(tranquil music)
- My name is Kelli Anderson,
I'm an artist and designer
and I make animations
from physical materials,
like risograph prints.
And then also from paper.
I also make these program pop-up books
that are about paper and tech.
So, this for example is a
book that I made called,
"This Book Is a Planetarium."
that has all kinds of different
paper tech experiments in it.
Most relevant to this discussion
are these program paper cards.
So, this was my New Year's card this year
and what it is is a paper magician.
So, you pick a color, you turn the wheel
and it reveals your selection to you.
Another one is this volvelle
which advises on whether
to take a job or not.
So, there are four
different physical inputs
that you turn and answer question
about the job under consideration.
It gives you a color,
kind of like a mood ring
which you flip over to the
back and find your color
and then you can trace it out
to the different situations
that will apply to you
if you have that job.
So, this workshop is called
Materials For Computer People
and it's all about
crafting material logic.
In addition to the
information and examples
I'm providing in this workshop,
I've also made these different activities
which you can download as PDFs.
You can either pause the video
and do these activities as they come up
or you can go ahead and
do them all at the end.
Whatever works for you is great.
So, the first activity that I want to do
to set up the idea behind this workshop
is for you to build a simple volvelle.
So, this is a little paper mechanism
that will generate calendars for you
for the next 50 years.
It's two layers and it's
a really good introduction
to how these paper calculators work.
This was inspired by a trip to
the bagel production factory.
This factory is shaped essentially
to produce this specific thing.
So, it takes all of these
inputs of flour and water
and rolls this dough
into these bagel shapes.
So, it's this process of
conversion of raw materials
that your eyes can follow.
The logic is, no pun intended,
baked into the shape of the equipment.
So, this is how everything
used to be made.
Everything used to be mechanical.
All logic used to be physical.
But what if you end up in a situation
where you wanted tiny
bagels or square bagels?
You'd have to rebuild the entire machine.
So, this becomes a very
big, very practical problem
when your machine is producing things
where you'd naturally
want that kind of variety.
For example, a jacquard ribbon.
So, computers and the way we
think about logic and computation today
comes from this problem
of jacquard ribbons.
Because producing those
patterns and ribbons
requires a lot more sort of
physical infrastructure around it.
They're very complex machines
than you'd need to produce a bagel.
So, this is a jacquard loom
and it essentially uses
these punched cards.
They're binary that specified a pattern
on every single row and column
of these jacquard ribbons.
If you wanted to change
the output or the pattern,
like say you want a different
kind of flower pattern on your ribbon,
all you would have to do
was change how these cards were punched.
So, this brings us to this...
Really, like the whole
thrust of computing history
is one of like designating
it and separating
the material realm from
the programming realm
from the logic.
It's not that materials
like ribbons or bagels
don't have their own inherent logic,
but it was a way of getting
these machines to be more powerful,
so they could do different things,
run different programs,
make different ribbon
patterns essentially.
So, this begs the question of
why think about materials at all?
Why think about analog stuff at all
when we're living in the 21st century
and we have one,
like we have made computers
that can do almost anything now.
So, I thought about it and
there's basically four reasons,
that I think are
instructive in making work
that's really interesting
at this moment in time when
we are still thinking about
analog things in a digital world.
The first reason is really that
humans don't think like computers.
This, for example is what computer
parsable numbers look like.
This is what computers want,
they want an Excel spreadsheet,
they want a CSV, they want
a whole bunch of numbers.
But, when we look at it,
it's really hard to tell what's
going on with those numbers.
It's really hard to discern any patterns.
But as soon as we take those same numbers,
and we put in an XY coordinate,
and we start putting them on a map,
we start to be able to
understand what's going on.
Bret Victor has this really great essay
where he writes about
how to scatterplot graph
which is like a very basic
type of data visualization,
empowered humans to use numbers
in a way they hadn't before
and is essentially like one of
the most important inventions
of the last century
because it makes the relationships
between those numbers spatial,
so we can automatically fall
back on this human superpower
honed by thousands of years of evolution
of navigating the world spatially.
We can see where the outliers are,
what the highest number is,
what the lowest number is.
Like all of those little patterns.
So, the answer really to
like why make logic physical
is because we are physical.
We intellectually think about the world
through our bodies and through touch
much more than is acknowledged.
The nervous system, for example,
doesn't end with the brain at all alone,
it extends all the way to the skin.
So, all information, not just like
the super touchy feely stuff,
even technical information
flows in through our senses,
everything we know as human beings
is an event on the skin.
So, we are just hard wired
to have this very deep,
very rich intellectual
and philosophical life
through our tangible
exchanges with the physical.
