it is a a real treat for me to introduce
our next speaker it's you know Jonathan
Harry's artist computer scientist which
means that he programs his own art but
more than anything you know he's already
well known and you can look at all of
his accomplishments webby awards and
more on your booklet but what I really
love about him is that he's truly a
radical thinker and one of the most
focused people I know he's not afraid to
take a stance that is not necessarily
the most popular one he is not afraid to
let go of all of his friends conferences
and just you know accolades to go and
Trek in Alaska to follow the whale hunt
by the Eskimos and he's not afraid to
always dig deeper he's a person with
whom small talk is impossible and I like
that because you know no matter what it
seems here I'm also a little
uncomfortable with small talk and I'm
sure that today's lecture lecture it's
not a lecture today's outpouring of his
thoughts will be memorable please let me
say hello together with you - Jonathan
Harris
okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna talk a new
talk actually that I just put together
yesterday and it's something that's been
on my mind a lot for maybe the last year
or two but especially in the last few
months and I'm gonna it's it's called
cold in bold and you'll see what that is
about later but I'm basically going to
talk about the process of what it's
actually like to try to be someone who
works as an artist and someone who also
writes code and how hard that actually
is to combine and what kind of
schizophrenia that can lead to and the
both professional and also personal life
of the of the person who's doing it so
it's going to be quite personal and more
about you know what it's like to make
this stuff so I've always had a kind of
underlying schizophrenia in my life
between physical stuff and digital stuff
my whole life I've kept sketchbooks that
are very elaborate sometimes they're
filled with watercolor paintings and
drawings and things that I make on
ticket stubs and then I put them in
books I used to do lots of oil paintings
of landscapes like out in fields when I
was a teenager and and when I was in
college I made this big mural for my
dorm room which had ten roommates and
each of the roommates was personified by
a different jungle animal and all my
roommates used it as a line to pick up
girls and get them to come back to the
room to see the mural which is really
successful actually anyway I started
keeping these sketchbooks when I was
around 18 years old and I kept keeping
them pretty religiously every day until
I was about 22 when I got robbed at
gunpoint in San Jose Costa Rica by five
people I had a gun on my on my head and
they took my bag which contained a
sketchbook that had about eight months
of work it was almost full and it was
like this you know filled with plants
and insects and pasted ticket stubs and
very personal things and film strips and
photographs and writing and things
people had made me and put so much of my
life into these things and then to have
it disappear so quickly really just took
the wind out of my sails and I stopped
keeping these books once that happened
and at that point is really the moment I
turned to to the web and to computers I
wanted to make stuff that couldn't be
destroyed in a fire or from a robber and
so I started trying to find a way to use
my computer science education which I
had just finished at Princeton which
taught me how to think like so
rationally and so controlled and so
analytically very different from how I
thought before and I tried to use that
new skill set I had to make something
that would be beautiful or resonant or
provocative something that would have
the same level of humanity that that my
sketchbooks used to have and my first
attempts at these I don't think we're
very human they were I did a lot of
projects that I would call pure
information visualization this is an
early one called word count which
visualizes the eighty-six thousand eight
hundred most frequently used English
words as a long sentence where all the
words are scaled by their order of
commonality this is another early
project called ten by ten which
automatically chooses a hundred words
and pictures each hour to represent
what's happening in the world at that
moment and it archives all the old hours
so you can go and see any hour from two
November 2004 until today this is
another early one called phyllotaxis
which is about science it was made for
seed magazine this is a thing I did with
Yahoo to build a time capsule for people
to put in this is a simple project just
curious it's an anonymous question and
answer system before Yahoo Answers and
all that stuff we feel fine a pretty
well-known project that's basically a
search engine for feelings it tries to
show the human side of the web through
looking at blog posts where people are
talking about their emotions universe
was trying to choose new constellations
for the night sky based on what's
happening in global news coverage then
the whale hunt started to get a little
more personal this involved as Paula
said going up to Alaska to spend some
time with Eskimos anyway I did a bunch
of these projects I'm not really going
to talk about them today I'm just gonna
