In her latest work The Thought Leader (2015), a 10-minute single channel video, New York based artist Liz Magic Laser combines the format and particular uniformity of the TED conferences with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s dark novel Notes from the Underground (1864). A young boy, Alex Ammerman, recites Dostoyevsky’s text speaking in the most cheerful way about an individual on the margins of modern society and the effects modern life has on the human condition.