Insidecy

Recently, one of my friends Ben Blair told me about a four day conference called TED which essentially is a seminar of 50 distinguised speakers talking about everything from Entertainment and Technology to Politics and Social Issues. From TED.com:

“TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).”

I didn’t think to research TED when Ben told me about it initially, but today, fellow blogger David Bruno, who is the inspiration for my participation in the 100 Thing Challenge that he started, posted this video of Chris Jordan, photographer and cultural observer, giving his “talk” at TED.

About Chris:

“Photographer Chris Jordan trains his eye on American consumption. His 2003-05 series “Intolerable Beauty” examines the hypnotic allure of the sheer amount of stuff we make and consume every day: cliffs of baled scrap, small cities of shipping containers, endless grids of mass-produced goods.

His 2005 book In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster is a chilling, unflinching look at the toll of the storm. And his latest series of photographs, “Running the Numbers,” gives dramatic life to statistics of US consumption. Often-heard factoids like “We use 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes” become a chilling sea of plastic that stretches beyond our horizon.

In April 2008, Jordan traveled around the world with National Geographic as an international eco-ambassador for Earth Day 2008.”

From TED.com.

As David Bruno says in his post, this video is certainly worth eleven minutes of your time.