Quite frankly, most real things
in the real world that we really live in
aren't data in numbers anyway.
There are a lot of things
that are complicated that are physical.
You can explore them only by tinkering.
This for example is a mobius strip
which you can make by
taking a strip of paper,
twisting it once, taping the ends together
and you'll notice if
you draw a line down it,
that that line ends in the
same place that it began.
So, this is something that defies our idea
of like how reality works
and yet you can make it very easily.
It's something that you
can understand in paper,
but is really tricky to
try to understand on paper.
So, this is the Wikipedia article
explaining how a mobius strip works.
It's just much more accessible,
if we tinker with it,
if we make it physical,
if we can apply that super power
of like human physical
intuition to that problem.
So, I want to pause and take
you to our second activity.
So, for activity two,
it's a jump in magnitude and complexity
for these paper calculators.
So, this one has four different wheels.
If you download the PDF,
there is an explanation
printed on each page
of what each wheel does.
But the best way to understand it
is to print it out and
then start coloring in
those little blank spaces
where the dia cuts are
and you can see what each wheel does,
how each wheel eliminates
and reduces options
from the whole possibility
set that you're presenting
and allows a user to hone
in on a specific answer.
Okay.
So, reason number two that
we're thinking about this
is simply that physical
things are really interesting.
So, when physical things fail,
they tell us something
about how the world works.
I want to just show you
this example photograph
with this woman with
this really warped head
and point out that this
is not done in Photoshop,
it's not done with digital technology,
it's done by shaping the
morphology of a pinhole camera,
which is just like a really
simple handmade camera,
basically, the film bed is angled
so that it really emphasizes
people's foreheads.
So, there are ways to do this digitally,
but if you do it physically,
you're able to interact with
all of the laws of physics,
all the ways that light works,
which is pretty interesting.
This is from a book by Peter
Olpe called "Out Of Focus"
and in this book, he creates
hundreds of different pinhole
cameras for other artists
based on their specifications
of what artistic output they want.
So, he has a lot of
things that look like this
where the film is being subjected to these
almost like glitch-like compositions
where there are all
these super ornate holes
where the light is projecting through
and it's really fun to look at this
and like wonder about what
photograph it's going to make
and the answer is it makes
photographs that look like this.
So, we are humans in this moment
who are straddling this time period
where we are one foot
into the analog world,
one foot into the digital world
and can we have fun with that?
So, this is a work by Marjan Teeuwen
and it's based on this digital concept
of being able to draw a black square
in the middle of a white composition,
but if you look closer,
you can see that it's actually
made from physical things.
So, she is taking something
that would be very easy,
very simple to do in the digital space
and rendering it in physical reality.
This is another piece that
I saw at the Armory Show
which looks so much like
you just pasted in a
new layer into Photoshop
and it cuts away reality on either side.
But, if you look a little bit closer,
you'll see that it's actually
a physical construction.
So, she built this scene in her bathroom
and cut through the toilet paper roll
and cut through the towel
in order to create the illusion
of Photoshop in real space.
So, this is a way to play
with this space that we're in
and I provided a work sheet
to help you think through
making an art project.
Activity three is a work sheet.
So, this is more of a thinking activity.
What I want you to think about here
is how to cross modalities.
Make a list of what you
feel is a digital experience
and then list what you feel
is resolutely analog and physical.
And then think about a
way to cross those two.
So, right here I'm showing you sort of
like a pixelated RGB display
that I printed out and turned into
a physical thing that I can play with.
So, reason three that this is interesting
and will help us make better art,
when we're talking about
digital and analog translation,
going back and forth between
the digital world and the analog world,
we're able to tinker with
exactly how we pay attention.
This is a book by Damon Krukowski
and it's called "The New Analog"
and it's all about what we've lost
in the translation from going from
music being mostly physical,
going to record stores, having records,
into this new realm where
we're all in Spotify.
What he points out is that
any time we translate from
the physical world into digital space,
we are having to make
like active decisions
about what is signal and what is noise,
what are we keeping and
what are we not keeping?
So, for example with Spotify
or all these other services,
it's really easy to find the
music that you're looking for,
search is great, works way
better than the record store.
Access is great.
You can get any music you want,
but the things that we've
lost were things that
people who were involved in the transition
didn't necessarily prioritize.
For example, that serendipity,
that we didn't really talk about
of walking into your favorite record store
and just some album art
you love catching your eye
and being able to connect with that.
The background noise of more
analog recording processes
where we can hear The Beatles
like talking to each other between sets.
So, being able to control your attention
and to reassess what you consider signal
and what you consider noise
is a way to have like a really
unique point of view as an artist.