focus on one and this is one that
actually Paula commissioned me to do for
her design in the elastic mine show a
couple years ago and I decided to you
have project about online dating for it
I was doing online dating at the time I
was living in New York
this was my nerve profile actually ended
up meeting someone on this that I went
on to date for about seven months and we
said we split up after that but I was
living in Fort Greene and I would always
be wandering around
looking into people's windows and
imagining all these lives in there and
realizing that it was so similar like
these apartment buildings where people
were living inside craving somebody else
to be living with them and these dating
profiles where people were alone in
their little profile hoping to meet
someone else in their profile and come
together somehow and I saw a lot of
similarities between these these two
things so I decided to try to use this
metaphor of an apartment building
initially for this project that people
would be trapped in their apartments and
all of the typography I decided to do
with neon lights because this was like
the language of advertising so I bit I
made this typography system all 3d
modeled and everything consisting of
neon lights and that I modeled this 3d
building with all of these windows and
we're gonna have a little person in each
of these windows had this whole building
it was going to be above the skyline
then there would be one person trapped
in each apartment there could be
billboards all of this stuff I went very
far down this path I worked for about
two months developing this concept and
the show's opening was getting closer
and shot all these videos we put an ad
on Craigslist and about 600 silhouettes
we filmed from about 200 people that
came to a studio over a three-day period
and acted out things that they might do
alone in their bedrooms then somebody
sent me a link to this which was a HBO
series that had just launched called
voyeur and it was like a better
execution of exactly the idea that I was
having and I was like holy shit like a
month and a half until the show opens
and this concept has just been taken so
I went back to scratch threw away two
months of work and went back to my
sketchbook and thought what other ways
this could be done eventually came up
with a concept of using balloons to
represent people's dating profiles
people trapped inside balloons and I
wrote a huge program one of the biggest
programs I've written it was about
28,000 lines of code on a four foot wide
computer screen big touchscreen it was
like filling my whole field of vision
and it was on my desk and I this process
was so crazy like I got so into this I
really forgot how to be a person like I
would go out and I'd walk around my
neighborhood and I would look in
restaurants and watch people having
dinner and just think to myself like
you know what could they possibly be
talking about in there
and it was a very very like dehumanizing
experience actually and it's kind of
what was required but it got done and we
made this project with these balloons
and thought bubbles with people's text
and these are different movements from
the project this was a little kid using
it at the moment opening this is also
the opening I'm going to show you this
video about three minute video of the
piece
I want you I believe is a project that
explores the search for love but also
the search for self in the world of
online dating every few hours we pull
data from online dating sites all over
the world we put these dating profiles
in a database we do several different
movements and each of these movements
explores a different topic one movement
explorers who people are and that's
called Who I am
one movement explores what people are
looking for that's called what I want
and we allow people to search through
them by saying like I'm interested in
seeing what women in their 20s are like
and I wanted to see what men in their
60s are looking for
so the blue balloons are men and the
pink balloons are women and the darker
balloons are older people and the
lighter balloons are younger people
whereas all the other movements are very
very chaotic with all of these balloons
creating around the screen Matchmaker
offers finally some resolution so in
matchmaker
we algorithmically pair of people
together based on what they say in their
profiles so the next movement is called
snippets and it actually consists of
three smaller movements snippets takes
little text snippets from people's
dating profiles out of
in this case this is called openers and
this is showing the opening lines from
people in their dating profiles this
particular movement is the closing
statements of all the profiles and this
movement is the movement that you can
see the silhouettes best so each of
these are silhouetted persons and they
represent people trapped inside balloons
looking for love taglines
is going to take the text snippet that
is the subject line of the people's
profile and then put them all in this
DNA double helix here which is kind of a
symbol of identity so one thing that's
interesting with these is you see half
of these are men half of these are women
and this represents the population on
