阿拉伯世界的流行文化

The theme of your talk was cultural hybridization. While attending TEDGlobal did you discover any new examples of cultural hybridization?

Yes, it wasn't so much geographic as it was cross-disciplinary. TED is all about cross-fertilization. For example there was a really great presentation [by Manuel Lima] which was looking at visual ways of presenting data. It was a really interesting example of hybridization, again, not across geographies, but across, almost, modalities of expression.

The other thing I tried to do, I was there to also catalyze some of these connections. So, for example, one of the Fellows [Gabriella Gomez-Mont] runs an arts cultural center in Mexico City, and I have a friend who does something very similar in Cairo. And again, a lot of what they're trying to achieve, both in Mexico City and Cairo, are actually quite similar in terms of both fostering young artists, but also creating a sense of community around the arts in a place which has a lot of urban stresses and a lot of the pressures of an urban space in the developing world. So I've put them in contact as well. I see myself more as a catalyst for hybridization, trying to get some of these reactions going.

The wonderful presentation [by Manuel Lima] about 3D visualization was how to take complex data and put in visual form. And really what he was doing, it was a form of hybridization. It was working from the world of numbers and facts and figures and statistics, and finding a creative way to present that visually, which also not only makes it more accessible, but actually draws out more information because when you present that sort of dense data in a new way, you also start to see new connections between pieces of data that you might not have seen if you just saw them as numbers on a page. And I thought that was a very interesting example of what I would consider to be hybridization.

So TED was a really wonderful experience. I'm sure it's great going as a delegate, but certainly going as a Fellow was also very, very interesting because you had more time to interact with this incredibly interesting group of people. That was a bonus as well.