An immersive record of what the LA fires left behind | Nonny de la Peña

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. The soundtrack for The Apocalypse might be silent. Or at least that's how journalist Nonny de la Peña describes walking through the neighborhoods burned by the January 2025 Southern California wildfires.
Block after block with no cars, no children, no birds, no sound at all. I remember back then we could hardly see because of all of the neighborhoods so destroyed and the burnt smells thick in the air. But very few sounds.

**Nonny de la Peña** (0:42)
I know personally when you're looking at what is the remains of what had been a vibrant life, you can't help but feel like everything is gone.

**Elise Hu** (0:51)
There's a code among journalists to bear witness and write the first draft of history. For Nonny, that has meant showing up with whatever technology it takes to make people feel what she sees. She is a pioneer of immersive journalism, a form of storytelling that puts you inside the story, not just in front of it.
So when the fires tore through her hometown of Los Angeles, and where she herself lost everything, she suited up in hazmat gear, mobilized her graduate students, and went out to document what was left. She shares what she found and how she used technology and storytelling to help the rest of the world bear witness to what happened and what's to come.

**Nonny de la Peña** (1:30)
Silence is not emptiness. It's a place to reflect and remember, to imagine wild ways we can rebuild.
And to consider what really endures.

**Elise Hu** (1:42)
That's coming up right after a short break. And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Nonny de la Peña** (1:54)
The soundtrack for the Apocalypse is silent. We felt the weight of that total absence of sound when we arrived in the devastated neighborhoods of Altadena and the Palisades after the January 2025 firestorm. Our small crew of two or three were usually alone for blocks and blocks. There was no sound of cars or children or people or pull pumps or electricity across the lines. Even the birds were gone. I'm best known for having pioneered something called immersive journalism, which uses emerging technologies to create new stories that represent our world the way it really is. Fully dimensional and not flat. People then can experience stories with their whole body and not just with their eyes.
Also, as a journalist, I feel that we have a moral responsibility to bear witness to injustice, to wonder, to the human condition. With immersive journalism, I am merging those new technologies with that code of ethics. I'm also founding director for the Narrative and Emerging Media Program at Arizona State University. So when the fires broke out, I mobilized my colleagues and my graduate students, and we went out to cover, using our Cronkite Journalism News Passes, what firemen called nuketown. When we got there, the fires were basically out, so there wasn't anything anyone could really do. But when we'd run into a fire crew, they would rush over, and we thought, wow, they were going to question our press passes. But no, they just wanted to help in any way that they could. And in our case, it was just water or granola bars.
All of us were suffering from shock and sorrow as the sole witnesses for the devastation around us.
It was grueling work. The air was toxic. It was incredibly hot. We were wearing hazmat suits and heavy boots and double filtered masks. We were using specialized equipment designed by Mike Corona, who's a photojournalist and the former general manager for Reuters. We had these 3D printed special parts that were clamped to the top and the middle and the bottom of a pole, so we could shoot in every direction all at once. I also use my phone to make very painstaking captures. You have to use your camera like a paintbrush and get every bit, every angle, and at the same time, make sure that you're not stepping on upturned nails or broken glass or shards of metal. This is my graduate student, Ashley Bushhorn. She was trying to capture a cactus that had been really weirdly burned only on one side. I'd often look up and see my colleague, Mary Matheson, and she had been taking the gear into these incredibly dangerous situations, determined to get the best scan possible. We scanned fallen angels, Buddhas, melted trash cans, Tesla's, surf wagons.
We filmed until the light was gone every day.
We even used our headlights to capture this car that was sliding down the mountain. We didn't know if we would be there the next day.