Photographer Angélica Dass captures some of humanity’s truest colors through her portrait project Humanae, a catalogue of human skin color displayed as a simple, captivating collage of Pantone portraits that reflects the deepest shades of brown and black, to the lighter tones of white, pink and everything in between. For Dass, Humanae is more than an expansive exhibit, but a thought-provoking educational tool meant to prompt a dialogue on how we see each other and the boundaries we set around race, ethnicity and identity.

At the time of her TED Talk in early 2016, Dass had traveled to 13 countries and photographed more than 3,000 people. Since her talk almost a year ago, she continues to share her work with the world as it travels the globe and continues to spark those necessary conversations.

Where in the world has Humanae been? Scroll to find out some of the places it’s popped up.

February 2016: Daelim Museum, in Seoul, South Korea 

Humanae was part of the Daelim Museum’s “Color Your Life,” which visually examined how the functions of color and space can re-illuminate the hidden aesthetics of everyday life. The exhibition was divided into five sections: Color is everywhere, Color meets material (glass, leather, fabric, metal), Color challenges design, Color completes furniture and Color paints space — with Dass’ photo project cast in Color is everywhere.

March 2016: Uribitarte Promenade, in Bilbao, Spain

For this public installation, Dass collaborated with the Bilbao City Council and made an open call for citizens volunteers and neighbors of the port city to be featured in her photo series. The selected images formed a mosaic of local faces — six large cubes lining a pedestrian zone of the Uribitarte Promenade between the Pio Baroja station and the Zubizuri Bridge — that were revealed on March 21, 2016, the International Day against Racial Discrimination.

May 2016: Upho Urban Photo Festival in Malaga, Spain

The showing of Humanae at the Urban Photography Festival lined the plazas, streets and squares of the Lagunillas district for two weeks. Dass worked in the area for a time before the exhibit was shown, to add individuals as young as eight months and old as 80 to her growing chromatic collection.

June 2016: Photobiennale Θεσσαλονίκη, in Thessaloniki, Greece

Every two years — for the past 20 years — the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography organizes an International Photography Festival, also known as the PhotoBiennale. The museum partners with Urban Layers, an European public photography project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union that travels between art festivals throughout the continent, including UPHO Urban Photo Festival. Humanae was featured in Urban Layers’ 2016 theme, Identity Flows, a concept that sought to capture what identity means through a “photographic crossroad of cultures at a crucial moment in the European Union’s course,” following the UK’s historic exit from the EU.

July 2016: Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, in Milan, Italy

At the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology, Humanae was displayed in the genetics section. “Scientists want the same thing as I do, to show people that we are all the same race. There are things in our DNA which make us unique but in the end the things that construct us are the same. So these are two sides of the same idea,” Dass explained to 52-Insights. “I have my way, making photos and talking about my family, and the scientists are doing it in their own way, sometimes using my work to show visually what they are proving with science.

August 2016: Data for Life 2016, in Jakarta, Indonesia

Humanae made an appearance in “Visualizing the Invisible,” an art exhibition shown in conjunction with Data for Life 2016 — Indonesia’s largest international conference on the influential power of big data and technology. The theme of the exhibit focused on humanity’s relationship with numerical information, exploring the many roles art and other visual mediums can play in representing statistical data.

October 2016: Habitat III, UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, in Quito, Ecuador

A larger-than-life display of Humanae was featured at Habitat III, the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development. The cube, 12 x 12 meters (~39 x 39 feet), displayed enlarged versions of her photographs, with each of the 64 portraits averaging around 3 meters (~10 feet). According to the UN website, the conference convened “to reinvigorate the global commitment to sustainable urbanization, to focus on the implementation of a ‘New Urban Agenda.’”

October 2016: Museon, in Den Haag, Holland

The Museon description for Humanae: “On this cube you see different portraits of people from many places around the world, including of course The Hague … But, the question is: Do you see who’s from here and who is not? That’s impossible based on physical appearance alone. Everybody has unique characteristics. We usually use the white, black, red or yellow colors to classify people, however, the images show that these color labels don’t exist and, in fact, seem pretty absurd.”

