I was honored to be invited to speak at the TED 2023 conference in Vancouver. (Photo above courtesy TED.) My talk was about what inspired the "Locked Down Looking Up" series and what I learned from observing the movements of bats, bees, birds, dragonflies and other creatures of the air. To be clear: I don't claim to have invented this technique. I'm not even the only artist doing it with birds. This is my exploraton of a process—photo stacking or composite imaging to record flight trails—that's been around for a long time, going all the way back to Edweard Muybridge before the turn of the last century, and there are other artists (who also didn't invent it) making work of this kind.
There's also a TED TALKS podcast episode, which includes audio from the talk but also lets me go on for a bit about soft fascination, forest bathing, and my hope that AI can be a tool for human creativity instead of stealing our work and destroying our livelihoods.
TED TALKS DAILY episode 61 on spotify
The text and photographs of the talk are also available as a book:
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