Probably the most well received talk at TED Tea Party City was Alien Woman, who shared her personal and moving story of thwarting the alien invasion.
(click for full sized glory image)
This Fantasy TED Talk assignment is brought to you by the ds10zone:
Create a scene from a TED Talk being given by a fictional character. Obscure or well known, feel free to have your fictional character pontificating on their story, and their “essential truth” that has come to be known as TED Talks.
Week’s 1 assignment suggested using one of my all time favorite episodes, The Invaders, which in typical TZ fashion, leads you into an assumption of character that gets flipped in the end. A power of this episode is is spareness, one actor (A pitiful “victim” played by Agens Morehead), almost no dialogue, and music that builds the suspense. The woman’s contortions, moans, and screams draws us into seeing her as the victim of an invasion from beyond.
The “essential truth” here is one of presumption, ignorance, language barriers, and use of violence over reason.
When Jim Groom discussion re-filming episodes of the Zone, I speculated a redo of this episode using my mountain remote home in Strawberry AZ, which, of course carries a bit of side meaning given my home states rather regressive attitude towards immigration (IMHO). Before Arizona SN 1070, when I told people where I was from, they would respond with “Oh yes, Sedona, the Grand Canyon, Tombstone” nut post 1070, it was more of a odd query of, “What is going on in your state?”
So just like Alien Woman, we may have some confusion/assumptions/predispositions towards people from other countries, we paint as invaders,
And thus TED, in reaching beyond its liberal bias, may someday have talks for spreading ideas that don’t matter. Alien Woman would be perfect as a speaker.
I have to admit working with the video from the UMW media server, was a bit of a struggle to use- since I could not pawn it, and getting a still was though if the movie was paused. But I grabbed my images ok. I downloaded the PSD template Ben Rimes created initially for this assignment. The poster shown on screen was borrowed from the It Makes Sense Blog (a site I feel dirty just looking at). In Photoshop I used the distort tool to stretch the image to the corners of the screen. I pasted in a few copies of the alien non aliens from the episode, and then did some erasing to make them appear to be behind the sign and the dude’s head.
I do like this creative challenge of finding assignments from ds106 that could be done with this episode.