January 2017: World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland

Dass was chosen as one of the 36 other cultural leaders (alongside TED Prize winners Sarah Parcak and Jamie Oliver) at the Davos World Economic Forum Annual Meeting “to speak truth to power and inspire more responsive and responsible leadership.” The large-scale outdoor installation greeted conference attendees at Promenade Entrance heading toward the Congress Centre.

E-commerce is booming. Here are three rules of thumb for brands looking to break in.

What marketers need to know this week: native advertising has seen tremendous growth in the past three years, why your brand may not want the president’s seal of approval, YouTube responds to brands’ boycott, and more.

While no longer fashionable in the popular discourse, trade has been a key engine of prosperity. Relations across the Atlantic have been solid and deep but recent recommendations from the White House risk souring that economic friendship. Admittedly, TTIP has never been really popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Trump Administration might […]

In this exclusive Q&A, Dos Equis VP of Marketing Andrew Katz explains why the brand introduced a new “Most Interesting Man” and how the iconic campaign has evolved.

This is not your typical campaign. It’s an artist-driven platform that partners award-winning Mexican director Rodrigo Garcia Saiz, and Albertan conceptual photographer Justin Poulsen.

The inspiration is from a contemporary art exhibition of the same title, curated by Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery curator, Peta Rake. The campaign aims to illicit a range of emotions (intrigue, amazement, curiosity, magic…) and articulates experiences are so perception-changing that one cannot unthink them.

PRESS: Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the renowned postsecondary arts training institution in Alberta, Canada, has launched its first consumer focused creative campaign since unveiling a new brand identity and strategic plan in 2016. Titled Things You Can’t Unthink, the artist-driven platform articulates the unique experience of artists as part of Banff Centre’s immersive training programs. The experiences are so perception-changing that one cannot unthink them.

“Banff Centre programs offer unparalleled learning opportunities where artists are given the opportunity expand their practice and create work under the guidance of world class faculty. Like all artistic expression, these works alter perspectives, provoke conversations, and provide experiences that people remember forever,” says Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity President and CEO, Janice Price. “Just like Banff Centre, the Things You Can’t Unthink campaign is a bit groundbreaking and always curious. It stays with you.”

Developed in partnership with creative agency Cossette, Award-winning Mexican director Rodrigo Garcia Saiz, and Albertan conceptual photographer Justin Poulsen, Things You Can’t Unthink uses artist content to create a surreal world of fascinating moments through video, print, and digital executions. The campaign title is born out of a contemporary art exhibition of the same title, curated by Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery curator, Peta Rake.
The campaign consists of one launch film and three print pieces, which aim to illicit a range of emotions from intrigue to amazement, to replicate the unforgettable experience Banff Centre offers.

“Banff Centre’s artist-driven experience is what gave birth to the Things You Can’t Unthink platform. Regardless of whether the work makes you feel love, intrigue, curiosity, or magic, you’ll experience something you can’t unthink. That is the beauty of this execution,” says Jason Chaney, Chief Strategy Officer at Cossette.

“Things You Can’t Unthink is an articulation of what Banff Centre stands for and accomplishes year round through its programs,” adds Carlos Moreno, Chief Creative Officer at Cossette.

The spot will run for four weeks on TV and in cinema. Print and out-of-home ads will be in the marketplace into May.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Cossette, Canada

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“Can we learn something from the past that helps us see more in the present?” asks Timothy Snyder, right, onstage with historian Rick Perlstein, during TED Dialogues, February 23, 2017, at TED’s offices in New York. Photo: Dian Lofton / TED

Timothy Snyder grew up in America, but as a historian of 20th-century Europe at Yale, he’s spent much of his adult life in, or thinking deeply about, Central and Eastern Europe. And what he sees there — especially in looking at the Europe of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s — is a pattern that may feel familiar to people who are watching the political scene in the United States right now, with its political polarization, targeting of ethnic groups, and movement away from globalism toward nationalism inside government.

In conversation with Rick Perlstein, himself a historian of conservatism, Snyder talks about what Americans in 2017 might learn from looking hard at Europe’s darkest decades. “What we should do,” he says, ”is learn from the way things don’t work out.”

