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so I asked you how do you follow an act like that and I'm going to talk about Parkinson's disease I've actually rehearsed this talk about three different times and every time it came out completely different so I have no idea what I'm about to say but my friend Lynn just gave me a good piece of advice she said well just keep it loosened don't do a Marco Rubio and you'll be fine so here we go I have Parkinson's disease and I was diagnosed for the first time about 13 years ago it seems like a long time ago and it was back then a lot of people believed that there was a certain personality type that was prone to getting Parkinson's disease and that creativity was one of the characteristics of that personality type recent research in the last two or three years and recently made public paints a very different picture and a very interesting picture they have found out that what's really going on is that Parkinson's disease is causing people to be more creative the Parkinson's disease combined with dopamine based medication is actually stimulating the creative part of the brain and I have felt this I was very thrilled to hear this because it explained to me what had been going on in my life for the last few years what they found out is that people intensely involved in creative activity for that period of time the brain produces more dopamine and the symptoms of Parkinson's disease are significantly reduced I have produced an incredible amount of work in the last few years frankly I can't stop doing it I'm hooked on making art because I'm hooked on dopamine because it makes me feel good so I do art because I get high doing art and I do it all the time as my wife will tell you if I'm not in front of the screen the computer screen doing art I'm out taking pictures what I'm going to show you today is some of the art that I have done over the last few years fueled by this this drive from the Parkinson's disease most of the art work that I do these days is in the virtual world and I'm going to give you a little glimpse into what that's been like for me if I can make this work there we go that is my avatar for those of you who have never been in the virtual world or don't know about it it is basically a parallel universe most anything that goes on in the real world also goes on in the virtual world well almost everything and one is represented in the virtual world by an avatar and this is my avatar and his name is DB DB and I have been working together for almost 10 years he is in essence my puppet I tell him what to do using the keyboard most of the time he does it sometimes he doesn't I remember reminded of that movie 2001 in the computer Hal and I'm gonna pull his plug at the ever says to me hello Dave DB and I have built a lot of things together he is standing in front of one of our projects which was an exhibit hall for Stanford University Library I have worked for both paying clients frequently universities but what I'm going to be showing you today is the art that I've been doing I'm not a professional artist I'm not trying to build a body of work what I'm interested in doing is exploring the capabilities of the virtual world for creating art I think the potential is huge and I'm hoping that more artists will get involved in this now on the more serious side before I get into the art fluff this is a support group that I am a participant in that's my avatar in the front there in the green chair and we meet in the virtual world once a week and we've been meeting for about three years everyone comes to this in their avatar and they can come from anywhere in the world and do it's very powerful it's been tremendously beneficial for all of us we don't really know each other in person we only know each other through our avatars but have found that relationships through avatars can be just as real and strong as they are in the real world I think the batteries need to be changed on this my first project in the virtual world was for my mother it was her 95th birthday she had been doing watercolors her entire life but had never had an exhibition so I built her an exhibit hall with her paintings the relatives came to her party in avatar form and she had a wonderful time she became quite the celebrity at the old folks home and used to go to a lot of art openings at the age of 97 declared the oldest resident in the virtual world so when people tell me I'm too old to get into the virtual worlds too complicated I don't understand it I call up my 97 year old mother and that puts that to rest I like to tell the story she had a avatar looked about 16 years old was really cute and so I asked my mother one time said mom dude would you throw these are two openings dude the guys hit on you and her Baxter hug she turned looked at me and she said if that is none of your business so what she was up to I don't know but she had a great time having Parkinson's disease is a lot like getting old what I'm going through now with Parkinson's disease everyone in this room is going to go through as you get old it's about dealing with a slow deterioration of body and mind and the virtual world is great for people with Parkinson's and it's great for the elderly this was the first studio that I built for myself in the virtual world that's dB my avatar out on the balcony admiring the view had a very nice view what I'm showing you here are 2d images of 3d environments this is like me showing you photographs of my trip to Europe you're only going to get a vague idea of what it's like you have to go into these spaces with your avatar which you can do by going online and walk around fly around in these spaces to really understand it oops that you can't wait to hear that expression explanation for that one there we go that's the first house