Tiffany Shlain:
Ken and I spent a good year thinking, “What are all the big questions of humanity?”

Ken Goldberg:
Now I still haven’t seen a really good joke from AI yet. I’m waiting for that.

Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg talk about their artistic collaborations.

Ken Goldberg:
I always joke that Tiffany had never met a piece of rusted metal that she didn’t love.

Tiffany Shlain:
I love salvaged things.

Debbie Millman:
Tiffany Shlain is an artist, a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, the founder of the Webby Awards, and the co-founder of the International Academy of the Digital Arts and Sciences. She’s also the author of several books, including 24/6: Giving up Screens One Day a Week to Get More Time, Creativity, and Connection, which we talked about on this podcast when the book first came out.

Ken Goldberg is the William S. Floyd Chair of Engineering and distinguished professor of Robotics at UC, Berkeley. President of the Robot Learning Foundation, an author whose books include Beyond Webcams: An Introduction to Online Robotics. He’s also an artist whose work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale.

Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg are partners, partners in life and collaborators in several films and art installations. Their latest project together is currently on display at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It’s a magnificent installation titled Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology. Ken Goldberg and Tiffany Shlain, welcome to Design Matters.

Ken Goldberg:
Thank you so much.

Tiffany Shlain:
We’re so happy to be here.

Debbie Millman:
Listeners of the show know that I’ve interviewed Tiffany a few times, but I’ve never interviewed her husband, and so I do want to talk to him about his really fascinating career. And then we’re going to talk about their exhibit together. Ken, you have at least by my latest count, 13 patents, several more under review. Your grandfather, [inaudible 00:02:37] had 10 patents to his name. Has your family always had this legacy of invention and innovation?

Ken Goldberg:
Thanks for finding that. Yes, my grandfather… There’s a lot of sense that we are very similar many people say, and he was an immigrant from Poland and he was an electrical engineer and he developed all these patents in the ’50s around hermetic seals, which was a way of sealing circuits and that were very popular with the military and other applications for aerospace.

So I’ve always admired him. I didn’t get to know him very well because he lived in California. He actually lived in Pasadena and then later in Beverly Hills, and so I always admired him because he had a gold Rolls-Royce.

But he was very creative and my grandfather on the other side was also an entrepreneur and he started companies around various creative ideas. He was very interesting, and my father was an entrepreneur as well. So I think there is an element of that kind of trying to do things a little differently that’s in my DNA.

Debbie Millman:
And is it true that you were born in Nigeria?

Ken Goldberg:
True. My father and mother were both part of the civil rights movement in Philadelphia in the early ’60s, and so they wanted to do something constructive, and so they wrote letters to different places and got a response from Nigeria and they went there and taught in a school in a pretty remote area for two years.

Debbie Millman:
And you then moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And from what I understand though, you considered becoming an artist as you were growing up through high school, your parents wanted you to do something with a bit more security, and you ended up going to the University of Pennsylvania and majored in electrical engineering. You got your BS in economics.

At that point what did you think you wanted to do professionally? Because 30 years ago or some range of that… Because I know that we are both around the same age, so maybe 40 years ago people weren’t thinking, “I want to be a specialist in artificial intelligence when I grow up. I want to be able to create robots when I grow up.” Well, maybe you could because we both watch the Jetsons.

Ken Goldberg:
Exactly, exactly. We are actually a month apart, less than a month apart.

Debbie Millman:
20 days I believe.

Ken Goldberg:
Exactly. But yes, exactly because we were both in that era when it was rockets and NASA and there was this whole idea of mythology around rockets and robots that were, and jetpacks actually was one of those things. And I think that I was very much a kid of the ’60s. My dad was an engineer, so we built go-karts and rockets and things, and we actually did a robot that we developed.

It was just a crane basically, but it was controlled by a computer and it was very primitive it never really worked, but we spent a lot of time in the basement working on this. But it was a way I got exposure to robots and also AI because he taught me binary numbers when I was a little kid. And so then I was interested in those ideas from an early age.