Why look at the past? Because, Snyder says, America’s founding fathers explicitly wanted us to. “Our founding fathers enjoined us to study something very specific for reasons of citizenship: they implored us to study tyranny.” He goes on: “They were worried because democracy has always failed. Classical Greece, classical Rome, both turned into oligarchy and empire. They were concerned the American experiment would also turn into oligarchy and empire. They were very skeptical of themselves and other citizens, and they set up a system of checks and balances, where tyranny would be harder.”

America’s democracy has survived for more than 200 years, in part thanks to checks and balances. But also because the US was lucky at a time when Europe wasn’t: the 1930s.

In the era just before the 1930s, Snyder points out: “It was a time of globalization. Everyone was saying, history is over, liberalism is spreading, we’ll have prosperity for all.” And then social movements came along that “wiped out liberal democracy in most of Europe — and could have in the US. We had a 1930s that was unusual,” he says, and “we should realize how lucky we got.” The US’ escape from fascism wasn’t thanks to American exceptionalism, he argues, but thanks to a president who was, among other things, openly anti-fascist.

Just after the November 2016 election that brought Donald Trump to power, Snyder wrote a post on Facebook that drew on what he’d learned from the Europe of the 1920s–’40s and from more recent movements and revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe. His post began:

“Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.“

He distilled his insights into 20 points, soon to become the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Onstage, Perlstein asks Snyder to review a couple of the most memorable points, starting with the first one: “Do not obey in advance.” What does that mean?

“It comes from Germany in the 1930s,” Snyder says. “Much of the way Hitler managed a regime change is, people figured out in advance what the leader wanted, and then they edged in that direction.And that’s the lubricant in regime change. As humans, we do this, we say: I’m going to adapt to this new situation of authority. If you just don’t do that, you can slow things down. Just don’t shift automatically because the situation shifts.”

Another point: “Practice corporeal politics.” This is a term Snyder borrowed from a Ukrainian activist — and by it, he means getting off the internet and connecting to people in real life. He describes a trip he took to the US Midwest to talk to voters: “The folks I was talking to were coming up from their basements and away from their Facebook feeds to talk to a real person, and it was uncomfortable! There is something strange about coming up from the internet and voting from someone who is really going to be president.”

Corporeal politics is about “getting away from the internet and exposing your brain to different stimuli. That changes you too, and gives you a sense that things are possible. It doesn’t distress you the way the internet will.”

Americans who are distressed about the rise of fake news might also take a lesson from the recent experiences of people in Europe, Snyder says. “All the fake news stuff, even down to the particular memes about protestors — that they’re thugs, that they’re paid — all of these were used in Ukraine in 2013, 2014, 2015.” In response, he reports, young people there made their own counter-fake news and created their own fact-checking sites. “When you decide you love the truth enough, you can make a difference,” he said.

Overall, Snyder stressed that American democracy shouldn’t be taken for granted; it, along with its institutions, needs to be supported and protected by our words and actions, no matter how small. As he writes in his book, “Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do.”

This conversation is part of our TED Dialogues series, bringing context and insight to our current political situation. The next TED Dialogues conversation happens Wednesday, March 1, at 1pm Eastern, on Facebook Live. Sign up for email notifications about this series.

For marketers, every new channel, platform, and technology presents opportunities to deepen consumer engagement. However, they also pose risks, not only of litigation and regulatory punishment, but of eroding consumer trust. When an organization’s marketers and lawyers work closely throughout the marketing process, it not only protects the company, it can strengthen the brand’s relationship with customers.

You’ve seen HGTV’s Property Brothers, Jonathan and Drew Scott, help transform countless fixer-uppers into dream homes. But, have you ever seen them perform early ‘90’s R&B while helping you fix your car’s headlights? Well, now’s your chance.
TV’s favorite home renovation brothers have partnered with Esurance to share helpful home and auto hacks—and have some musical fun while doing it. In a series of musical ditties, the duo rhyme, rap and dance through home and auto DIY hacks.

