provocative and intimate.
Will Allen is co-founder and director of Growing Power, Inc., an organization that is transforming the production and delivery of healthy foods to underserved, urban populations. Growing Power operates as an urban farm and education center in Milwaukee, WI, and more recently, Chicago, teaching urban youth how to produce low-cost healthy foods for their communities.
Author and activist Michael Pollan is a passionate advocate for sustainable food. In his compelling talk at PopTech, he explores how our industrial food system is keeping us overly dependent on fossil fuels, destroying our environment, and making us sick. Breaking this cycle requires fundamentally changing our relationship to food - and eating more meals together.
John “Jay” Rogers is dedicated to transforming the auto industry. He tells us that we’ve got a problem with cars, “a challenge that we can all ride in to together in a successful automobile.” Our problem is with “frictional unemployment”.
Australian choreographer Gideon Obarzanek of Chunky Move showed a brief sequence of his choreography, which included dances that looked like giant spiders scuttling across the stage, the illusion of rose petals blowing across prone dancers and intertwined bodies bathed in pulsating, monochromatic shards and shafts of light.
John Fetterman is the hulking, tattooed and impassioned mayor of Braddock, PA, a tiny town ten miles from downtown Pittsburgh. Braddock was built around the steel industry: vintage pictures show a thriving downtown area boasting 30 tailors, 5 banks, 51 barbers in their community. Over the last few decades, the town has imploded and now none a single one of those businesses remain.
Sculptor Reuben Margolin works in the medium of motion. As a child, he started playing with stilts and was enamored with math. After going in a few different directions in school, he set out with a typewriter strapped to the back of a motorcycle to write poetry as he traveled across the country.
Assaf Biderman, who runs the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT, opened with reminding us that people used to think virtual connectivity was going to reduce urban density. This proved not to be true: the Internet did not introduce the death of the city. Cities are instead a concentrated focal point of looking at new ways to be sustainable.
Laura Kurgan heads up the Spatial Information Design Lab, which is they call a Think and Action Tank. Kurgan states that there are no neutral maps and no neutral data. She introduced the PopTech audience to their project “Architecture and Justice” and explained how they are looking at a city’s infrastructure. This, she says, includes prisons, which are generally not discussed when talking about cities.
Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, referenced the foolishness of certain actions (e.g. texting while driving), what he calls “small irrationalities” that we do every day. These can lead up to big problems. With our current model of labor, for instance, we reward people with rest. This doesn’t really capture what it is that engages people, what causes them to want to work.
Leading neuropsychiatrist Peter Whybrow recently authored "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough," a neurobiological look at the instinctual and social behaviors that balance a market economy. Pay attention as he explains how America's reward-driven culture is pushing the physiological limits of our evolutionary inheritance - making us sick in body and mind.
Environmental journalist Mark Lynas reports from his global tour of climate change hotspots - documenting the dramatic effects that even one degree of global warming may have around the world.
Practicing “identity correction” – the Yes Men target large corporations that put profits ahead of everything else. Getting inside the system, and impersonating business leaders, they smuggle stories out to the world to expose big business wrong-doing.
Champion of the Earth honoree and biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus has transformed the way we think about innovation and design. Benyus challenges us to study nature’s best ideas, then imitate its designs and processes to solve some of our greatest human challenges.
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 6:48PM 
