Thank you for coming to my TED talk

A talk on "What if we could read images like words?" and how I constructed it

This has been a time of growing things. I grew a garden, inexpertly. I fed the plants compost from the kitchen and green crystals of “plant food”. I sprayed them with neem oil and waged a war against aphids. A blight took away my zucchinis and my radishes were stunted. My sunflowers point stubbornly West all day long and are the size of marigolds.

We grew a dog. We named him Mountbatten, Batty for short. He has no sense of self-preservation. He fell asleep in the bowl of puppy formula we fed him on the day we brought him home, and nearly drowned. He caught tick fever twice, and had to be force-fed antibiotics for twenty five days each time. But he is thriving now, watches me gravely as I cook, and gets excited each time the doorbell rings. He joins me every morning as I inspect the garden and tries to dig up the tomatoes if I linger near them for too long.

I grew a child inside me, and fed him with my blood and bones. Growing a person is hard. I vomited till my teeth turned blue and capillaries burst in red lines all over my face. People told me I glowed. I felt radioactive.

He was born four months ago. We named him Malhar — after the season in which he was born — and he brings us rain and sunshine. I will be talking about motherhood here as it pertains to me, I expect, from time to time, but stop me if I ever talk about him. He is his own person, and should get to decide how much, if anything, is said about him on the internet.

Now, I feel like a softer, tireder version of myself. I have infinite patience for Malhar and very little for anyone else. It will take me time to feel less fragile. In the meanwhile, I hold his warm, wriggly weight against my body, and write.

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Last year, when the garden was full of sprouting seeds and hope, Batty was learning to heel and Malhar was still an idea, I received an email from a member of NIT Trichy’s TEDx team. Would I, she asked, be willing to give a TED talk? Of course I said yes.

A TED (Technology Entertainment Design) talk — though I suspect you all know this — is a snappy 10-18 minute talk given by a speaker who positions themselves as an expert in a particular field. In the better talks, they package their work into an idea that is laid out, explained and neatly summed up. A good TED talk, I quickly discovered, is hard to do. Let alone the impossibility of packaging a lifetime’s work into 10 minutes, you then have to communicate it in a way that people understand. In a great TED video, the audience is right there with you, responding to your words, laughing at your jokes. Your clothes are carefully chosen to convey who you are and what you represent. People on the internet see it and share it with each other. If you do it well, you could go viral.

I did not go viral. My talk has just over a thousand views, and about fifty of those are definitely my family. But I chose to speak about “What if we could read images like words?” which is something I write about in this newsletter as well. So, I thought I would talk through how I went about constructing my TED talk and delivering it here, and that’s the final video up there.

The concept

Reading is still my primary way of understanding the world, as I suspect it is yours, since you are here, reading a newsletter. It’s only quite recently that I’ve learned that there are other ways of absorbing, examining, and digesting the world. Sound, touch, smell, image, moving pictures, all abstractions, all play a part and either supplement the written word, or replace it. This observation might seem trite to some, but to me it was revelatory. It was only when I went to design school and later began reading about image-making and graphic design that I really understood how much could be encoded into an image. I see it more now, in the picture books I read to Malhar. He stares gravely at the drawings and tries to eat them, which is, for now, his way of consuming them.

So, when I started writing the talk, this was the idea I decided to speak about, because I had a hunch there were enough people out there who hadn’t thought about images in this way before.

Structure and slides

A talk has a rhythm that is unlike a piece of writing. You cannot assume constant interest from an audience; there are always distractions. You guide the pace of it, not them, and so the pacing has to take into account this ebb and flow. I like to think of it as a piece of music. I knew it had to have an introduction, something of a chorus (images are non-linear; images condense information; images are dangerous) and a crescendo, which is brought down to closure. Since I was writing about word and image, it made sense to have a presentation with images.

The opening image, and all the hand-drawn explanatory slides are deliberately informal. The informality makes an image more friendly and less academic. The words are drawn, rather than typed. I kept as few words in the slides as possible. I was talking and could supply the words. I used hand-drawn icons as symbols for the words and was pleased to think that iconography comes from the Greek ekion (image) and graphia (writing).

The pacing was planned and worked upon: There was a setup, with a little background about me, some mild humour — that no one but my husband in the audience laughed at — and some self-promotion, because the whole reason for doing a TED talk is to eventually get more work (hire me!).

I transitioned as economically as I could to the crux of my talk: That images are abstractions that can be used to represent the world, just like words. They say things that words can’t.

An [image] is sometimes a way of exploring pure feeling, long past the point where words have ceased to work.

- I, in my TED talk

The references

Older readers and former students will recognise a lot of the references in my talk. I wasn’t trying to explore a wholly new concept here, but really once that has animated this newsletter and a lot of my design work for years now.

I had been reading “Composition” by Arthur Dow at the time. I thought these slides were a good way of working in how I think about images while making them: a layering of detail using the elements of composition, and so, meaning.

The Atwood reference at the end was the first thing I thought of when I began to write the talk. For a long time, I thought words were not important. “Sticks and stones” I thought, even as books held me spellbound and I memorised speeches for elocution classes. It was a strange cognitive dissonance, that only really resolved when I read Atwood. Words matter, and by extension, all other methods of communication do too, just as much. In a hypervisual world, images maybe matter just as much.

Everything else

Staging, sound design, lighting, camera angles, editing, I had no control over. What I could control were my outfit and delivery, voice and pacing, and how well I had memorised my words. I did my best, though I could always have done better. What I realised when talking to my fellow speakers is that there is a TED talk circuit, and that many of the other people speaking on that day were old pros, comparing notes on how many TED events they had spoken at. Perhaps I will also do this again sometime, although I’m not sure I always have that much to say?

I delivered several impassioned iterations of my talk to Batty and my bathroom mirror, and brought it down to just under 11 minutes. While a TED talk can be as much as 18 minutes long, when it came down to it, I didn’t think I had enough to say to last a full eighteen. Meanwhile, ask me to describe Batty’s eyes and you’ll still be here forty minutes later, checking your watch.

Thank you for being here and reading along. I hope to be back in this space, writing more regularly, in the coming year. Follow along if you like thinking about images and how they mediate our understanding of the world, image-making, and beautiful dogs? Go on then.