TERRY O’REILLY

What you think is not always what you’d think. Terry O’Reilly shares some surprising insights about human behaviour that have led to a counterintuitive approach to marketing.

Speaker Profile:

Terry O’Reilly began his career as a copywriter for some of Canada’s top creative ad agencies. In 1990, he co-founded audio production company Pirate Radio & Television, now in Toronto and New York City. Terry has won awards around the world for his writing and directing. When he’s not creating advertising, he’s talking about it as host of the award-winning CBC/Sirius radio series, “The Age of Persuasion.” He’s co-written a best-selling book based on the radio show, published by Knopf Canada, which hits American bookstores this year. The advertising industry has given Terry three lifetime achievement awards, even though, to the best of his knowledge, he only has one life.

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PHILIP BEESLEY

Can buildings literally come alive? With the Hylozoic Ground project, Philip Beesley demonstrates how buildings in the future might move, and even feel and think.

Speaker Profile:

Philip Beesley is an associate professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo, and creates immersive, responsive environments. His projects feature interactive kinetic systems that use dense arrays of microprocessors, sensors and actuator systems arranged within lightweight “textile” structures. These environments pursue distributed emotional consciousness within synthetic and near-living systems.

His current Hylozoic Ground project will transform the Canadian Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Biennale with an environment made of tens of thousands of digitally-fabricated components fitted with meshed microprocessors and sensors. Beesley’s work is widely published and exhibited, and has been distinguished by awards, including VIDA 11.0 and FEIDAD, and by the Prix de Rome in Architecture (Canada).

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RAYMOND LAFLAMME

Throughout history, our innate human curiosity has driven us as we seek to understand and transform our world. This curiosity has now led us to the quantum frontier, where the mind-boggling rules of the subatomic realm promise to fundamentally challenge our very perception of reality.

Speaker Profile:

Raymond Laflamme is originally from Québec City, where he studied physics as an undergraduate at the Université Laval. After surviving part three of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge, he completed his PhD on aspects of general relativity and quantum cosmology in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) under the direction of Stephen Hawking. Laflamme and his colleague Don Page are responsible for having changed Hawking’s mind on the reversal of the direction of time in a contracting universe (see Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time).

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PAUL SALTZMAN

Is it true that we all have prejudices? and why do we so rarely talk about them? Paul Saltzman wants to change this, starting with his film Prom Night in Mississippi.

Speaker Profile:

Paul Saltzman is a two-time Emmy Award-winning Toronto-based film and television producer-director. He began his career in 1965 at the CBC and then moved to the National Film Board of Canada. In 1968-69, he assisted in the birth of a new film format, as second-unit director and production manager of the first IMAX film, produced for the 1970 World’s Fair. In 1973, Paul founded Sunrise Films Limited. Since then, he has produced television series, miniseries and movies of the week, and in 2008, he made his feature-film directorial debut with the documentary Prom Night in Mississippi with Morgan Freeman, which premiered in competition at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. He is currently editing his second feature, the documentary Return to Mississippi. Paul is a member of the Director’s Guild of Canada and the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television.

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CAROLINE DISLER

Caroline Disler explores the history of how language and cultural exchange have led to what has come to be called, somewhat ironically, “Western civilization.”

Speaker Profile:

Caroline Disler is a master of translation. With reading knowledge of many modern languages such as  Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Polish, modern Greek and Arabic, as well as working knowledge of ancient languages including Sumerian, Akkadian, Edomite, Ancient Hebrew, Egyptian, Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, she has unique perspective on the sources of human thought. In addition to translating modern books and academic papers from German, French, Dutch, and Italian, her work and teaching reveals how we come to think the way we do, examining the largely unexplored role of translation itself in ancient history. Drawing from original source material such as pagan Ugaritic epics and original Moabite, Babylonian, Syriac and Coptic texts, her studies of history, society and translation at York University explore inter-cultural transfer of information from the dawn of writing to the present day.

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MADHUR ANAND

What is the colour green? Madhur Anand explores the science and poetry of ecological remembering.