Debbie Millman:
Now, I believe it was when you were studying abroad and took a class on artificial intelligence that you really began to become interested in robotics, and what was the state of artificial intelligence at that time? This was the early ’80s.

Ken Goldberg:
Right. Some people were talking about it. There were classes on it, but my junior year abroad was in Scotland and in Edinburgh they actually had a department of AI, so they had a number of faculty there, and they taught a class that I took and I was fascinated by the different questions that people were asking. Mostly it was in pretty academic research level, but I got that exposure. And when I came back to Penn, I was just walking in the hallway and I stumbled onto a robotics lab that was-

Debbie Millman:
As one does.

Ken Goldberg:
I just got lucky. In fact, actually I will tell you, it said, “ESP lab.” And it was called the… I thought, “Oh my gosh, I got to check this out.” But it turned out to be called the Experimental Sensory Processing Lab at Penn, but it was doing robots, not ESP. So we actually later changed the name and I said, “Let’s modify this to the General Robotics and Sensory Processing Lab.” And that became the GRASP lab, which it still is today.

Debbie Millman:
You went on to get your PhD where you developed… And so I have to make sure I get this right. If I don’t, please correct me. You developed the first algorithm for, “Feeding polygonal parts and you prove that the algorithm could be used to orient any part up to rotational symmetry.”

Ken Goldberg:
Perfect, perfect. I am very impressed.

Debbie Millman:
Tell me what that means.

Ken Goldberg:
Okay, all right. By feeding parts would mean orienting parts, and the idea was that up till then you would have to use a camera and you would look at the object and try and orient it, but there was always uncertainty. And that’s one of the fundamental issues in robotics.

I started exploring this approach where it was just using pure blind motions without any sensing at all. And then I found that if you could squeeze the part with this very abstract parallel jaw gripper in the plane in a sequence of motions, you could always guarantee that the part would end up in a unique final orientation.

And it’s a counterintuitive result, and it worked for lots of examples, but the hard part was trying to prove that for all polygons. And I spent two years working on that problem. And then my advisor was like, “You can graduate when you finish that.” So I just struggled with this math problem for many years.

And then I remember, and I was talking to Tiffany about this recently, was this aha moment when I suddenly saw the answer and it was a step function, and I had been sitting by the stairs for all this time, and the step function turned out be the critical ingredient for being able to prove it.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about that aha moment. I’m really intrigued by aha moments and how they manifest through you. Aha moments feel almost mystical.

Ken Goldberg:
Absolutely. Debbie, I so much remember that moment. I remember that the idea came and I had to write out these equations to formalize it. And as I was writing them out, there was… these were these integrals and they were starting to cancel out, and I was just moving along and all of a sudden they all canceled out. And it became that integral equaled zero.

And I remember this, there was a huge emotional and spiritual moment because I had no idea that would happen. And it turned out that confirmed that there was always an existence, a step that would allow this process to continue and that would work for any object, any polygon that you could conceive of. It was essentially you’re dealing with infinity in some way.

And so it’s very hard to prove things in general like that. So when that all came together, it definitely felt like some bolt out of something larger than myself, and I always remember it because I really haven’t had an experience quite that intense since.

I’ve had aha moments in different ways but that one in particular where it just mathematically clicked, I still think about this sometimes that that is one of my reasons for having a sense of something larger than us. There’s something out there that I really believe in.

Debbie Millman:
Was this the work that enabled you to get your first patent? I know that you patented a comedically yielding gripper, which was a new robot gripper that complied passively to hold parts securely without sensing. And it sounds like that’s what you were talking about just now.

Ken Goldberg:
Exactly. Exactly. That’s right. The hardware part of it was a gripper where I figured out that I could put bearings on one of the sliding jaws and that would allow the friction to go away to eliminate friction. So I called it the kinematically yielding gripper, which is my initials, KYG.

