Our guest this week is Karen Palmer, an award-winning international artist, and TED speaker. In this episode, she shares with us how she found her purpose, her experience with fear, and how to use it as a motivational tool as well as how to consciously work through our implicit biases. If you are ready to find your purpose, but often feel like fear stops you, then don’t miss out on this episode!
The Beginning
“It's a conscious process that I undertook very deliberately to get where I wanted to be.”
Karen started her career in the music industry. She was very successful financially, but she never felt satisfied within the core of her being. She knew that she had a higher calling in her and she set out on a journey to discover what it was.
Karen was very involved in parkour and that taught her how to overcome her fear and take that leap of faith. Eventually, she left her well-paying, secure job in 2000, to pursue her dream as an artist. It took her around 15 years to get to where she is today and what she achieved exceeded her dreams.
She kept on going and never gave up because she believed in her purpose. She started to focus on self-development with visualization techniques, reading motivational books, and actively and consciously imagining the person she wanted to become.
Moving Through Fear
"Fear is a motivational tool. That's all it is. You decide how you channel it.”
Karen did her first project in 2014, SYNCSELF, that focused on moving through fear. That was the turning point in her career. It was a very difficult project to do, but she knew she had to keep on going and move through her own fears. She trusted in a positive outcome and eventually succeeded in her project.
Throughout the years, Karen learned that fear is one of the most dominant emotions in the world, and certainly the most dominant motivational emotion. Love is the other most powerful emotion, however, unlike love, fear is always imaginary as it arises only from our thoughts.
Riot And The Future Of Law Enforcement
“All the art you have around you, whether it's music, fashion, or whatever, are all influencing our interaction with reality.”
Karen is known as the storyteller from the future. She created many powerful projects to draw attention to issues in our society. One of her projects from 2016 is called Riot. It uses artificial intelligence and facial recognition to make you conscious of your subconscious behavior. It helps to identify fear in you so you can work through it consciously.
Karen’s latest installation is Perception IO, which she created in 2019. This project shows the other side of a riot, law enforcement. It is about realizing your own implicit biases by making you aware of your subconscious reactions.
According to Karen, in the future, law enforcement could be automated and robotic. As computers are trained by people, the same implicit biases and racism that exists in our society could be programmed into machines and artificial intelligence. Through her art and visual storytelling, she wants to create a bridge between people and science by drawing attention to these risks.
Karen’s advice to you if you want to evolve and get closer to your true selves is to always follow your bliss. No matter what it is, never give up on the things you really love. She encourages you to spend some time every day working on your true passion because that will turn into your life purpose.
Palma’s Practice On How To Befriend Your Fear
This week, we invite you to reflect, or journal on the question: What would it mean to make fear your friend?
Think of a situation that you are currently worrying about. Then ask yourself:
What is the worst-case scenario that could happen?
If the worst-case scenario happens, what could you do? What actions could you take?
Now ask yourself:
What is the best-case scenario that could happen?
What small steps could you take today to avoid the worst-case scenario?
You don't need to map out the whole plan of how to solve the situation. Just think about the next obvious step you could take, however small or big it is.
And only once you have taken that step, ask yourself again: What could I do today? And see what comes up.
About Our Guest, Karen Palmer
Karen Palmer is the Storyteller from the Future. She is an Award-Winning International Artist and Public Speaker. She speaks about her emotionally responsive film experiences at the intersection of AI, Immersive Storytelling, Neuroscience, Consciousness, and Implicit Bias. Past topics include:- AI Voyage: Can Conscious Storytelling Save Us? Implicit bias. Democratizing AI. The Future of Storytelling. How Art & Tech have the power to change your Cognitive Behaviour. How Storytelling affects the reality narrative.
Her latest installation is Perception iO, (Input Output) the pioneering new Law Enforcement Artificial Intelligence and Robotics System. Your perception (constructed from your emotional response and eye gaze) and your potential bias will become the training data for the Artificial Intelligence system. Currently on exhibition at Cooper Hewitt Museum.
The previous project RIOT prototype with Facial Emotional Detection premiered at Festival of The Mind then The Future of Storytelling New York, V&A Museum London, PHI Centre Montreal, SXSW Austin, The Museum of Modern Art Peru to name just a few. RIOT received great reviews including the New York Times and extensive articles in NBC The Guardian and an article on CBS News TV. The RIOT prototype was honored as part of the Digital Dozen Break Throughs in Storytelling 2017. Columbia DSL acknowledged the most innovative approaches to Narrative in the industries of art, entertainment, journalism, and marketing.
Karen is a respected international public speaker on New Tech and Storytelling as she shares her vision for the future media which she sees is Gaming, Film, Consciousness and Technology. She has been invited to the Google Cultural Institute in Paris to talk about her work and has been a TEDx Australia Speaker at the Sydney Opera House. Her talk on the future of gaming, film and technology titled “Your Brain is a Remote Control” was a TEDx Australia highlight. She is often to be keynote speakers at events such as The Netherlands Film Festival and ZKM Living Amongst Intelligent Machines AI Conference in Germany. Commissions include the 2012 London Olympics Cultural Lead and an HBO Award nominations at Filmteractive Festival in Poland.
Special thanks to Karen Palmer for taking the time to share her inspiring story with us.
Resources Mentioned In The Show
Continue Your Journey
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Thank You
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