Speaker Profile:

Madhur Anand is an internationally-recognized scientist and professor with over 45 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals and currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Ecological Change at the University of Guelph. Her research in forest ecology, ecological modeling and biodiversity spans several countries including Israel, Europe, India, China, Brazil and the USA.  She serves on several journal editorial boards and granting panels and is currently President of the Sigma Xi Scientific Society (University of Toronto Chapter).

Dr. Anand is also a poet. Her poetry has been published in CV2, The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, Room, Grain, Interim, Vallum and Maple Tree Literary Supplement, anthologized in The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in Science and Mathematics (2008) and nominated for a Pushcart prize (2007).

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MICHAEL SACCO

With chocolate, Michael Sacco invites us to think differently about food, community, business and our planet.

Speaker Profile:

Michael Sacco is a technologist, writer and chocolatier. He founded ChocoSol, an artisanal chocolate company which he has termed a “learning community social enterprise,” promoting the diversity of production of organic cacao through a structure defined as “horizontal trade.” Rather than sell commodities, says Michael, ChocoSol extends symbolic invitations: “The chocolate is an expression and vehicle for our dignity, creativity and learning.”

Honoured as Toronto Food Policy Council’s Local Food Hero in September 2009, he believes in open-source learning and building, and has been designing green production systems using solar power, pedal power, and waste diversion and upcycling techniques. ChocoSol’s bicycle-powered chocolate grinders earned it the title of Toronto’s Best New Bicycle Business in 2008.

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DARREN WERSHLER

Untimely? Conceptual? Impossible? Darren Wershler introduces the rich history and critical importance of imaginary media.

Speaker Profile:

Darren Wershler is a Canadian experimental poet, non-fiction writer and cultural critic.

A former gravedigger, he was the senior editor of Coach House Books between 1997 and 2002, where the works he edited included several highly acclaimed books of contemporary innovative poetry, including Fidget by Kenneth Goldsmith (2000); both volumes of Seven Pages Missing, the collected works of Steve McCaffery (2000, 2002); Lip Service by Bruce Andrews (2001); and Eunoia by Christian Bök (2002).

Wershler’s The Tapeworm Foundry was a Trillium Book Award finalist in 2000. He has instructed courses at York University and currently is an assistant professor of communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has authored several books about the Internet, technology and culture, as well as occasional essays on pop culture for newspapers and magazines such as Brick, Broken Pencil and This Magazine.

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MARTY AVERY

Marty Avery offers us a decoder ring for everyday clues and takes us spelunking for the inner treasure that makes our outer world richer. What if?

Speaker Profile:

Marty Avery is a business advisor who collaborates with business founders and leaders to design and implement prosperity strategies. She has been consulted by the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Women in Business, as well as NextMEDIA & Fortune Magazine. Marty has presented on Digital Delivery at several CEO forums and on social change at Buzz, a CEO think tank in California. Chief Catalyst at What If?, a member of the faculty at the Canadian Film Centre’s media lab and at the Banff Centre’s BNMI, Marty’s passion is using the power of networks and connection to build a world where you can extend your reach.

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AMY KROUSE ROSENTHAL

Amy Krouse Rosenthal shares some notes on life, from A to G-sharp.

Speaker Profile:

To say Amy Krouse Rosenthal is a writer, filmmaker and radio host does not do justice to the variety and sheer innovation behind her creative endeavors.  The New York Times said this about her work: “Her books radiate fun the way tulips radiate spring: they are elegant and spirit-lifting.”

Rosenthal has published 12 children’s books (and 8 forthcoming) including The New York Times bestsellers Duck! Rabbit! and Cookies: Bite Size Life Lessons. Duck! Rabbit! was selected as Time Magazine’s best children’s book of 2009.  As for her adult work, Amazon named her Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life one of the top 10 memoirs of 2005.  Amy is also the creator of YouTube sensations such as “17 Things I Made” and the international film project, “The Beckoning of Lovely: A Feature Film Featuring You.”