dating profiles so this last movement is
called break downs and what we do is we
then say what are some ideas about the
population in general or what are some
information about the population in
general so for example what are the top
first dates a lot of people like to go
to coffee a lot of people like to go to
a movie
in online dating profiles what people do
is they talk about themselves and maybe
200 words and they say the most
important things about themselves and so
it's a very fertile ground for building
a mosaic of humanity
who knows there's a really big project
and obviously it was very exciting very
euphoric to have this thing at MoMA and
there was like the big opening and I've
never been in MoMA before and it was
really cool and exciting and everything
but I actually went out to Texas after
that and I drove out to Marfa and West
Texas and ended up getting really
depressed actually for about three or
four months after finishing that project
I just went into this like really bad
phase I went down into Mexico I actually
waited across the Rio Grande River and
to Mexico and saw this baby's head on a
post down there and saw these weird
taxidermy shops but this it was just
well I think the best way I can describe
this is to read you something this is
something I wrote last spring when I was
living in Santa Fe so we just can read
this I have to live to work
that's what Hemingway used to say his
work was to work write boldly so he had
to live boldly first to get good
material these days my work is also to
write but to write code not words to
write good code it's often best not to
live life and certainly not to live life
boldly because living life boldly
requires energy and empathy and to write
good code you need to save those things
for your program and not waste them on
people this kind of strategy makes your
code bold but your life cold it's weird
the more time I spend with computers the
more I feel they're exerting some kind
of hold over me like it's me serving
them and not the other way around
when I'm deep into my program like I am
now I feel like a totally different
person than I am on the road in fact I
frequently don't feel like a person at
all but like some kind of organic
operating proxy to type the necessary
instructions I lie on my bed in the
afternoon and I look at the wall and
it's hard to know exactly what I'm
feeling because my mind is entirely
inside the machine and my body simply
feels like an interface a few nights ago
Kyla called and she was at South by
Southwest in Austin Texas where the
digital aristocracy has gathered to
learn about the latest
developments in the digital world she
was saying how everyone in the
interactive session sat around in
corridors staring into their iPhones or
laptops and how nobody was actually
interacting in person because they had
digital tools that could do it more
efficiently these people were not nerds
they were fashionable educated urban
tech savvy hipsters and many of them
were very attractive they just had all
the right devices and these days it's
cooler to use them than to talk or to
touch unless what you're touching is a
multi-touch screen she described a sense
of euphoria there among them an excited
optimism for what they were building and
for what the online world can become
there was something that bugged her too
and she was trying to tell me what she
thought it was everyone's really smart
and friendly and nice she said so it's
not that and everyone seems to be having
a really good time but it's like
everyone is so smart and logical and
ambitious but no one is wise I think
that's it and all this stuff they're
building there doesn't seem to be any
wisdom it's like everyone is just
leaping ahead trying to build the next
best gadget to get a lot of users and
make a lot of money but no one's really
asking why or what it's all really doing
to us as humans she was saying how the
Internet today feels like the fast food
revolution in the 50s when everyone was
suddenly so amazed they could get food
so fast and so cheap that they gorged
themselves on it like we gorge ourselves
today on technology both habits lack
consciousness and are run by frantic
compulsion even addiction Kyla was
talking to a female psychiatrist who's
recently had a lot of young female
patients come in complaining about a
lack of sexual intimacy from their
boyfriends and how many of these
boyfriends work in technology apparently
in the last few years this has become a
common complaint for the psychiatrist
the guys come home after working all day
with the web thinking and code and
designing instructions and it's really
hard for them suddenly to become human
again and to sit down for dinner with
the person they love it's like coming
home from study abroad every single
night and having to manage the culture
shock while your girlfriend is passing
the potatoes and holding your hand for
all of the porn and the sex that exists
on the web the web is a remarkably a
sexual place very little as either
masculine or feminine there and as we
live our lives increasingly online you
can almost feel our hormones dissolving
dismissed as massager
stick an old-fashioned and gleefully
replaced by information and knowledge
