Ideas worth spreading

Mind-blowing stage sculptures that fuse music and technology

710,914 views |

Es Devlin |

TED2019

• April 2019

It starts with a sketch. Then it evolves into a larger-than-life visual masterpiece, a celebration of human connection. Follow along as legendary artist and designer Es Devlin takes us on a visual tour of her work -- including iconic stage sculptures she's created for Beyoncé, Adele, Kanye West, U2 and more -- and previews her design for the upcoming World Expo 2020 in Dubai.

It starts with a sketch. Then it evolves into a larger-than-life visual masterpiece, a celebration of human connection. Follow along as legendary artist and designer Es Devlin takes us on a visual tour of her work -- including iconic stage sculptures she's created for Beyoncé, Adele, Kanye West, U2 and more -- and previews her design for the upcoming World Expo 2020 in Dubai.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Add your voice to Es Devlin's ongoing, collective global poem.

About the speaker

Es Devlin

Artist, designer

See speaker profile

Es Devlin is an artist and designer practicing across the worlds of art, music and technology.

Stefano Massini, 2012 | Article

Lehman Trilogy

Spanning 150 years in three hours, Stefano Massini's play traces the trajectory of western capitalism by following the fortunes of a single family. It's a kaleidoscopic social and political metaphor — an intimate epic, a religious parable of reckoning. Past, present and future are coterminous in an eternal Manhattan that is equal parts steel and shadow. The word "nothing" echoes throughout. Nothing is what the Lehman brothers say they come from; nothing is finally what's left of all they've achieved. That's what happens when money floats into the ether of latter-day Wall Street, unmoored by connection to substance. As one of the characters says: "If buying is instinct like breathing, then people will use banks like they breath air."

Warsan Shire, 2016 | Article

"For Women Who Are Difficult to Love"

This is one of my favorite poems by Warsan Shire. I discovered Shire's work through Beyonce's film Lemonade. Shire says: "I navigate a lot through memory, my memories and other people's memories, trying to essentially just make sense of stuff." As a first-generation immigrant, she has used her poetry to connect with her home country of Somalia, which she has never visited.

E.M. Forster, 1910 | Book

Writing just a few years before the onset of the first World War, in response to the advancing machine age, Forster envisions a marriage of soul and body, country and city, passion and prose, culture and commerce.

T.S. Eliot, 1935-1942 | Book

Four Quartets

Novelist and critic Peter Ackroyd describes this collection as "poems about a nation and about a culture which is very severely under threat, and in a sense, you could describe The Four Quartets as a poem of memory, but not the memory of one individual but the memory of a whole civilization."

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Add your voice to Es Devlin's ongoing, collective global poem.