to them. They only learn to be frightened of those differences when
an
adult influences them to behave that way, and maybe
censors that natural curiosity, or you
know,
reins in the question-asking in
the hopes of them being polite little kids. So, I just pictured a
first grade teacher out in the lobby with these unruly kids,
saying, 'Now, whatever you do, don't stare at her legs.'
But, of course, that's the point. That's why I was there, I
wanted to invite them to look and explore. So I made a deal with
the adults that the kids could come
in, without any adults, for two
minutes, on their own. The doors open, the kids descend on this
table of legs, and they are poking and
prodding, and they're wiggling toes,
and they're trying to put their full weight on the sprinting leg to
see what happens with that. And I said, 'Kids, really quickly -- I
woke up this morning, I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a
house -- nothing too big, two or three stories -- but, if you could
think of any animal, any superhero, any cartoon character, anything
you can dream up right now, what kind of legs would you build
me?'
And
immediately a voice shouted,
'Kangaroo!' 'No, no, no! Should be a frog!' 'No. It should be Go Go
Gadget!' 'No, no, no! It should be The
Incredibles.' And other things that I don't --
aren't familiar with. And then, one eight-year-old said, 'Hey, why
wouldn't you want to fly too?' And the whole room, including me,
was like, 'Yeah.' (Laughter) And just like that, I went from being
a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as
'disabled' to somebody that had potential that their bodies didn't
have yet. Somebody that might even be super-abled.
Interesting.
So some of you actually saw me at TED, 11 years ago, and there's
been a lot of talk about how life-changing this conference is for
both speakers and attendees, and I am no exception. TED literally
was the
launch pad to the next
decade of my life's exploration. At
the time, the legs I presented were groundbreaking in
prosthetics. I had woven carbon fiber sprinting
legs modeled after the hind leg of a cheetah, which you may have
seen on stage yesterday. And also these very life-like,
intrinsically painted
silicone legs.
So at the time, it was my opportunity to put a call out to
innovators outside the traditional medical
prosthetic community to come bring their talent to
the science and to the art of building legs. So that we can stop
compartmentalizing form, function and
aesthetic, and assigning them different values.
Well, lucky for me, a lot of people answered that call. And the
journey started, funny enough, with a TED conference attendee --
Chee Pearlman, who hopefully is in the audience somewhere today.
She was the editor then of a magazine called ID, and she gave me a
cover story.
This started an incredible journey. Curious
encounters were happening to me at the time; I'd
been accepting numerous
invitations to
speak on the design of the cheetah legs around the world. People
would come up to me after the conference, after my talk, men and
women. And the
conversation would go
something like this, 'You know Aimee, you're very attractive. You
don't look disabled.' (Laughter) I thought, 'Well, that's amazing,
because I don't feel disabled.' And it really opened my eyes to
this
conversation that could be
explored, about beauty. What does a beautiful woman have to look
like? What is a sexy body? And interestingly, from an identity
standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability? I mean, people
-- Pamela Anderson has more
prosthetic
in her body than I do. Nobody calls her disabled. (Laughter)
So this magazine, through the hands of graphic designer Peter
Saville, went to fashion designer Alexander McQueen, and
photographer Nick Knight, who were also interested in exploring
that
conversation. So, three months
after TED I found myself on a plane to London, doing my first
fashion shoot, which resulted in this cover -- Fashion-able? Three
months after that, I did my first runway show for Alexander McQueen
on a pair of hand-carved wooden legs made from solid ash. Nobody
knew -- everyone thought they were wooden boots. Actually, I have
them on stage with me:
Grapevines,
magnolias, truly stunning. Poetry
matters. Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to
a realm of art. It can transform the thing that might have made
people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a
little longer, and maybe even understand.
I learned this firsthand with my next adventure. The artist Matthew
Barney, in his film opus called the 'The
Cremaster Cycle.' This is where it really hit home
for me -- that my legs could be wearable sculpture. And even at
this point, I started to move away from the need to replicate
human-ness as the only
aesthetic
ideal. So we made what people lovingly referred to as glass legs
even though they're actually optically clear
polyurethane, a.k.a. bowling ball material. Heavy!
Then we made these legs that are cast in soil with a potato root
system growing in them, and
beetroots
out the top, and a very lovely brass toe. That's a good close-up of
that one. Then another character was a half-woman, half-cheetah --
a little homage to my life as an athlete. 14 hours of
prosthetic make-up to get into a creature that had
articulated paws, claws and a tail that whipped around, like a
gecko. (Laughter) And then another
pair of legs we
collaborated on were
these ... look like jellyfish legs. Also
polyurethane. And the only purpose that these legs
can serve, outside the context of the film, is to provoke the
senses and ignite the imagination. So whimsy matters.
Today, I have over a dozen pair of
prosthetic legs that various people have made for
me, and with them I have different negotiations of the terrain
under my feet. And I can change my height -- I have a variable of
five different heights. (Laughter) Today, I'm 6'1'. And I had these
legs made a little over a year ago at Dorset Orthopaedic in England
and when I brought them home to Manhattan, my first night out on
the town, I went to a very fancy party. And a girl was there who
has known me for years at my normal 5'8'. Her mouth dropped open
when she saw me, and she went, 'But you're so tall!' And I said, 'I
know. Isn't it fun?' I mean, it's a little bit like wearing stilts
on stilts, but I have an entirely new relationship to door jams
that I never expected I would ever have. And I was having fun with
it. And she looked at me, and she said, 'But, Aimee, that's not
fair.' (Laughter) (Applause) And the incredible thing was she
really meant it. It's not fair that you can change your height, as
you want it.
And that's when I knew -- that's when I knew that the
conversation with society has changed
profoundly in this last
decade. It is no longer a
conversation about overcoming deficiency. It's a
conversation about augmentation. It's
a
conversation about potential. A
prosthetic limb doesn't represent the
need to replace loss anymore. It can stand as a symbol that the
wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to
create in that space. So people that society once considered to be
disabled can now become the architects of their own
identities and indeed continue to change those
identities by designing their bodies
from a place of empowerment. And what is exciting to me so much
right now is that by combining cutting-edge technology --
robotics, bionics -- with the age-old
poetry, we are moving closer to understanding our collective
humanity. I think that if we want to discover the full potential in
our humanity, we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths
and those glorious disabilities that we all have. I think of
Shakespeare's Shylock: 'If you prick us, do we not bleed, and if
you tickle us, do we not laugh?' It is our humanity, and all the
potential within it, that makes us beautiful. Thank you.
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