The 6th annual Entertainment Gathering Conference took place on Apr. 12-14 in Monterey Bay. 

– Hilda Huang

Driving down to Monterey for the 2012 Entertainment Gathering Conference 6 (E-G 6) of “innovators in media, technology, entertainment and education” last Wednesday evening, Apr. 11, I remember the brittle rain falling on the windshield, the creeping fog swirling around the car and thinking that this drive was going to be one heck of a stressful drive. 

Well, I was right, but as a 15 year-old I was, and still am, one who suffers from the arrogance of youth and the ignorance of contemptuousness, and it turns out I was wrong regarding most everything else. 

I remember seeing rain the first morning of E-G 6 and thinking that it’d be best to work out at the hotel, not on the beach, and so I did, on a sprained ankle. It hurt. Then, I read the Wall Street Journal and saw a wonderful article about Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun’s160,000-plus-student, college-level Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, thinking that I should be in these classes, not in high school. I checked my grades, and I did poorly on an AP Biology exam.

I decided it was time to lunch, and met Bonobo researcher and expert Vanessa Woods, dressed in a chic gray sheath and carrying a neon yellow purse, on the elevator ride down to the conference center. I asked her if she was off to E-G too and she replied “yes,” and so we introduced ourselves. I admired her vivaciousness and enthusiasm, in the way her voice sparkled with spriteliness and lightened the elevator mirrors and muzak. 

Stepping foot into the amalgam of fun-loving, creative intellectuals that is the Entertainment Gathering, I was quickly whipped out of reality with Kina Grannis’s “In Your Arms” and 288,000 Jellybeans, with Lytro’s new light field camera (for after-click focusing and essentially 3-D photography), with Jonathan Harris’s Cowbird (an experience-sharing web platform), with Jim Meskimen’s hysterical yet incredible impressions (check him out on YouTube). The intensity of one talk after another was amazing and became even more exhilarating when I remembered that I would have been sitting in class on a glum day, thinking of what I could have been doing if I weren’t sitting in class.

BREAK! And onto Creature Features and a special screening of Mark Wexler’s “How to Live Forever.” “It was a dark and stormy night…” Well, it was further north in San Francisco, but not really in Monterey. Who knew Loma Linda had the world’s longest life expectancy? Or that there exists Laughter Yoga, a rhythmic body exercise of hoo’s and haa’s and perhaps the world’s greatest diaphragm workout known to man (that is, until you break out in true hysterics and end up on the ground)?

The feeling of finding out so many new things in such a short time was best – I discovered that the greatest tool for educators and students alike is the desire to learn and explore, something I had not experienced in too long a while.

Friday morning Nosh and Wheaties sped into Mythbuster Adam Savage’s not-so-subtle and extremely eye-opening lesson about failures, and Roz Savage’s pursuit of trans-oceanic rowing after quitting her job as a management consultant. And onto “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” author Brian Selznick’s discussion about the physicality of storytelling  in books and Caltech particle physics professor Maria Spiropolu’s  narrative of her life in particle physics. But, I realized that all of these presenters and attendees really had nothing in common besides a sincere quest for developing their talents to better their own characters and world around them. 

Actually, illusionist Simon Coronel also quit his job as a management consultant to pursue magic as a career. My mom just quit her management job – I think she’ll be onto something new soon…

After exploring Wondrous Things and having E-G director, pianist, MIT media lab professor and builder of the world’s largest book Michael Hawley explain to us the nature of the E-G 6 logo (he took it from NASA), shuttle buses swept us off to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for Nokia’s Make a Splash Party. I met the animator PES, who creates short video stories that twist common preconceptions about inanimate objects (don’t avocados look like green grenades?).  We talked about the life of the stage director and the commercial filmmaker, while “schmoozing” along with jellyfish and other marine critters.

But at least I was exactly that, lost and drifting in the waves of innovation and wonder, like the jellyfish that were always drifting backwards even though they pumped the water behind them.  

Saturday morning, I finally realized I was tired as I headed off to Nosh, but I quickly left my senses again after seeing RED aka Hong Yi’s brushless paintings and Mark Stutzman’s illustrations and product design, and from this artistic tour we powered into “Life Cycles,” an exploration of life, expression and death.

But why were we to care about Peter Menzel’s and Faith D’Alusio’s photographic stories about death and its rituals, or whether New York Times obituarist Bruce Weber already had an advance obit on you, or whether Ellsworth Wareham, a cardiothoracic surgeon who finally put down his scalpel at the tender, young age of 95, performed your last cardiac bypass? And it was my wonder at these interpretations of the gems of life and death and the steep cliff between them that presented to me that we were all there to discover anew our own capacities and faculties for creation: It truly is no wonder that humans have the desire to create and augment our realities. Birth and death are mere boundaries, as the Hindus believe, between one life of creation and another.

The power of the voice to create impressions, technology to create new realities and relationships to create new beings all really demonstrate the same thing – we’re all here, all of us freaks of nature, here to create, order up whatever our crazy imaginations dream of and recreate! And never once in that statement is the discussion between what’s correct and incorrect – we’re here to give with all our might, not judge.

I haven’t felt this liberated in years, and Sunday, I went home and slept for a long, long time. Yesterday, I bought a box of Wheaties inspired by Wareham’s talk about how to live longer; today, I told my diving coach that, in light of recent injuries and other matters, I would take a hiatus from the sport; and the day after tomorrow, I turn 16. But, the gap between today and the day after next is the mysterious creation of ‘tomorrow’, the gulf between the present and the future, and an empty canvas for our imaginations. So perhaps it’s time to imagine up a new life to pursue and for my “Rebooting Tomorrow.”

As Dr. Seuss said, “Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.”