Earth

Wind

Fire

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Toa Mata Band RiskMachine is a data mining multimedia performance applied to robotics music. Toa Mata Band uses real historical disaster and climate risk data to create rhythmic music played by a LEGO robot orchestra. During the performance, data will become a live robotic performance, streamed simultaneously in three different On Demand rooms. Each of these rooms is themed “Earth”, “Wind”, and “Fire”, the music of which draws on data related to earth, wind and fire, respectively. An electroacoustic beat will be randomly generated by eight digits, each representing the main musical fractions ; number “1” is a whole, “2” is half note, “4” is quarter note and so on; “0” will be a pause and “9” a stochastic figure generator. The metronome BPM tempo and the sound design of each room will be randomly generated, and new datasets will be included throughout the performance. This performance is an experimental way of representing the earth’s activity and climate changes in music

Toa Mata Band
Lego Robot Orchstra

The Band: Toa Mata Band is known as the world first LEGO® music robots orchestra, made of vintage Bionicle figures. Each band member is built using LEGO Bionicle pieces, a system of electric motors, rubber bands and pulleys connected to the figures’ arms, allowing them to play a rig of different touchable synthesizers, drum machines, smartphones and acoustic percussions. To learn more about Toa Mata Band visit https://www.youtube.com/user/opificiosonico 

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When our usual way of life gets suspended, fear and discomfort confront us; when what we are familiar with is no longer available to us, we feel ungrounded and anxious about what is to come. When change is an inevitable part of life, what is within our locus of control, and what is not, that we could learn to be at ease with? Between looking back and looking forward, there is the present. Between the ups and downs of life, we can take a pause to notice what is here for us.
Meditation Teacher and Bestselling Author Mingyur Rinpoche and Mindfulness Coach Erin Lee discuss the role of mindfulness in times of disruption and uncertainty, and the possibilities of navigating life’s transitions with greater openness and awareness of our own mind.

Mingyur Rinpoche
Teacher, Author & Master of the Karma Kagyu

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche possesses a rare ability to present the ancient wisdom of Tibet in a fresh, engaging manner. His profound yet accessible teachings and playful sense of humor have endeared him to students around the world. Most uniquely, Rinpoche’s teachings weave together his own personal experiences with modern scientific research, relating both to the practice of meditation.

Born in 1975 in the Himalayan border regions between Tibet and Nepal, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a much-loved and accomplished meditation master. From a young age, Rinpoche was drawn to a life of contemplation. He spent many years of his childhood in strict retreat. At the age of seventeen, he was invited to be a teacher at his monastery’s three-year retreat center, a position rarely held by such a young lama. He also completed the traditional Buddhist training in philosophy and psychology, before founding a monastic college at his home monastery in north India.

In addition to extensive training in the meditative and philosophical traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, Mingyur Rinpoche has also had a lifelong interest in Western science and psychology. At an early age, he began a series of informal discussions with the famed neuroscientist Francisco Varela, who came to Nepal to learn meditation from his father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. Many years later, in 2002, Mingyur Rinpoche and a handful of other long-term meditators were invited to the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Richard Davidson, Antoine Lutz, and other scientists examined the effects of meditation on the brains of advanced meditators. The results of this groundbreaking research were reported in many of the world’s most widely read publications, including National Geographic and Time.

Erin Lee
Founder and Mindfulness Coach of Mindful Moments Singapore

Erin Lee, founder of Mindful Moments and Light On Life, is a Mindfulness Coach and Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Teacher. She earned her Master of Science degree in Studies in Mindfulness with the University of Aberdeen, UK. Having spent nearly a decade living and working under chronic stress and burnout, Erin is today an advocate of mindfulness as a way of life. She currently lives in Singapore and devotes her time to propagating the seeds of mindfulness and supporting individuals and urban communities in developing skills of mindful awareness for better attentional flexibility, mental resilience, and emotional balance.

Erin works with corporate organizations and educational institutions to deliver mindfulness and mental wellness programs for working professionals, adult learners and youths. She also co-founded The Big Sit – a social meditation event that inspires the use of public spaces for fostering good mental health, and runs Take A Pause, a weekly online mindfulness practice.

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Learn about Google’s Flood Forecasting Initiative from the head of the program. Sella Nevo walks through the advances made around flood maps and early warning alerts.

Sella Nevo
Senior Software Engineer, Google

Sella Nevo is a tech researcher committed to enacting large-scale effective social impact, and specialises in machine learning, research & development and tech management. Currently, Nevo is leading the Google Flood Forecasting initiative, alongside several humanitarian and environmental efforts at Google. He also teaches Applied Ethics and Information Security at Tel Aviv University, and advises on VC investments in startups advancing the UN’s sustainable Development Goals.