but what kind of knowledge my friend
Annie lived in Greece for a while and
she told me the Greeks say that women
make men and men make women like
everyone is lazily flopping around until
they are suddenly jolted into place by
the opposite sex who demand they become
who they are
technology tries to undo this merging
men and women into the same end Raj -
users for the first time in a while
today I went back out into life
I couldn't code anymore and plus it was
Friday so I drove into town and got out
of the car I walked for a long time
all over town the weather was crazy and
I passed Our Lady of apocalyptic skies
next to her church I saw two red traffic
lights across a field and set out loud
red eye I saw a group of Mexican girls
playing volleyball in a gym where they'd
left the door open a crack and there was
a kid chasing a ball
I saw a mural lit by a light that
somewhat suddenly went out I saw a
bridge with footprints
I saw a man walking up on the hill I saw
a baseball scoreboard in a white field I
saw an old couple come out of a
restaurant she's snuggling up into him
probably saying thank you for another
wonderful dinner after all these years
and wasn't it lovely and maybe we can go
home now for some you know I saw three
men in cowboy hats standing under an
awning staring into a phone I saw a girl
grabbed the collar of a guy in a bar and
pull him close and kiss him hard on the
mouth then they saw me see them through
the window and they giggled teehee and
turned away I saw an old man with long
gray hair eating alone at the counter he
was having fish and chips and he didn't
smile or say anything when he handed his
credit card to the waiter and paid then
he walked out into the snow and then I
walked out into the snow then I saw snow
and then I couldn't see anything because
of it so thanks
so I'm gonna I don't have much time left
unfortunately but um I want to talk a
little about this of why I think this is
some of the some of the problems that as
a someone who's using technology to try
to make art I I feel and I my story is
personal but I think that what I'm
feeling is is actually representative of
what a lot of us are going to be feeling
very soon if we're not feeling it
already so one of the things is about
empathy you know when you're building a
small computer program it's it's a
beautiful thing it's so simple it's so
playful you can make everything so
perfect and it's great but as these
programs grow and scale and complexity
they become a total mess and just a
total nightmare to maintain and to add
to and anyone who's a developer knows
this and when you have a big computer
program you have to hold this whole
thing in your mind at all times because
you have to know what's happening in all
the different places so you can have a
mental model of the thing but when you
do that your brain fills up it's like
you it's like your RAM on your computer
there's only a certain amount of it and
once you've used all that space to hold
your program in your mind you don't have
any let empathy left for people and and
to clear out space and then bring people
in can work but then you're then you
become a bad programmer so there's like
this trade-off between being a good
person like a feeling person and and a
bad programmer or being a good
programmer which makes you a bad person
or an unfeeling person this is what I
feel constantly these trade-offs and I
can tell you at a given day in my life
which one I'm being it that day another
thing is this idea of determinism in
rational beings when you code you expect
total rationality and determinism from
your code and when you have a bug in
your code which can seem irrational
actually it's not irrational there's
always a reason for your bug and if you
back-trace enough you can find the
source of it you can fix it and then
it's solved and it's very tempting to
think that real relationships are like
this - you can think that if there's a
problem in your relationship there's a
source of the problem and you can solve
that but it's usually not like that
usually there's a hundred reasons for a
problem and they're all interconnected
and the person feeling the problem
doesn't even know what the problem is so
you can become very detached from other
people when you code too much and how
complex people actually are another
thing is the act of expression I mean my
friend Rob once asked me how I could be
an artist who wrote
and how I could possibly channel my my
personal feelings and my emotions into
my work and I what I told him which I
think is true is that I don't think it's
possible actually I mean when you're a
painter you're a sculptor or you're
writing text the the active expression
is so direct you make a mark and there
is the mark but with code there are all
these layers of abstraction between what
you feel as a human and the thing that
actually comes out in the end and those
layers of abstraction gradually wear
down your your humanity as you're doing
it so it's very hard to actually express
yourself through code another thing is
the resistance of the medium some people
say well why don't you just hire a staff
to write your code for you and I think
that you can do that but then you end up
producing incredibly mediocre work and I
