TEDxGatewayArch team members Jean Kennedy, Mary Luckey, Farzana Chohan, Jill Stone, Casey Epley, Laura Chauvin, Steve Sommers, Mich Hancock, Suzanne Sierra, Jeanette Guellil, Andy Kanefield, and Lisa Kuntz. Photograph by Kate Munsch
I can’t get this thing to stay on,” a redheaded woman in a tube top says with a throaty laugh. This is comforting; I can’t either. Earlier in the evening, I was given a metal name tag with a red X on it, which I was told was magnetic. But like the redhead, I’m struggling to figure out how to make it stick (maybe position it over a bra-strap loop…or a pacemaker?). Eventually, I discover that the tiny magnet on the back is detachable and goes inside your shirt (perhaps not ideal for a tube top...)
My paranoid side worries it’s a secret IQ test. In fact, it’s an icebreaking tool called SPARX. The tag comes with a sheet of sticker dots, like a tiny set of trivia mulligans, to be traded for other people’s dots. The idea is to “spark” conversations with people who aren’t like you. And there’s a pretty motley group assembled in the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis tonight: bald, bobbed, shaved, after-shaved, yuppie, neo-yippie, post-hippie, artsy, ritzy, bearded, smiling, frowning, nerdy, trendy, middle-aged, college-age, tattooed, natty… They’re drinking cocktails, chatting, and checking out exhibits on cutting-edge technology: a solar car, a Mars Rover, a 3-D printer. All along, design collective Danger Schmanger squeegees red X’s onto visitors’ T-shirts. All of these X’s, all of this red, indicate we’re in the midst of a TEDx salon.
Unless you’re a purist without a Facebook profile, you know TED. You know it’s not some guy’s name, but rather an acronym for technology, entertainment, and design. You recognize the bold, red logo; the PowerPoint slides; the hyperfocused 18-minute talks, uploaded to the TED site to be disseminated as open-source content. Celebs like the late film critic Roger Ebert and Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg have given TED talks. One of the most popular talks, though, is from musician Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls, who spoke about how crowdfunding is like crowd-surfing. Comedian Reggie Watts’ loop-pedal beatbox performance is another classic. So is scientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s account of watching her own brain shut downduring a stroke.
TED posits that ideas can change the world, and a lot of people agree. There are now hundreds of independently organized TEDx events curated on every continent. They’re mostly hosted in auditoriums, though they’ve also been held at an archaeology site in Greece and on Nile Street in Sudan.
St. Louis has more than one TEDx, but tonight’s salon is organized by the brand-new TEDxGatewayArch, the only local TEDx group currently licensed to hold events for audiences of more than 100. Doing so requires an organizer to attend an actual TED event, either one of the annual conferences (which costs thousands of dollars) or the TEDActive conference surrounding the live telecast.
Last year, St. Louis businessman Steve Sommers attended the latter, after discovering there wasn’t a large-scale TEDx in St. Louis. Tonight’s salon is a kick-off event to give St. Louis a sample of what he and fellow organizers have in store for 2014.
“Is that the world’s largest burnt marshmallow?” Sommers quips during his introduction, nodding toward artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s enormous charred cedar cube in the adjacent gallery. “That’s a reminder to either go camping or renew my homeowner’s insurance.”
After encouraging the audience to “listen, learn, and share with an open mind,” Sommers hands over proceedings to KETC-TV producer and digital strategist Ed Reggi, who also cracks wise and keeps things moving along at an easy clip. The night begins with former St. Louis Mayor Vince Schoemehl Jr. calling for the city to see itself as part of a larger whole. Francisco Saraiva Gomes, the executive manager of Novus International’s Aquaculture Business Unit, then describes how sustainable agriculture can be scaled up—not with giant farms, but with many small, connected permaculture-style farms.
Next, Green Strum, a local group that makes all of its musical instruments out of found and salvaged materials, performs Robert Crumb’s “Fine Artiste Blues.” In the second half, Ben Tolkin, who’s on Washington University’s WU-SLam poetry team, belts out “Spock,” a spoken-word manifesto about the woes of being the rational guy: “I am the reminder that sometimes it is a no-win situation / I am cold equations, and patience, and ‘It’s too dangerous to go back for the girl!’”