that I built in the virtual world it's atop a mountain in Patagonia you can be anywhere in the virtual world you'll notice there are no walls because there's no hot there's no cold it's utopia that's Camelot this I was trained as a modernist architect minimalism was well drummed into my head less is more in all that and I came to realize that the virtual world is a place where you can be free from all of that free from style and fashion and expectations and really fully explore your own personal aesthetic so in order to break loose of 50 years of training I decided I had to go the exact opposite direction of the minimalist modernist so I went to the excess of decoration decadence color etc as far to the other direction as I could get this was a poolside party pad for those Hollywood Knights and party we did and there were some very interesting bizarre people that showed up for these parties fashion is a big part of the virtual world but because they're not the restrictions of style people can come up with the most bizarre outfits and it's amazing how bizarre and creative people can be given the right circumstances particularly anonymity in addition to Parkinson's giving you more creativity it also gives you additional or added generation of ideas I've heard many people with Parkinson's say this they just have ideas about everything constantly my poor wife has to put up with this every morning I get up and I say this great idea she rolls her eyes as oh god here we go again this way I've shown you some of the bad ideas that I've had because they're more interesting than the good ideas a lot of you probably don't know who Cass Walker is but he was quite a figure in Knoxville a musical of his life is probably a really bad idea but I remember that movie the producers it's just possible that it's such a bad idea that it would be a hit now I had one of those mornings that I woke up as I envisioned a shop that only sells Sunspear would get a control of it well that would only sell paraphernalia related to the Sun sphere and we were going to sell such things as earrings and and whatnot that would say I love Sun sphere well this was not a big hit and finally somebody pulled me aside and said David it's just the Sun sphere it's not the Eiffel Tower so I thought well there's an idea they belong together don't they I mean they gave us the Statue of Liberty let's give them the Sun sphere I guarantee you you will never look at another picture of the Eiffel Tower without thinking of the Sun spirit now the French got it right they too had this tower relic from a previous World's Fair the Parisians they hated it they wanted to tear it down but what the French did was they learned to love it and they celebrated it and you can buy anything in Paris in the shape of an Eiffel Tower and it became the beloved symbol of an entire country why can't we do that with the Sun sphere now I agree that gold reflective glasses as much out of style as anything can be but it will come back in retro form and maybe we'll learn to love the Sun sphere I have no comment every child loves castles and loves to build castles so the first major bill for me in the in the virtual world was to build a castle and it was great fun I had a lot of fun doing it people came to visit and it was terrific until it caught on fire but not to be deterred I went on to build myself a palace if you could have anything in the virtual world might not build yourself a palace so I did somebody said to me if you're gonna do a TED talk you should talk about your secret for having living a contented life well I don't have a secret for that but if there were any if I did have there would be two words make something I think people are at their best and their most contented when they're making things not consuming things but making things we talked a lot about that today and I think it's a great virtue and it certainly brought me great contentment the hours that I spent building this and took away a lot of the symptoms of Parkinson's here it is under construction it took me months to build it it was quite an undertaking but finally it got finished and I'll show you a few of the rooms and the palace this was the entry hall one of the interior courtyards the music room the music room was very popular lots of jam sessions went on in there and the entrance to the to the music room as I said my purpose in all of this is to try to get artists introduced to this because I think the era of hanging pictures on the wall is about to end because we're going to all be spending more time in the virtual world I spend a lot of time in this world and we're all going to be spending more time working and living in the virtual world and the opportunity there is for artists to create entire environment to have an influence like never before and I'm hoping that artists will more quickly embrace this oops that's the problem with Parkinson's disease okay back one more okay we'll get back on track here texture is a very important part of designing in the virtual world the richness the depth etc comes about through the use of textures this was a study in texture let's see if I can do one there we go this is one of the corridors in the palace it's built out of multiple layers of texture this was a rather delightful experience because when you walk down this it made this sort of tinkling sound like wind chime so it was quite delightful my studio it didn't actually do very much work here but it was a great place for entertaining visitors and having chats the Chinese sitting room I don't think anybody ever sat in it but it was fun to build and over on the right is the entrance to the art gallery of course they had to have an art gallery in the back there is a docking station for hot-air balloons that's the way we got around the Palace estate was