think a lot of big companies like
advertising agencies for instance this
is why they produce such mediocre work
because they have one guy coming up with
the design another person designing it
another person writing the code another
person testing it and it's just a big
convoluted mess no one has a vision and
the reason is that when you try
something you're your first vision will
always be wrong and you have to listen
to the the ways that the code pushes
back at you and says no this is not
working I'm resisting you and you say
okay I feel you're resisting me I'm
going to go this other way instead and
that will also be wrong so you you go
another way and gradually you find a
path that works but you'll only see that
path if you're there in the code
actually doing the thing so the so being
sensitive to the resistance of the
medium is such a critical part of the
creative process I think and you lose it
when you have things working on spec the
way I see the web is that it was this
kind of new world that opened up back
back in the early 90s really and at
first it was this place of tinkerers and
experimenters it was this weird motley
colorful place everyone had their weird
homepage and their Geocities page and
then their MySpace page and it was just
incredibly weird and diverse kind of
like going to Burning Man or something
like that and gradually more and more
people started to come on the web but
they didn't know how to build houses for
themselves and they said well I want to
participate in this space but I don't
really know how to do it I don't know
where I'm gonna live and so these
companies swept in and they said we've
got the solution we're gonna make a
homepage for you we'll make a profile
for you you can put all your stuff here
we'll just show you a few ads down in
the lobby but you can have this
beautiful free apartment in this big
sparkling condominium
and these condominiums suddenly grew and
grew larger larger larger now it has
about 550 million rooms in this
condominium and all of us have one
they're all free it's great it's a great
deal but all of our rooms look the same
we all we're all living in identical
apartments yeah we have our own photos
on the walls but the spaces
architectural er the same and I wonder
what this does to us I wonder what it
would be like if we could get back that
joy and the diversity of the mottley
early days of the web okay this is
another thing I know in the design world
especially there's this cult of ideas
people think ideas are really important
and I also think ideas are important but
I've recently had a change of heart
about ideas I think that ideas are not
the goal ideas are a way of getting at a
goal but the goal is the goal the goal
is the outcome the goal is what does the
idea produce an idea is just a technique
of getting there and you can have
thousands of ideas anybody can have
ideas it's not the question of how
beautiful is the idea but the question
is how does the outcome make you feel
how does the outcome actually improve
your life as a person and I think as
designers too often we get caught up and
how sexy or cool or conceptually strong
an idea is and also as business people
people starting companies but they
rarely ask like is this thing that I'm
building actually making the world a
better place
and I not even the world a better place
but is the thing I'm building making
people better making the people that use
this better is this good for their lives
as humans not as consumers but as humans
and I think across the board in almost
all cases the answer is no and I think
as designers we should be thinking more
about building things that actually make
people's lives as humans and as
individuals better I'll say this one
very quickly this is basically this idea
that right now we have this very strange
sociological phenomenon which is that
there's a very small handful of people
namely the small group of young male
geeks who run the large internet
companies that are having a hugely
outsized effect on the rest of human
culture there's a small group of several
hundred or maybe even several dozen if
you boil it down mainly guys who are
quite young and probably were pretty
socially awkward before they started
having this effect and they are
dictating and designing the ways that
our human behavior as people is evolving
and it's changing so fast and I think as
citizens of just culture
not even digital culture we have to ask
ourselves if this is good or not do we
like this fact that a few people are
deciding for the rest of us or do we
want to have more of a voice in shaping
what the digital world becomes because
increasingly the digital world is just
becoming the world and then the final
thing is individuality this is just a
question that I have actually you know I
work a lot with technology and one
question I ask myself is is it actually
possible for technology to help us
enhance our own individuality our own
introspection can it help with
self-reflection not just self-promotion
I actually don't know I don't know what
the answer is
maybe maybe those things can only happen
in the physical world and that they
can't be helped by technology but
technology has done such a good job in
transforming so many other things that's