The videos each have their own music-genre flair, spanning from rap to country, and offer a variety of valuable tips, from determining when to replace car tires to keeping a rug from slipping on wood floors.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
–to follow

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Please enjoy your weekly roundup of TED-related news:

Good luck and farewell to the Cassini spacecraft. Launched 20 years ago, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will begin its final mission on April 26.  The spacecraft will embark on a series of 22 dives through the space between Saturn and its rings, transmitting data that may help us understand the origins of Saturn’s rings and the makeup of the planet, explained NASA’s James Green. After completing the dives, Cassini will run out of fuel and disintegrate over the ringed planet on September 15, 2017. (Watch James’ TED Talk)

Rwanda joins AIMS. The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences has a new campus in Kigali, Rwanda! Launched as part of an agreement with the Government of Rwanda’s Ministry of Education, the Kigali campus marks the sixth country of expansion for AIMS, founded by TED Prize winner Neil Turok, whose centers of excellence also stretch across Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania. (Watch Neil’s TED Talk)

A newly discovered dinosaur. Jack Horner can add having a dinosaur named after him to his résumé. The recently discovered Daspletosaurus horneri, or “Horner’s frightful lizard,” lived in Montana around 75 million years ago and is a cousin of the T. Rex. It stood at 2.2 meters tall and, as its name hints, it had a large horn behind each eye. A scaly face dotted with tactile sensory organs (similar to the ones modern crocodiles have) provided their snouts with sensitivity similar to fingertips. Its discovery provides new insight into how tyrannosaurids evolved. This new species appears to have evolved directly from its sister species, Daspletosaurus torosus. The finding supports the theory of anagenesis, or direct evolution without branching, in which a species changes enough over time from its ancestral form to become a new species. (Watch Jack’s TED Talk)

Changing the economics of an illegal economy. At a recent hearing in front of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Caleb Barlow discussed the state of cybercrime and the ways in which new technologies help not only to reduce such crime, but also address the skills gap that exists within the cybersecurity workforce. Invited as part of the Senate’s review of emerging technologies and their impact on the future of cybersecurity, Barlow argues that one of the most alarming aspects of cybercrime involves the manipulation of data by hackers, where “we move beyond stolen information and money to an even more damaging issue: a loss of trust.” Barlow concludes that massive coordination by criminals today requires an equally organized mode of response by cybersecurity experts, who must embrace collaborative practices like threat sharing in order to properly manage their cybersecurity. (Watch Caleb’s TED Talk)

Awards aplenty for TED Prize winner Raj Panjabi. The winner of the 2017 TED Prize has racked up a stack of additional honors over the past month. He was named one of the four recipients of the 2017 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship for bringing lifesaving health care to remote regions of Liberia, and he spoke yesterday at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England, about his work with Last Mile Health. In addition, Raj also landed in spot #28 on Fortune‘s list of “The World’s Greatest Leaders for 2017,” and became one of the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneurs of the Year for 2017. Raj will share his TED Prize wish for the world at the TED2017 conference in Vancouver on April 25. Find out how to watch live through TED Cinema Experience. (Keep an eye out for Raj’s TED talk!)

The future of medical imaging. Moving on from Facebook and Oculus, Mary Lou Jepsen has founded Openwater, a startup working to turn MRI-quality imaging into simple, wearable technology. Unlike MRIs, the startup uses near-infrared light for its imaging and if successful, the technology has incredible implications for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Their hope is to create a device that enables users to receive detailed information about their brains and bodies in real-time, such as clogged arteries, internal bleeding, and neurological disorders. The company is still in R&D to determine what their first product will be, but Jepsen spoke in depth about the startup at South by Southwest 2017. (Watch Mary Lou’s TED Talk)

Attacking counterfeit with neuroscience. In collaboration with the European Central Bank, David Eagleman has helped create a new currency design for the European Union, one that lets anyone spot a fake. Displayed on the EU’s €50 note, one of the most counterfeited currencies in the world, the design integrates the face of Europa into the bill’s security features, displaying the Phoenician princess as both a hologram and as a watermark. The reason, according to Eagleman, is that the human eye proves itself far more adept at spotting inconsistencies across faces instead of buildings. “The human brain is massively specialized for faces, but has little neural real estate devoted to edifices. As forged watermarks are generally hand-drawn, it would be much easier to spot an imperfect face than an imperfect building.” (Watch David’s TED Talk)

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