So, I want to give you an activity
that will prompt you to consider
what you're paying attention to,
in the style of Jenny Odell,
in the style of Rob Walker,
this is George Perec and he wrote this
in October of 1974.
He sat himself down at a Paris cafe
and made the choice to not
pay attention to anything
that wanted his attention,
so he didn't think about the loud noises,
he didn't think about the big buildings,
he didn't think about anything
that was specifically an event
but he changed his perception
so he was paying attention
to all of the minute details of life,
the small events, buses coming,
people walking on the sidewalk.
He paid such close attention to it
that he transcribed
everything that happened
and he started turning it into numbers.
So, it's interesting to think about
what the fabric of life actually is.
Like, what are the increments of your day?
How can we change our relationship
to time and our surroundings
by paying attention differently?
George Perec is actually like the basis
of a lot of data visualization classes
because it shows how you
can be sitting at a cafe
and then turn it into numbers.
So, that's part of the
translation into digital.
So, I prepared a worksheet
and I want you to just find a place,
find a place in the world
that you find interesting,
maybe your apartment right now
and just list what is happening.
Think about it on different scales,
scales of time, physical scales,
think of the tiny things
that are happening,
the piece of dust that might
be floating through the air,
and then try to quantify it,
and then think about what patterns
you discover with this new
mode of paying attention,
and how could you emphasize it?
How could you turn it back
into an artistic experience?
Okay.
So, this is our last one, number four.
Here, I want you to write
a program for yourself
as a strategy for conquering
the intimidating blank canvas.
To do that, we are going to
learn from how computers work.
So, there are a bunch of artists,
some names you might already know
who predate or simply
just don't use computers,
but work in a way that's very
similar to how computers work
in that they write a set of
instructions for themselves
and then execute it much
like a computer would.
Sort of the patron saint
of this idea is Sol Lewitt
who did not even execute his own work,
he would sell, for
example, the Boston Museum
a set of instructions for
them to execute on the wall,
saying that like the instructions set
is really what's important
in art at this point in time.
So, for example, this
instruction set says that,
on any wall surface, any
continuous stretch of wall,
use a hard pencil and
place 50 points at random.
The point should be evenly distributed
over the area of the wall
and all of those points should be
connected with straight lines.
So, it's fun to read this
and not see the art
because hopefully your
brain is like generating
what you think this looks like.
That is the resulting drawing.
Another Sol LeWitt.
The first draughter has a black marker
and makes an irregular horizontal line
near the top of the wall.
Then the second draughter tries to copy it
without touching it using a red marker.
The third draughter does the
same using a yellow marker.
The fourth draughter does
the same using a blue marker.
Then the second draughter
followed by the third
and fourth copies the last line drawn
until the bottom of the wall is reached.
So, are you imagining it?
Can you see it?
This is what it looks like.
In the Blanton Museum of
Art where this piece is,
actually shot this time lapse of the team
that made this work happen.
This highlights something
that's really interesting
and like really human
about following a rule set
that you're then
executing with your hands,
is that it seems like maybe
this is like a very cold, rational way
to engage with the world,
but actually, look what's
happening to that line.
It almost looks like
some natural phenomenon
of geologic strata littering in.
We can see what's human about it.
We can see people's hands getting shaky
and we can see that as they go down,
those aberrations and anomalies,
like in the process get
emphasized more and more.
So, it actually has the
opposite effect in a way
of like really highlighting
what is human in what we create.
This is the finished piece.
Another example of this is Karel Martens,
who came up with a system for print making
that uses these rules.
So, Karel Martens has all of these
different plates of numbers
and he is mapping a specific
color to each number
and then laying down a grid of numbers
and allowing the ink to mix together
and I'm just going to let
him explain it to you.
(upbeat music)
- (speaking in Dutch)
(upbeat music)
(speaking in Dutch)
- So, the last one in this
category that I want to show you
is by Studio Moniker
and they created this series
of instruction based drawings
which they called conditional design
which they put together in this book
called The Conditional Design Work Book.
What they've done in this book
is come up with a whole
bunch of multi-player games
where one person is given
one set of instructions
and then the next player
is given a different set of instructions
that reacts to the first player's lines.
They're able to create these
really vast sort of sprawling,
generative design compositions
based on very, very simple instructions.
Another reference that
you might've heard of
is John Cage worked this way.
So, he didn't use computers,
but he would create these flow charts
of different programs
that he would then hand
off to his musicians
to create the generative compositions.
The Eameses also work this way.
If you go to the New York Hall of Science,
you will see this display.
This is a flow chart showing
how an answering machine works
and the Eameses are showing a
real life process next to it.