And I didn’t even think of this, but my uncle, I went home for Thanksgiving and he said, “You should file a patent for that.” And so I did, and amazingly it was granted. So that was very fun to actually get it into the patent system. I had known that my grandfather had patents at that point, but I hadn’t had one of my own. I was super proud of that.

Debbie Millman:
I was thinking about how when you go to amusement parks, there’s that amusement that you can participate in where you stand in front of a big glass little room where there’s a gripper and you can try to get stuffed animals from this pile.

Ken Goldberg:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
And I was thinking that never works. So they should have used your… But then again, I guess that would be a way to lose all the stuffed animals immediately.

Ken Goldberg:
Well, it’s actually… I love the crane thing you’re talking about where it drops the little claw. And actually I was at a roller skating rink with our youngest daughter, Blooma and it turned out that she had a knack for doing that, and she would win. She would get stuff. And I always think, “This is great.” Because I am so interested in that problem, which is how do you pick things up?

And I am so glad you brought that up because that’s a perfect example, and I should use that for what I’m explaining to people because people say, “Well, what do you work on?” And I usually reach over and there’s a glass or something nearby, and I say, “My whole career has been spent trying to pick this up. That’s what I do.” And we still haven’t figured it out.

Debbie Millman:
Well, I think Blooma’s success at doing it has to be something related to her DNA. I’m just convinced. Now, you also coined the term Cloud Robotics, so help us understand what that is and how do you see that evolving over the next decade?

Ken Goldberg:
Oh, great. Well, thanks for asking. I actually didn’t coin the term. There was a… I was using the word internet robots and networked robots, various things like that because I had done an art project that in the early days of the internet, we had connected a garden to the internet.

Debbie Millman:
Telegarden.

Ken Goldberg:
Telegarden. And in my mind, it was an art project and it was also an engineering proof of concept. And so these two things coming together, we wanted to get this to work where anyone in the world could come in over their browser and tend a living garden. So it was a lot of engineering to get that to work.

And also it had to be online for 24 hours a day, so it had little headlights that would come on so that it would work at night when people in Europe were operating it, but people could plant water seeds. And so that idea of working over the internet, I was very excited about that going back to 1994.

Tiffany Shlain:
I wanted to jump in because you were also… What I love about that project is you were playing with the irony of what you can’t do online. It was also a critique at the same time as you were proving that this could be done, it was also showing what you can’t replicate. And I know Debbie, you’re a big gardener now and all the things you can’t replicate with the internet. So you were also kind of playing with that.

Ken Goldberg:
Good. No, thanks for bringing that up, Tiffany. You’re right. So there was an irony in my mind about doing this because I thought it’s the last thing people want to do over the internet is garden, right?

Debbie Millman:
You’d be surprised.

Ken Goldberg:
I was wrong. I was wrong. Exactly. People spend huge amounts of time. We estimate 100,000 people came in and participated in this garden. And it was fascinating because I was really interested in this intersection of technology and nature and the natural world. And so this was a way of exploring that.
But it also, in the research realm, we believe it was the first robot on the internet. So then it led to research and I got funded by the National Science Foundation and developed these various versions of these systems that explored other kinds of activities.

And then more recently that has really picked up because the idea of networks being essential for robots is being increasingly recognized because now the robot doesn’t have to carry all of its computing on board. It can use the internet.

And so for example right now everybody’s talking about these humanoids, which by the way, I’m a bit skeptical about the claims that people are making. But I think that the beauty is that the robot is, it can’t carry that much weight and it can’t carry that much battery power.

So what it does is it transmits back to some base station or maybe even a data center somewhere, and that’s where the heavy duty processing the AI basically goes on, and then it sends back the commands for the robot. So that idea of Cloud Robotics is now being really embraced worldwide.

Debbie Millman:
I learned it about a new paradox as I was doing my research to prepare for today’s show. I believe it’s Moravec’s paradox, and I’m wondering if you can share what that is and how it relates to robots.

Ken Goldberg:
Yes. So Hans Moravec is still alive. He is a roboticist who wrote a book about 35 years ago where he pointed out that what’s easy for robots, like picking something heavy or manipulating heavy things is very hard for humans.

