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THUNDERBIRD ATLATL DESIGN Part of TED Conference

In January 2006, we shipped an Osage Otsiningo Atlatl to Bix Biederbeck of Thinc Design in New York City. Two months later, the atlatl was part of the 2006 TED Conference in Monterey, Calif.
We recently ran across a blog about the conference which commented on the atlatl. The link is below. “TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out”, according to the TED web page, ” (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.
“The Otsiningo Atlatl designed by Bob Berg of Thunderbird Atlatl was part of a display at the 2006 TED Conference entitled: “Behind the Scenes: Collecting objects of the future” The 2006 TED Conference’s theme was: “The Future We Will Create”. According to the blog on the TED website, “the stage and lobby at TED2006 were accented with a collection of distinctive objects, each representing a vision of the future. Thinc Design principal Tom Hennes led the curation effort, and talks here about how he chose.
“The idea of what is futuristic is one of the most mutable memes — nothing gets older faster, yet some objects (and ideas) seem to remain ‘futuristic’ for a very long time. When we decided to populate the stage with objects that signify the future, we thought it would be interesting to include not only things that feel like today’s future, but also a number of things that are from futures of the past. And a number of objects that represent the multitude of things that once changed the future. Or tried to.
“The yellow Atlatl, made by Thunderbird, is a modern rendition of a uniquely American spear-throwing device used about 12,000 years ago across the continent for efficiently – and lethally – hurling neolithic spears at wooly mammoths. Sustaining hunting and gathering bands for a couple of thousand years, it most likely also contributed to the extinction of the largest megafauna in the Americas at the end of the Pleistocene, about 10,500 years ago. The Atlatl isn’t part of our present future, but the message is clear enough”…

To learn more about TED, check oaut the blog and web page at:
http://blog.ted.com/2006/03/behind_the_scen.php