TEDxUNCAsheville prepares for club’s upcoming event
TAYLOR SEXTON
A&F Staff Writer
tsexton@unca.edu
After a year and a half of plan
ning, TEDxUNCAsheville’s largest
event sold out in 24 hours.
Independent from TED Talks,
TEDx is a way for people around
the world to organize their own
events and conferences. TEDxUN
CAsheville, assembled eight years
ago, is a self-sufficient group, or
ganized and funded by students in
volved.
“Our theme this year is Love, Mu
sic and Other Drugs, and it started
out as a way for us to explore what
people are passionate about and
what drives them to do what they do
and how love and music and these
sorts of passions are like drugs to
us,” said Taylor Beyrer, junior psy
chology student and current presi
dent of TEDxUNCAsheville.
Beyrer said the concept for this
event took root in the fall 2016. She
made the decision as president to
take her time building her team and
preparing for the large event with
smaller talks.
It was not until 2017 that the team
decided to officially plan the event.
Love, Music and Other Drugs
started as one concrete concept but
expanded over the preparation peri
od.
Recently, the club decided to in
corporate the theme of recovery
into the event, which divides into
four sessions: intoxication, fixation,
dependency and recovery.
“We’re really going on that jour
ney of what is it like to become in
toxicated, to love something that
much and then all the way through
to how do you recover from loving
something so much that it takes
over your entire life or you're at
tached to something to a certain ex
tent,” Beyrer said.
The only student speaker at this
event will be Forest Gamble, a se
nior new media and German stu
dent.
“My talk is about breaking down
fake news and how propaganda
works, and then the census of my
PHOTO BY ELIJAH LAPLANTE
Robin Russell Gaiser performs a portion of her upcoming speech at an event last November.
talk is that I urge people to create
their own propaganda in order to
combat institutional propaganda
and I go through different princi
ples and methods of doing that,”
Gamble said. “So it’s about basical
ly destroying the fake news appara
tus by creating fake news.”
Gamble explained the process of
preparing his speech as intensive.
He began writing his script in Oc
tober and has since gone through
11 drafts, cutting his 15-page script
down to six-and-a-half pages.
“It goes from very broad ideas
like, T want to give a talk on propa
ganda,’ and then they’re like ‘OK,
what exactly about that do you want
to talk about?’ And then we had to
pare it down and they really worked
with us to make sure the talk was
good,” Gamble said.
Outreach coordinator Tessa
Friesen, a sophomore health and
wellness promotion student, also
helped train the speakers.
Friesen helped during the process
of interviewing, choosing and train
ing the speakers, including Gamble,
UNCA staff, faculty and Asheville
community members.
“Once we finally determined
our speakers, it was just a process
of ‘How can we best curate your
talk and narrate it so that the most
amount of people benefit from
it?’ So that was a really interesting
time to try and figure out ‘How can
you boil these really, really intense
topics down to very simple, under
standable concepts for the mass
es?”’ Friesen said.
Beyrer said she really wanted
this event to stand out from all the
others, which led to the creation of
Project X.
Project X was a collaboration
between both TEDxUNCAshe
ville and the STEAM studio. The
STEAM studio cut out 150 large
foam X’s and the goal is to have all
of them decorated. The X’s were
then delivered to schools in the
Asheville community, organiza
tions on campus and several which
were left in buckets for artists to
pick up.
“We'll string them up and have
CONTINUED ON PAGE 18