Written Response – Nat Rosa

What’s Wrong with TED Talks? as an Exercise in Style

Notation

On a TEDx stage in San Diego, in front of a large audience. A middle-aged man stands in a suit, his hands behind his back. He paces back and forth. The man begins a monologue accusing TED Talks of being oversimplified, cynical, and myopic. His voice a monotone meant to be taken seriously. When he pauses, it is for effect.

For eleven minutes he speaks. He concludes TED Talks are another version of right wing media, a harmful, self-aggrandizing affectation.

Titotes

A man was on a stage. He looked serious and spoke about TED Talks for eleven minutes, pacing back and forth. He concluded TED Talks were cynical; an exercise in empty, oversimplified ideas.

Retrograde

TED Talks are a forum for oversimplified ideas that solve nothing, the man concluded. His talk ended after eleven minutes in which he explained the fundamental problem with TED Talks was their lack of depth and engagement with ideas that offer real solutions. He protested against their artifice, calling their content infotainment, words without value or substance. This middle aged man wore a grey suit. His talk took place on a stage during TEDxSan Diego.

Surprises

How serious the middle-aged man! Why was he pacing so? Well, if he wasn’t being so very critical of the very forum that gave him a platform to speak – it is an empty platform! So he claims! And then he gives examples as to why TED Talks are so harmful! They pretend to present world-changing ideas when really they just publish middlebrow drivel! Instead they should do the hard work of investing in ideas that actually solve problems!

Eleven minutes of criticism! The main in the suit! Giving TED Talks a piece of his mind! You’d never believe it!

Bibliography

Queneau, R. and Wright, B. (1998) Exercises in style. London: John Colder.

TEDxSan Diego, 2013. New Perspectives – What’s Wrong with TED Talks? Benjamin Bratton at TEDxSanDiego 2013 – Re:Think. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo5cKRmJaf0 [Accessed 21 November 2021].

Investigation – Written Response

For the Methods of Investigation project, I chose to create a visual language that would tell the story of the auditory soundscape of my home, street and neighborhood, as heard from the inside of my home. The final iteration of the project is a collection of gestural symbols that seek to communicate how specific sounds feel when experienced, as well as snapshots of the most common modulations heard in my neighborhood, depicted through a series of intertwined gestures.

My choice was initially inspired after reading Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, in particular the chapter titled The Street. The meticulous process he uses to describe the layout, style and topography of his street, is one I tried to emulate when listening to, and transcribing, the sounds I heard. “Note down what you can see,” says Perec. If “nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see.” (Perec, 1997, p. 50).

Breaking down the common into parts to be interrogated became itself a method of investigation that encouraged me to actively absorb the sounds I heard, yielding a rich tapestry of tones, pitches and intonations that I had thus far been entirely inure to. “Make an effort to exhaust the subject…Force yourself to see more flatly. Detect a rhythm,” Perec’s words guided a dynamic and comprehensive methodology that in turn led me to a more nuanced understanding of how sound behaves and how difficult it is to communicate the experience visually (Perec, 1997, p. 51).

As I experimented with different methods of visualizing the sounds collected during my research, I read Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, and was intrigued by his discussion of the difference in perception and between literate and pre-literate societies. “The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear – ‘hearing was believing.’ The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear.” (McLuhan, Fiore and Agel, 2001, p. 45).

This discussion encompassed the thematic core of my project. Deconstructing sounds and creating a visual language based on the feeling they evoke, made it necessary to employ both senses to understand what was being communicated. In essence, hearing was seeing was believing. The work was a response to McLuhan’s question, “Whence did the wond’rous mystic art arise, of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?” though rather than painting speech, mine was an attempt to paint sounds (McLuhan, Fiore and Agel, 2001, p. 48).

In combining the methodical approach outlined by Perec with the thematic content discussed by McLuhan, I sought to explore the potential of a visual language to evoke the experience of sound. Though the outcome remains somewhat divorced from its intended objective, I hope to have captured some of the spirit and quality of the source inspiration.

Reference List
McLuhan, M., Fiore, Q. and Agel, J. (2001) The medium is the massage Hamburg: Gingko Press.

Perec, G. (1997) Species of spaces and other pieces: Georges Perec. Translated from the French by J. Sturrock. London: Penguin Classics.