with hot-air balloons this was perhaps the most popular room in the palace the Moroccan Tea Room what I was doing here was trying to develop a technique that took the sort of plastic look off of computer drawings I think it's possible to create a sort of personal style but it's difficult with computer drawings this was another attempt trying to create a sort of rustic handmade feeling a study for trying to capture the essence of watercolours but without actually doing watercolours oops trying once again there we go this was the guest house on the grounds the strange thing about this house is it was constantly rearranging itself I don't know why I did that but the walls kept moving every time I went in there was a different floor plan so the furniture all had to be attached to the wall so it moved with the walls and we built some stables for the creatures the creatures that had no purpose other than to sort of wander around the estate and look picturesque in a robotic sort of way the problem with being motivated by Parkinson's is that this creativity thing can get totally out of control and with me it frequently does now the palace got completely out of control and started turning into a city and the city turned into a megalopolis and frankly I couldn't stop there I am exhausted on the rooftop terrace having spent the day building all of these cities the buildings started to get very sort of organic because I'm interested in the idea of growing buildings but as you can see the city was completely out of control and it was costing me hundreds of dollars every month because you have to rent space in the virtual world so it was time to pull the plug on all of this and I moved into a small apartment in the cottage in the woods it was delightful little place and this time I so much like the idea of moving walls at this time I intentionally had everything in the place move but it moved very gradually it was very soothing to have everything around you slightly moving that was my next-door neighbor now you know you are in the virtual world when your next-door neighbor looks like that she's actually a middle-aged schoolteacher in a small town in Germany but on the weekends the work started to become increasingly surreal which was which was good because what I was trying to achieve was letting go of being intentional about what I was doing and let myself become just a conduit for something and that's what started to happen even though this was coming out of my brain it didn't feel like it was coming out of my brain it felt like it was coming from somewhere else and I began to realize how very deep all of our imaginations are that we barely even even begin to understand and strange things started to happen such as the attack of the Audi car bumpers that was an interesting experience and quite a mess that they made building started exploding the building started melting dissolving all of this again coming through my head but yet I didn't know from where these strange exotic lands that started to appear and I realized it was time okay I'm going to take the dive here I'm going to go and to another world that had no reference to the real world and really find out how far into my imagination could I go it was like getting into a spaceship and flying into this alien world and what I found at the very core of this was something very basic a world made up of form color texture and light and nothing more and it was very soothing in a sort of Zen way but what I found was I got bored with it very quickly and one of the biggest problems was that nothing had scale I had no idea how big anything was how small anything was and it was it was very frustrating so finally the thing the whole thing became a jumble in my mind there was no up there was no down no right no laugh no context no meaning and I had to pull myself out of it and back to the real world whereupon I decided to spend some time in a very special place so that I think some of the best art comes from a zone I call teetering on the edge of bad taste and here were experiments with color combinations trying to get as garish as I could but without quite going over the edge some people would say I went way over the edge but it was made for interesting conversation what's garish what's not and new techniques for lighting experimenting not everything that I have done in the virtual world has been for fun I've also done work for paying clients this was a project I did for Santa Barbara City College it's a teaching venue I've also done real-life architectural projects I was living in Los Angeles but I was working on projects in Cairo and flying back and forth and getting exhausted when it occurred to me one day we could be doing this in the virtual world so I collaborated with the Egyptian architects via our avatars designing this shopping center unfortunately our client was a little too close to Mubarak and when they had the revolution that was the end of that but we did go on to start a program called Kansas to Cairo with funding from the State Department in which we had American architecture students collaborating with Egyptian architecture students which was very successful in that they focused on the similarities and not the cultural differences this is a project I'm working on currently which will be on the sunset on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles and it will be a showcase for new technologies in outdoor advertising and this is my current passion and I have a I have some goggles here today if anybody wants to try it in the lobby afterwards it's the oculus rift actually I have the gear VR and if you've not tried this I recommend it because it's going to blow your mind what it's about to mean to our culture is mind-boggling so I hope I will see you all in cyberspace and thank you very much