BlackRockCity
x = independently organized TED event

Theme: Frontiers of Humanity

This event occurred on
September 1, 2011
2:00pm - 7:00pm PDT
(UTC -7hrs)
Black Rock City, Nevada
United States

Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
-Dorthea Brande

TEDxBlackRockCity will be a one-day event of talks and performances that will explore and embody the frontiers of human knowledge and experience.

Our speakers and performers will reflect a wide variety of the creative dimensions of Black Rock City, a temporary city of over 50,000 people formed in the Nevada desert once a year to celebrate art and creative freedom. Our goal is to explore the frontiers of art, dance, civic action, ecology, music, design, philosophy and technology, illuminating and providing a stage for what is most profound about this remarkable community.

TEDxBlackRockCity will foster active learning, conversation and celebration of the creative explorations that sustain and flourish within Black Rock City -- ideas that can change the world. These are ideas worth spreading.

Black Rock City
Black Rock City, Nevada
United States
See more ­T­E­Dx­Black­Rock­City events

Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check event website for more information.

Kate Raudenbush

Kate Raudenbush is a New York City-based artist who creates social commentary through sculpture using themes and symbolism from history and mythology, geometry and architecture. She utilizes welded and laser-cut metal, acrylic, mirror, glass and light to form enveloping allegorical environments in an effort to shape an awareness of our changing earth and evolving humanity.

Chris Paine

Chris Paine is the co-writer and director of Revenge of the Electric Car (2011). His prior work includes the feature documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006) released by Sony to become one of the most successful documentaries of recent times.

Jim Glaser

Jim Glaser is an artist, event producer and executive recruiter living in Brooklyn. Following a creative path, Jim has spent the past decade bringing exceptional people together while manifesting many types of creative projects. As the founder of the Kostume Kult arts collective and the non-profit association behind the Figment Project, Jim is a tireless advocate of participatory culture, delighting in its growth while conspiring towards its greater potential.

Jess Hobbs

People have often described Jessica Hobbs as someone trying to lead a compulsively artistic life, which is more or less true. She is an MFA graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute and has been wandering and creating large scale art around the world for well over a decade. She believes collaboration is key in community and art, most recently illustrated through her work with the Flux Foundation, a nonprofit arts organization.

Hollis Doherty

Hollis Doherty is a writer, actress, and currency activist. A lifelong passion for protecting the Earth's natural resources led her to a Biology degree at the University of Colorado. When she recently discovered the true story of the currency experiment during the Great Depression in Woergl, Austria, she flew there to research and ultimately write a screenplay, "The Miracle in Woergl".

Reverend Billy Talen

Rev. Billy Talen is spiritual leader of the Church of Stop Shopping, a radical performance community based in NYC. Directed by Savitri D - the group's 35 voice choir is known for performances on four continents, and has won the OBIE, Albert and Dramalogue Awards for their theatre. On the other hand, they are, with Rev. Billy, imprisoned on a regular basis for singing "exorcisms" inside bank lobbies, especially the financiers of mountaintop removal, tar sands, or hydro-fracking. The Stop Shoppers play key roles in Occupy Wall Street.

Spencer Greenberg

Spencer Greenberg is a mathematician with an education in applied mathematics and computer science from Columbia University's School of Engineering and NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Spencer is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Rebellion Research, a quantitative fund that applies machine learning technology to investing.

Dan Ariely

Dan discusses how financial and social norms affect people's behavior. Imagine a friend asks you to help him move her couch? Now imagine she offers to pay you $3.00 to help him move his couch? How does this affect the way you think about this favor? Watch and find out.

Tom Price

Tom has been involved in Burning Man for 15 years. He co-founded Burners Without Borders in the Gulf Coast, was Environmental Manager for the 2007 "Green Man" event, was the founder and Executive Director of Black Rock Solar. He and his wife Andie Grace live in the Bay area with their 3 year old daughter Juniper, who has attended 4 burns.

Sara Farley

Sara is the Co-Founder and COO of the Global Knowledge Initiative, a not for profit that brokers partnerships between individuals and institutions to solve global challenges in science, technology and innovation. After receiving her training at Stanford, Sara became an international science and technology strategist, helping organizations like the World Bank and UN rethink their approaches to tackling poverty through science and technology.

Tim Fielding

Tim “Journeyman” Fielding is a DJ and digital media producer with deep roots in the UK and US club scenes. His London-based label, Brainiak Records, released “Live at the Brain”, the first album of on-stage MIDI performances by some of the early stars of Electronica. One of the leading investors in London’s seminal club The End, he continues to experiment with transformational experiences on both live and digital platforms.

Dan Ariely

Why do we so often fail to act in our own best interest? Why do we promise to skip the chocolate cake, only to find ourselves drooling our way into temptation when the dessert tray rolls around? What are the forces that influence our behavior? Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology & Behavioral Economics at Duke University, is dedicated to answering these questions and others in order to help people live more sensible – if not rational – lives.