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"To me, Ben Tolkin is the embodiment of what we’re trying to do: find people who nobody’s ever heard of, who are doing interesting things, creative things, or that fit the TED model: ‘ideas worth spreading,’” Sommers says by phone a few days later. He’s just left The Mud House, where he met with Tanya Hamilton, the founder and executive director of Independent Youth, a nonprofit that nurtures young entrepreneurs. “I think four or five [of the kids in the group] have been on Shark Tank and have been funded,” Sommers marvels.
Several weeks earlier, Independent Youth brought together 650 St. Louis teens to hear from Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square and Third Degree Glass Factory, before attending breakout sessions. Some of the teenagers have businesses, Sommers adds. “[Hamilton] was telling me about one that’s going to gross like $8 million—and she’s 13!”
Trained as an engineer at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Sommers is an affable guy who loves tech and creativity. He’ll tell you the rigidity of engineering is what drove him into the more fluid world of business. Though he’s known about TED talks for years, he didn’t realize that TEDx existed until reading an article in Wired last year. He’s since pulled together others who are enthusiastic about TEDx, including high-school sophomore Alex Reagan, who helped curate TEDxYouth at The Magic House in November, and Laura Chauvin, who helped organize a TEDxWomen event in early December, where Hamilton was set to speak alongside actress Ellie Kemper and boutique owner Ali Kindle.
The first full-day TED-like experience, though, takes place January 11 at the Sheldon Concert Hall. “The launch party at the Contemporary was sort of like a taste,” Chauvin says. “This will be more like a true TED experience, in that the presenters will all give full TED talks, meaning an 18-minute talk of your life—sharing a big idea about which you’re very excited.”
Among those on the docket at press time: chess champion Susan Polgar, Sweet Potato Project founder Sylvester Brown, and musician Pokey LaFarge. Admission to the full-day event will be around $100 per person. As the price indicates, TEDxGatewayArch is a little less grass-roots than earlier St. Louis TEDx groups have been.
Still, Sommers is aware of the dangers of being too big, too slick. “I joke with my group that we need to have a tattoo ratio of like 4-to-1,” he says. “We’re looking to find the Zombie Squad, the independent youth, biomimicry.”
TED proper, on the other hand, has been accused of being elitist and corporate, and peddling pop science. (As one commenter dryly observed, author Malcolm Gladwell has done not one but two TED talks.) Franchising TED hasn’t been without its snafus either. This past fall, comedian Sam Hyde pranked a TEDx at Drexel University, showing up onstage in a gold breastplate and gold sneakers to speak about the “2070 Paradigm Shift.” With a mostly straight face, he told the audience, “What in-spires me is finding out how to use MagLev trains to get resources to the moon.” Similarly, a presenter at TEDxCharlotte named Randy Powell gave a talk, “Vortex Mathematics,” only to be swarmed by angry scientists.
To increase TEDxGatewayArch’s chances of success, Sommers has traveled to some of the most successful TEDx events, asking organizers what not to do. The resounding answer: “Don’t bring in hired guns from out of town.” Here, the focus remains “more regional, more local,” he says. “That is our goal: to have it be mostly St. Louis–centric.”
At the kick-off salon, almost every talk addressed the region’s balkanization. Elasticity partner Aaron Perlut spoke about why St. Louis doesn’t suck. (You may remember his Forbes blog post on the same topic, which spurred crowdsourcing/crowdfunding platform Rally Saint Louis.) Great Rivers Greenway executive director Susan Trautman explained how her organization aims to unite the city through parks and bike paths.
In a way, “confluence” has become TEDxGatewayArch’s unspoken theme. “The idea is a coming-together, or merging,” says Sommers. “It’s getting artists, architects, scientists, students, and entrepreneurs together in a room. Because who knows what’s going to come of that?”
Visit tedxgatewayarch.org for more information.
