The face of diversity for Tedx

TEDx Amsterdam kicks off on November 28 with a diverse line-up of speakers from Greenpeace executive director, Kumi Naidoo, to fashion blogger, Ari Seth Cohen.

To highlight what Tedx is and promote the conference, We are Pi Amsterdam came up with an open source experiment – The Human Clock, a montage of faces each lasting one second and all uploaded by people throughout the world. The aim is to reach 24 hours worth of one-second faces, or 86,000 individual face, by the time the conference launches.

The underlying message is that we’re all united by time. This is how that message is expressed on the website:

“One pair of hands tells the time, many hands make history.

No matter where you’re from, or what language you speak, we all have one thing in common – the time we share.

The Human Clock is a challenge to celebrate our beautiful differences to create a clock made from all of us.

One second is one click away. Join us.”

Alex Bennett Grant, managing director of We Are Pi, explained, “TEDxAmsterdam and the global TEDx Community are a demonstration of how amazing things happen when people get together. We continuously try to bring this to life in our collaboration with TED – in this case, uniting the world in time. We wanted to celebrate the diversity and reach of TEDx…and demonstrate the power of an idea worth spreading.”

We Are Pi created the clock in collaboration with creative digital production company, MediaMonks, and film production & photography agency, 100% Halal.

The project is immense, but its structure is simple. Anyone can upload an image that already exists on their hard drive or use a webcam to take a new one. The photo is then immediately added to the clock, where it appears overlaid with clock hands that feature the words ‘tick tock’ in various languages.

Faces first appear in the centre of the clock face, then merge with new portraits as each is uploaded.