Shiva Rea

Shiva Rea, M.A. has been dedicated to the living creative pulse in all beings having studied with a global perspective movement cultures in India, East and West Africa, the Carribean, Nepal and Bali for a combined living research of over 6 years abroad as part of her graduate work at UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures. She has offered yoga for over 22 years around the globe as a pioneer in bringing the creative, spontaneous connection to our natural movement known as "sahaja" in yoga.

David Koren

David Koren is the Founder and Executive Producer of FIGMENT, a free multi-city participatory arts event. He has significant experience in arts, marketing, architecture, theatre, event production, and management. David is an Associate Principal and Director of Marketing at Perkins Eastman, the largest architecture firm based in New York.

Andreas Shobel

Andreas Schobel, a serial entrepreneur and avid software developer, co-founded Catch.com and currently serves as its CTO. Prior to Catch.com, Andreas designed the architecture for a web-based YouTube-like video security surveillance corporation.

Peter Haas

Peter is the founder of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG), which supports small infrastructure companies in Haiti and Guatemala. Since founding AIDG in 2005, Peter has become an active voice for poverty issues, speaking at the World Bank, Harvard, MIT and other forums on technology, entrepreneurship and SME finance.

Rosie Lila

Renaissance woman based in San Francisco, California. She is a public speaker and entertainer, a storyteller and community builder, and a creative events producer. Her mission is to transform the world through play and community-building by inspiring others to live fully self-expressed. She is the founder and CEO of Movement Play Events.

Klaudia Oliver

Klaudia Oliver is a longtime ambassador of the cultural zeitgeist. Her ability to see what lies beyond the horizon and make it current has given her work as a talent scout and casting director in the entertainment and fashion industries, to publishing a quarterly tourism and culture magazine in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. TEDx has given her passion for social bridge building to move into event production projects with soul and purpose.

Marisa Lenhardt

A conservatory-trained opera singer, Marisa has sung with the San Francisco Opera, the Oakland East Bay Symphony, Chris Brubeck, and multiple times in recital with Frederica von Stade. She has sung for Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and performed as herself in Francis Ford Coppola's most recent film project, "Twixt". Marisa has performed for 60,000 Raiders fans at the Oakland Coliseum. At San Jose City Hall, she rode her motorcycle down the steps before singing. At the Burning Man festival in Nevada, she sang before David Best's temple burns from 2002 to 2007.

Larry Harvey

Larry Harvey is the main co-founder of the Burning Man festival, along with his friend Jerry James. What started in 1986 as a summer solstice evening ritual burning of their artistic creation of an effigy of a man with a group of just a dozen people at San Francisco's Baker Beach, which then became an annual event that over 4 years grew to more than 800 people. In 1990, in collaboration with the SF Cacophony Society, the event moved to Labor Day weekend in the Black Rock Desert, where it has grown precipitously from a 3 day, 80 persons "zone trip," to an 8 day festival with over 50,000 "participants." As the population grew by the mid '90's to top several thousands, the encampment started to be referred to as Black Rock City, it now has a year round staff headquartered in San Francisco, managing an over 12 million dollar annual budget. In 1997, six of the main organizers formed Black Rock City LLC to manage the event with Larry Harvey as the executive director, which position he still holds. He is also the president of the Black Rock Arts Foundation, a non-profit art grant foundation for promoting interactive collaborative public art installations in communities outside of Black Rock City. He scripts and co-chair/curates the arts departments annual event theme and is the main spokesperson and political strategist for the organization.

Larry Harvey

Larry Harvey (born 1948) is the main co-founder of the Burning Man festival, along with his friend Jerry James. What started in 1986 as a summer solstice evening ritual burning of their artistic creation of an effigy of a man with a group of just a dozen people at San Francisco's Baker Beach, which then became an annual event that over 4 years grew to more than 800 people. In 1990, in collaboration with the SF Cacophony Society, the event moved to Labor Day weekend in the Black Rock Desert, where it has grown precipitously from a 3 day, 80 persons "zone trip," to an 8 day festival with over 50,000 "participants." As the population grew by the mid '90's to top several thousands, the encampment started to be referred to as Black Rock City, it now has a year round staff headquartered in San Francisco, managing an over 12 million dollar annual budget. In 1997, six of the main organizers formed Black Rock City LLC to manage the event with Larry Harvey as the executive director, which position he still holds. He is also the president of the Black Rock Arts Foundation, a non-profit art grant foundation for promoting interactive collaborative public art installations in communities outside of Black Rock City. He scripts and co-chair/curates the arts departments annual event theme and is the main spokesperson and political strategist for the organization. He has been featured in such engagements as San Francisco's Grace Cathedral "Radical Ritual" with the Very Reverend Alan Jones, the Oxford Student Union, Cooper Union in NYC, Harvard's International Conference on Internet and Society as a panelist, the Walker Art Center in Minnesota and the San Francisco Commonwealth Club as well as many others.

Organizing team

Klaudia
Oliver

San Miguel De Allende, Mexico
Organizer

Stephen
Brown

Malibu, CA, United States
Co-organizer
  • Catie Magee
    Event Producer
  • Brad Nye
    Stage Director
  • Nancy Elder
    Communications
  • Brigham Golden
    Speaker Coach / Curation
  • Jess Hobbs
    Curation / Coordination
  • Jon La Grace
    Performance Curation