"Spit" TEDMED DAY 2: session 5

(“SPIT” painting is described in spoken word in honor of Sekou Andrews and Steve Connell)

"Spit"

Please shut your mouth in the social hub. 
That is Regina B. upon the stage,
she is our Surgeon General.
I can't hear her!

Now, she's gone, not in the painting.

See those dudes upon the stage, the actors, the poets,
Steve and Sekou waking you up,
Keeping it real,
Hell no, making it real.

Do you see outrage?

I paint it with my brush, by the simulcast screen in the spinning Hub
while oh; so many texts and tweets expand

upon the OUTRAGE.
Those that sit in the sweet seats, center stage,
do you feel the rain?
As @TiffanyandLupus gasps in pain 
upon her bed and tweets till she can tweet no more.

That is spit.

Did you think
Steve and Sekou would let you go so gently in that dark night?
Just two fellows on the stage
Here for your entertainment
to wrap this final session?

No, they YELL at you.

 


They throw their words upon the stage
like fists through walls,
they show us all
the split,
THE SPIT,
between us.
The great chasm of pain
between those here who talk of tech and the patient ones
following the tweet stream while dying.

And you know,
as sure as paint falls upon the canvas,
as their words pound at you,
as our tweets # you,
Twitter can set us free.

I scream, the stream #TEDMED

Mop up the stage of sweat and spit,
Gregory and Reisa has come to avail us,
as Alzheimer's begins to assail us,
300 million time bombs passing by TSA,
every day,
terrorist cells exist inside our minds,
and what can be done to save us?
tweet out
@TEDMED,
iceberg ahead!

 


Then the mother walks upon the stage,
her blue dress cannot contain,
the pain,
her slumping shoulders say more than her lips,
as Virginia Breen,
talks of a girl who is seen,
and not heard.
WHY CAN'T THEY HEAR HER?

See the little girl.
See her little curls.
See her giggles stop.

See the iPad FREE her.

Then Miss Bonker takes stage.
Think the age that passed,
under lights too bright and noise too vast,
to finally see the port within the storm:
The iPad lay in Jay Walker's hand,
her voice on glass, taken away
As the show must go on,
and no way for her to say
I AM IN HERE.

 


#Autism
#Ageism
Tag you're it!
Can you tweet while crying?
My tears fall upon he canvas.

My eyes spit.

Then Robert Gupta plays his violin
upon this Titanic struggle,
bringing the sweet street,
to the c suite,
as we talk about
WHO is really mental?
My friends who sit within the grit
outside this very venue?
Or anyone in here who is not crying?

Miguel leads us to the end,
as he asks us to look within.
The universe
between our ears
and see and hear the storm of reason,
for we must understand this astronomy of thought,
the white noise
of our great gray processor,
before we talk about the treason of our cells.

Then Traces play upon the stage,
they contort their bodies,
as we contort our thoughts
the lights go down,
the feed goes up
and now we tweet a new tomorrow. 

We scream, the stream #TEDMED

(This painting was given to The Cleveland Clinic for their support of TEDMED.)

TEDMED Day 2: "Death" Painting Sesssion 4

TEDMED Session four was after lunch, so perhaps in a desire to wake people up it was quite provocative.

The company of dancer-illusionists entitled MOMIX began the session. The stage was dark and suddenly glow-in-the dark patterned limbs began gyrating in amazing disembodied symmetry.  Limbs appeared and disappeared while the audience watched in awe.  When the lights came up we saw the dancers dressed in black stretch velvet.  I was very inspired by the dancer's passionate movement so I began to paint a red dancer across the canvas and then created a background of riotous color.

Next Albert-Laszlo-Barabasi, Distinguished Professor of Northeastern University and Director of the Center for Complex Network Research came to the stage.  He began describing human genome research using the analogy of a map of Manhattan.  He talked about the different districts of the city, like the financial or theatre district, but now they were the cancer district or heart disease district.  He showed us that our mapping is incomplete and whole sections were missing.  He talked about a future where doctors operated as network experts. And so within the painting our dancing figure is gracefully draped with a blank map pressed upon her lithe body by the winds of change. Her one arm is encased within a swirling double helix.

 


Seth Cooper, Creative Director for Game Science from the University of Washington was up next and he sang the praises of gamification as they apply to scientific research.  I have been to many speeches where speakers talk about gamification in the personal application of weight loss and healthy living, but this was super cool.  Seth created FoldIt, a protein folding game that made headlines a while back. A large group of amateur folders from every walk of life managed to complete a folding exercise within weeks that flummoxed scientists for 15 years.  The best folder to the surprise of the TEDMED audience joined him; this unassuming female lab assistant is a preeminent protein folder and proves the power to harness the untapped resource of the citizen or patient.

 


Marc Triola, Associate Dean for Educational Informatics, NYU School of Medicine spoke next and gave this painting its title.  He spoke of the time when doctors are in medical school and they have access to the sacred cadaver.  Then I realized our dancer was dead.  Kait B. Roe my art assistant at TEDMED said she knew this all along, she thought of the figure within the metaphor of a lobster:  red is dead.  So the painting was entitled “Death.”

Marc followed this comment about access to the sacred cadaver with his frustration that as students leave school and this access is no longer available, they cease to actively learn about anatomy and things can be forgotten, so he and John Qualter, Co-Founder, Director of Media, BioDigital Systems and Research, Asst. Professor of Educational Informatics, NYU School of Medicine embarked on the creation of a 3D human body interactive program that will allow students, doctors and even patients to study human anatomy from a basic understanding to a detailed presentation of pathology. 
 

The next speaker was the amazing visual artist Lisa Nilsson.  She explained the art of paper quilling to the crowd of medical professionals.  Quilling is a very time intensive art form.  The artist must coil thin strips of paper around a quilling tool and place in compositional frame. Hundreds or thousands of these small coils make up an image.  Most quilling artists create elaborate flower arrangements using this technique.  Lisa creates cross sections of the human body. So within the painting our dancer’s skull is open and we can see her spiraling brain.

Next TEDMED’s Jay Walker treated us once again to a voyage through history.  He showed us some very old bibles handwritten in ink as well as a page from the Gutenberg Bible.  As I often use the historic example of the Reformation when explaining Meaningful Use and patient engagement, I was quite excited at this point.  Jay went on to show an e-reader and stated that our generation may be the last to depend upon using ink on paper.  At this point I painted a book upon the foot of the dancer.  Its title is INK.

David Icke, CEO of MC10, then wowed the audience with his flexible circuits that apply like a band-aid and look like a geeky tattoo.  He gave an inspiring explanation of these devices.  People are bendy and curvy just like this lovely dancer, and the devices we place upon them or within them should be bendy and curvy as well.  I can hardly wait for David’s work to go beyond its current use in the sports community and join us in the world of medicine.

Next up was the speaker who blew up the twitter stream.  I have not seen so many penis references since Xeni’s tweets about the #ghostpenis in December.  Diane Kelly is a wonderfully hilarious and genuine Senior Research Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  She spoke about her foray into researching the human penis and her special interest in erection.  Now at this point, I am staring at the simulcast screen trying to think of a way to incorporate this talk.  Diane saves the day by using a slide image comparison of an earthworm.  I twine the earthworm strategically around her leg as I chortle at Diane’s delightfully funny scientific speech.

 Traces, the Urban Acrobats, finished off the session with another amazing dancing experience, and so the session began as it started in a wild rush of athleticism and grace as I added the final brushstrokes to our dancer.

In honor of their support of TEDMED and scholarship funding this painting was bestowed to Xerox at the close of TEDMED 2012.