So, you have how the alarm clock works
and then you have a flow chart
of the social interaction
between a wife and husband
and the alarm clock below.
So, you can see that
John Doe is asleep in bed
and then the alarm rings
and then he has to make the decision
about whether to consult the
clock or reset the clock,
then consult the calendar, get out of bed.
So, it's this whole real life process
that has been outlined in
terms of these computer terms.
So, it's kind of absurdist
and it's kind of fun
but it's also a really good
way to work if you get stuck.
Oftentimes the blank canvas
is really intimidating
and you kind of just need
to be told to do something
in order to get a line down
and start reacting to it.
So, that leads us to our next worksheet.
Activity five is all about looking at
an existing work of art or design
and understanding the
rules that construct it.
And then creating your own set of rules
to structure a new work of art.
Okay.
So, this is the last one,
and this is sort of like a
bonus like next level one.
The reason it's interesting to think
about digital and analog
is because we can really
make something surreal
when we treat the physical
world like a digital experience
and we can really mess
with people's assumptions
about what can be programmed
and what can't be programmed.
So, as your audience, we're all used to
being presented with things on a computer
versus things in real life,
and there's a different
set of expectations
that accompany both of these experiences.
So, this is something that I learned
from the first big design
project I ever worked on
which was about 10 years ago.
A couple of us developed
this crazy project.
Early one Thursday morning,
we blanketed New York City
with an alternate reality.
One where the Iraq war was
ended, Guantanamo was closed,
we created a real service
that criss-crossed the US,
Appalachia got high speed internet
and the US government gave
land back to native people.
We came up with all kinds
of economic policies
to put the country on the path to equity
rather than driving people apart
and we set this groundwork for
this more informed future citizenry.
So, these are all just headlines,
but we created this newspaper
that was very carefully written
as this like road map for
progressive victories,
that was all achieved
through collective action
and popular pressure.
We made this little utopian simulation
where everything we wanted came true
and we didn't use VR or AR,
any kind of like high tech stuff,
we essentially did this
by hacking the authority
of this familiar morning time object.
So, we dissected a New York Times,
we studied the style guide, if someone
had uploaded and forgotten about
and then we put it back together again
as this pristine counterfeit
depicting this utopian future
that's better than our own.
We didn't bother telling
the New York Times
about these improvements,
we just mass produced it,
we created some nice silk
screened news boy aprons
and then we put it in the hands of
hundreds of thousands of
unsuspecting commuters.
The hoax part of this worked so well
because even though people knew it
wasn't real after about five seconds,
they had a moment where there was really
some very strong cognitive dissonance
where they looked at it
and they believed that
we lived in this world for a second.
So, this project was sort
of amazing to work on
as one of my first design projects
because people were
just so surprised by it
and so smitten and it was really fun
because we were concerned
about getting arrested
and it was just an exciting
project in general.
But the thing that no one talks about
anymore with this project
is that we also made a website.
So, we made a fake version
of The New York Times website
with all of the same content,
and no one cared about it.
Not one person cared about it.
So, the physical newspaper
ended up on the real
news all over the world
and we got people asking
these big questions
about what is possible,
like why do we live in a democracy
if we can't have the nice things we want?
It really provoked the debate we wanted.
So, I was thinking about this
and I think the reason we
got this enormous response
was that it's just really hard to argue
with something that you're
holding in your hands.
There are different assumptions
about what is programmed,
about what is manipulatable
in digital spaces
versus analog spaces.
As your audience, my expectations
might come to your project,
whether it's a design
project or an art project,
is if it's digital, I assume that
a human has programmed the space,
but when it's analog, I don't
have that same assumption.
Even though as a creator, you know
that you are programming it.
So, just to give you an example,
these are some of my
favorite programmed projects.
So, this is a game called
Universal Paper Clip
that exists in a digital space
that was made by Frank Latz
who's a game designer professor at NYU
and one of my favorite
physical programmed experiences
is by an artist named Zardulu.
Zardulu's art is that she or
he, very mysterious person,
we don't know exactly who this
person is, they're anonymous,
programmed subway rats to
perform different tricks,
and then people catch it on
camera on their smartphones
and put it on the internet
and blow people's minds.
So, this for example
is her pizza rat piece,
which she did not upload to
the internet, someone else did,
but it's a really interesting thing
because it just kind of messes
with your world for a second.
So, with this digital experience
and paper clip scheme,
I'm impressed with it because
of the depth of the thinking,
with the way that he's taken
a very simple thought experiment
and thought through like
every single aspect of it.
But what impresses me
about Zardulu's project,
and I think what impressed people so much
about the New York Times
project that I worked on
with The Yes Men,
was that it really pulls the rug out
from under reality for a second.