But what’s easy for humans like clearing a dinner table is still amazingly hard for robots. And that’s the paradox, why is that? That there’s this big disconnect and it’s fascinating, and that’s where really I’ve spent most of my career, studying that.

Debbie Millman:
In an op-ed you wrote for The Boston Globe, you stated that you’ve been a skeptic about AI for over 40 years and felt that AI could never be creative, couldn’t come up with an interesting work of art, an interesting invention or a funny joke.

But after ChatGPT went online and you used it for a few hours, you wondered if you’d been wrong. So this is a three-part question. One, why were you a skeptic for 40 years? What happened when you went online and experimented with ChatGPT? And how were you feeling about it now? Three-part question.

Ken Goldberg:
Okay.

Debbie Millman:
Sorry.

Ken Goldberg:
No, it’s such a good question. Such a good question. Now I know why you’re so amazing. All right, so why I’ve been a skeptic and I still am in general about AGI. I feel that there’s a lot of hype out there, but I think that in my sense, I had also been very involved with AI and seen the claims and the ebbs and flows about how AI has been treated over the years.

And I felt that there were things that were being claimed that were exaggerated in so many regards. And then when ChatGPT came out, I remember very distinctly like I think many people, being surprised by its ability to respond and to actually do something creative. Where for me it was I would give it two very different things and I would ask it to put them together and come up with a new idea.

So I’d give it two papers that I’d written and say, “Well, how would you combine these into something new?” And it was remarkably good at that. It is good at that, and that is creative. I mean, in my mind, when anybody connects two different things, puts them together. I always find that creative and interesting. So yes, I’ve recanted my claim that AI would never be creative.

Now I still haven’t seen a really good joke from AI yet. I’m waiting for that. I think that’ll come, in fact, I’ll make a prediction here, Debbie, with you in 2025, I think this is a year we’re going to see some kind of real breakthrough in AI creating something.

What I mean by that is that I think somehow it’s going to happen, I think could as early as this year, but some breakthrough where let’s say a real hard mathematical problem will be solved or a new important protein will be discovered or maybe it’s a truly hilarious joke.

But I think we’re going to get to something that’s very, very significant and say that that was done with AI this year. I think we’re ready for that.

Debbie Millman:
I’ve done a lot of experimenting with AI in the last year, both visually as well as with writing. I find that you can do more right now that feels more creative, maybe not original, but creative, visually than verbally or with writing. I find that most writing feels very soulless because so many of my students now try to write papers with it or resumes or cover letters or anything.

Ken Goldberg:
You can feel it.

Debbie Millman:
You can tell. I can tell instantly. I mean, I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, because I think you’ll enjoy it. Nobody under 50 uses the word hence or moreover in their writing, and that’s a dead giveaway. And there are certain words that you just know-

Tiffany Shlain:
But there’s more than that, Debbie, I think you’re right. There’s something… It’s almost ineffable, but it’s like when it has been written by… I mean, it’s interesting.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. There’s a soullessness to it-

Tiffany Shlain:
A coldness.

Debbie Millman:
… that doesn’t come through. And even if something that is written from the heart might not be either the most grammatically correct or ingeniously constructed, it still feels more like the person than something that’s constructed in AI by a prompt from a person.

But Ken, you’ve also written about how the scientists and artists you respect most are approaching the latest advances in AI with curiosity and not fear. And I thought that was really interesting because so many of the people that I know in the design community are actually really opposed to it. A lot of writers are opposed to it. I’m more on the curiosity side than the fear side.

And I think that comes from age because I started working as a designer professionally in the ’80s and literally started on a drafting table sitting next to a wax machine, holding an X-Acto blade. And I remember late ’80s, the very famous designers at that time were all lamenting the introduction of the computer and doing design work and felt that it was going to ruin the business and everybody was going to lose their jobs. And here we are 40 years later, and I’m actually hearing almost verbatim the same arguments just with different technology.