Stacie Chan
Global Product Partnerships Manager
Google

Stacie Chan leads Search and Web Product Partnerships at Google for the Asia-Pacific region. She most recently moved from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to Asia to work with partners in high-growth markets. Before Partnerships at Google, Stacie worked on the Google News team, supporting news publishers around the world. Prior to Google, she was a journalist in San Francisco covering everything from politics to technology; and before that, an actress in Los Angeles, where she was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award.

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In the year 2030, a small coastal community is hit by twin crises: a typhoon and an earthquake, in quick succession. The impact that these disasters will have depend on many different variables. What if we can make different decisions in the year 2020 or 2025 to alter the outcome for this community? In this interactive game, you take on the role of scientists, politicians and emergency services personnel, to see if you lessen the impact of a disaster on this community.

This performance is brought to you with support from Google.

David Finnigan
Artist & Game Designer

David Finnigan is a writer, theatre-maker and game designer from Ngunawal country, Australia. He works at the intersection of science and art, producing theatre shows that explore concepts from climate and earth science. David has worked as resident artist at research institutions including CSIRO, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, University College London and the Earth Observatory Singapore. He is a Fellow of the Churchill Foundation and the Australia Council for the Arts.

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Creating Change Through Music: Two talented artists, from two different cultures and generations, play music to raise awareness about natural hazards and climate change. Dr. Lucy Jones, who is also a renowned Californian seismologist, will perform her piece, “In Nomine Terra Calens”, or “In the Name of a Warming Earth”, to reflect on the effects of climate change. Tafa Mi Soleil, a young Haitian singer and artist, will share with us a song she created to help spread the word of disaster risk reduction and preparedness in her local country. Over 5 million Haitians have heard this song already! The two women will then have a conversation about their work in connecting science and art in service of creating a more resilient world.
The video was shot with the artists in both Port Au Prince and Los Angeles, and was directed by Emiliano Rodriguez Nuesch from Pacífico. This performance was made possible with support from FM Global.

Tafa Mi Soleil
Singer and Composer

Tafa Mi-Soleil, whose full name is Evenie Rose Thafaina Saint Louis, is a 22-year-old soul artist, born in Fort Jacques, Haiti, first known for her collaboration on albums by D-Fi Powèt Revolte and other Haitian rappers. Her first single Mizik Sove Vi m Pt 2 who announced her solo career was a great success with more than 2.5M views on Youtube in the space of 6 months. She just released a single “Chita Tann Ou” and is currently working on her EP “Reponn” which is due to be released next December. Tafa is also a stylist, she has her own line of fashion clothes and accessories. She also makes painting, she is a writer, plays and dances. Tafa is a member of the Evazyon Mizik label, of which she is a founding member and where she works as a producer. In 2020 Tafa co-created a song to spread the word of disaster risk reduction and preparedness in her local country, which impacted more than 5 million Haitians already.

Dr Lucy Jones
Scientist and Musician

Dr. Lucy Jones is the founder and Chief Scientist of the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society, with a mission to foster the understanding and application of scientific information in the creation of more resilient communities, and a Research Associate at the Seismological Laboratory of Caltech. With a Bachelor of Arts in Chinese Language and Literature from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Geophysics from MIT, Dr. Jones has been active in earthquake research for decades, furthering earthquake risk reduction, including 33 years of federal service with the US Geological Survey. Her work at the USGS included developing the methodology for estimating the probability that an earthquake will be a foreshock to a bigger event, leading the creation of a national science strategy for natural hazards research, creating the first American major earthquake drill, the Great ShakeOut, that has expanded to now encompass over 60 million participants around the world in 2019 and writing over 100 published papers on statistical seismology and integrated disaster scenarios. Her pioneering science was recognized with the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal (one of just eight awarded to federal employees in 2015), the Ambassador Award from the American Geophysical Union, the Distinguished Service Award from the US Department of Interior, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western States Seismic Policy Council, and the 2000 Alquist Medal and the 2017 Distinguished Lecture Award both from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.

Kaori Enjoji
Journalist

Host of UR2020

From the early outbreak aboard a cruise ship to the abrupt fall of the country’s longest serving prime minister, Kaori Enjoji spent most of 2020 in Japan reporting about the pandemic and its social, political and economic impact for CNN.

After graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she joined Reuters as a correspondent to work in the Tokyo and London bureaus. She later switched to television to serve as CNBC’s bureau chief based in Tokyo. Storytelling has been her passion since she first saw the World Press Photo exhibition as a teenager growing up in Amsterdam. Kaori was raised on three continents and is bilingual in English and Japanese.  She is also proficient in Dutch and French. She reports for print, television and online media by melding those languages and cultures in an unscientific mix. She is currently working on a documentary project to mark the ten years since the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In her free time, Kaori enjoys being beaten in a good game of shogi by her teenage son.