You have to question about like
what is programmable in
the world and what isn't?
So, there's a dimension of
surreality, of the surreal,
that's brought to you a lot of these
physically programmed things.
This is just like another example of that.
This is by a Dutch
artist named Johan Rijpma
and he noticed that cats
chase the laser light.
So, he wanted to make a music
video with dancing in it.
So, he set up a laser sight
at the top of this room
and got cats to run where
he wanted them to run
by adding cats to the room essentially.
So, basically, if you pay attention
and you can figure out how things work,
then it's a really fun way to figure out
how to interact with it.
People believe what the newspaper says,
so you can change the newspaper
and get people to think differently.
People believe that they're witnessing
the real unmediated behavior
of rats in the subway,
so, you can play around with the rats
and train them to
essentially do what you want.
So, just to summarize this concept,
so much of material and so much
of the world around us that we see
is programmable somehow.
All of these things have these depths
of hidden complexity to them
that are either observable
or you can access through
tinkering and testing
and if you can pay attention
and bear witness to these structures,
which govern that complexity,
you can build something that
hacks into it and runs off of it.
The first step in any of this
is just paying attention,
sort of finding the grain
of how that experience works
and working with it.
So, that's what we can learn about craft
and that's what we know
as artists and designers
that we can bring to this new digital age,
is that we can pay attention,
observe how a thing works
and then lean into it,
learn what it can do
and impose these different rules
that will yield interesting results.
So, I just want to do a
little bit of show and tell
and show you some of my favorite
physical objects that
have been programmed,
just to give you like some inspiration
and a jumping off point
into your own experiences.
This is one of my favorite ones,
just because it's so beautiful.
Again, this has been replaced by an app.
There's an app that you can
hold up to the night sky
and see where all of the stars are,
but this is the paper version of this.
So, this is a star explorer volvelle
that you can point in
your different direction,
you turn the wheel to tell it
what month and what day you're in
and then you can see what night sky
should look like above your head
and be able to identify the stars.
This one is called the Triangulator
and it's whole aim is to
make trigonometry easy.
So, you have these little slide tables
showing you the different
relationships between
the different parts of a triangle.
Find the hypotenuse basically
is like what the deal with this thing is.
I just want to say a few quick words
about programming paper,
because this is something
that I get asked a lot
about my paper engineering work.
So, the idea with programming paper,
it's binary like the computer.
Either there's a fold
there or there's not.
The way that we manipulate
these programs or have them run
is by applying pressure.
So, I'm applying pressure left right
and this amazing spinning
choreography happens.
That doesn't happen when
it's not folded, right?
I'm pushing this tension,
it doesn't know where to go,
but as soon as I put a crease in it,
now, as soon as I apply
that left-right pressure,
see what happens?
It's immediately directed
into that crease.
So, when we create these
paper engineering experiences,
we are playing with the
material memory of paper
to always remember where it was creased.
We can use that material memory
to create things like this flasher
and then we can also use it
to create more complicated things
like pop-up books.
We can tell the paper to slide and pop up,
just by virtue of where those creases are,
where the glue is and
where the creases are.
Those are the two things to play with.
Okay.
So, one more fun programmed paper thing.
So, this is a Miura-ori fold
which is a really complex
way to bend paper.
So, this piece of paper
is bent into a pattern
that is considered an
auxetic metamaterial.
Meaning that if I pull it left, right,
it springs up and down to you,
which is a behavior that
you don't see in nature,
but is actually very desirable
from an engineering standpoint.
This shape has been used
in nanotech applications.
So, they use it in like a tube form
to put in stents in people's
veins that have collapsed.
So, when it goes in, it's
really, really super small
and then as they're exiting,
you could pull it from
one side and it opens up
and it will open up a blocked vein.
This is also floating in outer space.
The Japan space flyer program
has a satellite in space
that's an array of solar
panels using this shape.
So, each place where you see a rigid side
has a solar panel on it.
The advantage of that is that
it uses very little energy,
pulling it only in one direction
to allow those solar panels to
tilt and track with the sun.
So, this is an amazing
little low energy machine
where an entire complex choreography
of things happens when you pull it.
The cool thing about it
is that it does scale.
You can make it super small
and you can make it really big
and it still does exactly
what a piece of paper does
when you're holding it in your hand.
Okay.
I hope you all feel super
inspired to jump back and forth
between the digital world
and the analog world
and have some ideas for new
projects and experiments.
Thank you so much for joining me
on this sort of strange voyage
and yeah, I look forward
to seeing what you make.
Thanks.
(tranquil music)