been applied to that I also have to
believe still that it can help with this
process of introspection and
self-reflection I don't think it's doing
it yet but I'm still a believer in
technology but I think it's in a very
awkward adolescent phase right now and I
think we need to keep pushing it pushing
it pushing it to make sure that it grows
up and matures in a really good healthy
and wholesome and nourishing way as
opposed to becoming a shopping mall
which it increasingly looks like these
days so I'm going to stop there I had a
couple other things but maybe Paulo and
I can chat for a bit so thanks guys
well I'm just was I was like what I was
expecting so thank you very much know
you've often come and just screaming the
emperor's new clothes you know you you
had that kids role but interestingly you
know when I saw several expressions of
this mullahs pop up from Zhang LAN yeas
book to others I always thought you know
this was the first generation of the
digital world they're like protecting
their turf you know they're a little
bitter but if you are the one talking
about it then this malaise must be true
must be real and some people might be
anesthetized by it but now that you but
nicely deconstructed pretty much every
long-held belief we have as digital
creative people which you know and
understandably so when which direction
are you gonna go well I've actually been
working on a project for about the last
two years I haven't finished quite yet
but I've been building a storytelling
platform for people to use to tell
longer-form stories like their life
story for instance on the web using
technology and I'm hoping to have it
done in the next few months but that's
what I've been doing living like a
hermit in these weird cabins although
for the world the last year so I still
believe in it I am not telling you that
I'm gonna believe in it forever but at
the moment I still believe in it and and
I think it can become something really
beautiful in utopic still but I see it
you know it's in a very I think
unhealthy place right now and I think we
need to all work to change it we were
discussing before how how sometimes
phony certain gestures are we were
discussing in particular the interface
the iPad and the gestures that were
making that seemed at first so
liberating and instead now feel
constricting the integration between
technology and body mm-hm
you know how do you think that can be
implemented or promoted yeah I mean this
is a this is something I struggle with
so much because most of the work that
I've ever created resides on a
two-dimensional screen and people sit in
front of screens and we have I think
this like genetic imprinting at this
point where we see a screen and we just
get this
ELQ and I think that like as a someone
who presents work that way you want
people to be very present and very in
the moment when they're interacting with
it and not having this glazed over
feeling so I think interface devices can
go a long way from where they are now
have you been working while you've been
working on the interfaces all your life
yeah so the interface that you will have
on the storytelling platform how
key-based would be and instead how well
it's still a website so you're still
bounded by these metaphors but but
hopefully in the future we can come up
with more expressive devices I mean I
think one one of Jaron Lanier is ideas
that I like so much is that computers
have no sense of time like you formulate
an instruction whether it's a URL or a
piece of code and that could happen over
10 seconds or five months and then you
press ENTER and it executes immediately
but both of those actions happen outside
of time so there's no notion of time and
computers whereas as humans we live in
time so time is a really important
missing element I think and I was
interested when you were talking about
the autism that happens when you get too
much into code last week's episode of
Fringe is about this guy that becomes
too intelligent and starts thinking all
the encoding doesn't have any
relationships with people anymore is it
true that computation is the opposite of
feeling well I think that computation is
a very cerebral activity and feeling is
something that happens in your body with
all of your senses where computation is
a brain thing feeling as a body thing
and I think we're getting very into
bodies are very into brains rather and
we're losing touch with bodies but so
many programmers talk about the beauty
of code and it's actually something that
I am as a non programmer I'm going crazy
trying to understand it because I would
like to express it also as an object in
the museum collection how is a code
beautiful I think code is beautiful
because you can maintain for yourself
the illusion that you understand and you
can control but this is an illusion and
I think most programmers are very afraid
of their bodies and they're very afraid
of things that happen in the world to me
that the geek I think it's a true myth I
think it is I mean I know a lot of
programmers
not for all of course and people defy
that let's think of a sexy program let's
like make it wrong no grammars I don't
think it would have very good sales but
so that the kind of beauty is really
