TEDxVaduz was the first officially licensed, independently organized TED event to take place in Liechtenstein, held at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in 2013. It was conceived as a vehicle for the reconsideration of the conference’s cultural implications, particularly at a moment when powerful voices from Silicon Valley – like Balaji Srinivasan, Larry Page and Tim Draper – were calling for new forms of secessionist societies underpinned by tech ideologies. Notions of “Exit” and “offshore”, two hot-button terms from that world, served as the backbone of the conference.

With over 1 billion youtube views, TED has attracted a huge amount of praise, but is not without skeptics; some have criticized it for being too corporate, while others lament it for having a liberal bias. Some argue that TED’s emphasis on simplicity goes too far towards reduction; still, others accuse it of elitism, for only reflecting the viewpoints of technocracy.

These considerations consolidate into physical objects, in the form of a stage, designed by Keller and Denny, which served as the set for the talks. Its backdrop is a word cloud mapping the most-used language from TED talks. For “TEDxVaduz redux” at T293 in Rome, Denny also produced wall-mounted sculptural vitrines – “TEDxVaduz atmospheres” –condensed reconsiderations of each presentation appearing alongside the conference’s successful TEDx application, iced onto a series of cakes.