it's like it's a beauty that is not real
like I cannot see it if I'm a normal
person I cannot see that view it's a
sociopathic beauty it's like this very
twisted like hunger to control and to to
to finally have something that feels
like it's not overwhelming you I think
this is a quality a lot of a lot of
programmers have they feel like and I
feel this myself like I feel overwhelmed
by life sometimes and it can be like a
refuge to go into code where everything
works and everything is just in its
place and when you have that mental
model in your mind and as I was talking
about you don't have the mental model of
people in your mind you you kind of
enter this like very comfortable place
where everything is just so
but it's fake you know it's fake I
understand well you got into physical
riots mean you got into riots with
programmers yeah I gave it up what
happened really you tell this story cuz
it's so interesting yeah I gave a talk
in a flash you know flash yeah you know
flash I gave a talk at a flash
conference a couple years ago in the UK
and it was quite I guess it was a little
incendiary just basically telling people
to think bigger and try to do more
serious work and that saying things like
there have been no masterpieces created
yet online which I still think is true
and I got boos after the talk I mean a
lot of people cheered but a lot of
people booed and then I went out to
dinner and I kind of forgot about it and
I went over to grab a drink at the bar
afterwards and I walked in and there was
this guy who will remain nameless but
many of you may know who came over to me
and he goes yeah he came over and he
said well look who it is the one person
who's not welcome here funny I'm not
kidding I'm not the only one here who
thinks you were a fucking asshole I was
like game on and I walked in and then I
realized they were all standing around
all of the kind of aristocracy of the
flash world were standing around these
tables with their pints of English beer
and they were like debating whether
there was any
truth and what I was saying or not and
most of them said that it was all
bullshit and one guy tried to punch me
in the bar and he had to be restrained
so this is actually an example of a
programmer getting really back into
their bodies I've kind of been persona
non grata and in the flash world which
is fine with me they're sort of non
grata in the iPad world you just opened
a show an actual show there's a gallery
there are walls you sent me pictures of
you know an art show in Vermont yeah
what are you showing there pretty much
everything I've done in the last 10
years starting with the really kind of
cold and detached in fove is work like
word-count going all the way up to my
latest project which is every day I take
a photograph and write a story and post
them on my website before I go to sleep
it's kind of like studying myself
instead of studying other people and I
did an installation physical
installation of that in the back room
with pieces of colored string connecting
the photographs together that share
similar things so it's like a physical
network graph of what would be happening
inside my mind oh I'm sorry I have all
these references of TV series yes yeah
so it's it's it's it's interesting to
see it in a real space because on the
web you know everything is buried away
on a different website under a different
URL and there's no sense of like a body
of work really but when you see
something in physical space that that's
something you can't have a sense of a
continuous body of work so there were no
watercolors nothing no pain oh I did
show my sketchbook sir in the show show
the ones before it's interesting that
you had that trauma that kind of brought
you to reinvent yourself I mean we were
talking about it yesterday because also
John made I was here Jay Jay Allen was
supposed to be here I mean what trauma
can do to you in terms of reinventing
yourself
well sometimes you you're you start to
feel something percolating but you don't
really have the guts to really listen to
it and go with it and then a traumatic
event can sometimes like be the shock
that you need to say like okay I'm gonna
I'm gonna do this thing now I'm sorry I
think it's rare that a traumatic event
creates something out of the blue
normally it it initiates something that
was already percolating in you I think a
lot strong but sometimes you know they
say the depression is a form of anger
is non expressed and I find it very
interesting that you had major
depression I know of other people that
that have had major depression and they
could get to the other side there's kind
of an anger that pushes you as a
launchpad into it or out of it I also
know pushes you out of it and into a new
kind of life yeah yeah well I'm actually
always a little bit happy when I'm
feeling lower because I know I mean life
is like a sine wave and and oh great
garbage song I'm only happy when it
rains about it but you know like like
I'm always really freaked out when
things are going great because I know
they're gonna be really bad oh my god so
understand that then so when things are
bad you're like well you know it's gonna
get better pretty soon - half - two
uppers here so thank you this was great
okay