Ken Goldberg:
Definitely. And I think that’s a great point because the key is how you can start to use it. I should have made it a little more clear when I was saying about my prediction. I think the prediction won’t be that AI will have done this entirely on its own, but it will have been in a partnership with a human that worked, understood, and knew how to use it in the right way.

And in terms of imagery, Photoshop was such a complex, new, fangled thing when it came out. But it didn’t mean the end of design, it just enhanced design. And now with people learning how to really steer and prompt a system to come up with images and fine tune them, that is opening up incredibly interesting new doors and new potential.

So I think that’s right. And the idea is not to run away from it, but look at it as a new instrument almost, and how can you play it? What can you do? How can it be used? I don’t think it’s going to wipe out jobs in the same way people are saying, I really don’t.

I mean, we can come back to robotics where anything, I really believe any manual labor is safe. We’re very far from being able to reproduce motor skills and what tradespeople can do. But I’ll also say that I’m fascinated by more recently the breakthrough that happened two years ago with ChatGPT was based on a new model of attention. Can we talk about that for a second?

Debbie Millman:
Please.

Ken Goldberg:
Okay. So the technical result, there was a famous paper that was a big breakthrough called Attention is All You Need. And that is a little confusing as a title, but what it meant was if you basically train not just the system on a sequence of words, but you actually had the system learn which previous words to pay attention to, that turned out to be a big breakthrough. And that’s called the transformer network. And that’s what enabled ChatGPT and also in some way is very much a part of the new vision recognition systems.

So that is really interesting and subtle, it’s that what was critical was knowing what to pay attention to. And I think that’s so true. I’ve been thinking about this in robotics is that when we move around, our eyes are constantly moving as you know with our phobia, right? So we’re always paying attention to these fine little details. And if you’ll watch those eye tracking videos, our eyes are moving in this kind of… It’s very hard to figure out what’s going on, but I think that there’s a huge amount of nuance in that. And we haven’t figured that out yet in the physical world.

So when I go to reach for a pen or pick up a glass, there’s things that I’m paying attention to both visually and tactile with my fingers that are very important and they’re constantly changing what I pay attention to. And it’s very fast and very subtle and subconscious. And that idea of where is our attention being focused is extremely profound and I think it’s really the key to making progress.

Debbie Millman:
I have just two more questions that I want to ask you and then I want to talk a little bit more about what you’re doing creatively with your artwork. But what is one ethical issue in AI and robotics that you think is the most critical for us to be paying attention to?

Ken Goldberg:
There’s so many issues that are coming up. I think that the idea of robots essentially running amok is maybe a little bit, I don’t know if you could say it’s an ethical issue. But I think that to my mind, most roboticists I know have no worry about this because robots are just not that sophisticated.

The idea that they’re going to take over is a very deeply rooted fear that goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, but it’s a distraction I think from what’s really interesting. But there’s a lot of people who are doomsayers, but people in the research field generally think of that as kind of a very far-fetched concern.

Debbie Millman:
I think that the only real mainstream robot that’s been introduced to culture are the little robot vacuum cleaners, and they don’t always work well. And I think the only people they’re scaring are cats and dogs, not people. The only things they’re scaring are small, furry animals.

Ken Goldberg:
Well, there’s actually a new one that just came out this week from CES in Las Vegas, and I was showing it to Tiffany last night. It’s Roomba basically, but it has a little door that opens on the top and this little arm comes out and then it can reach over and pick up a sock that you might have left on the floor, and then it drives over and puts it into a laundry bin. And it’s so fun to watch. You can find it online. It reminds me of The Addams Family. Remember the Thing?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Ken Goldberg:
Yes, that would come out of the head. I always loved that. And it looks like that.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God, it’s terrifying.

Ken Goldberg:
So-

Tiffany Shlain:
Well, it’s funny that you’re saying that because Ken just did this amazing performance with this other roboticist who’s also a dancer, and it has a nine-foot arm. I mean, I’m thinking about you showing me that small robotic arm. And then at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, he had this dancer was dancing with a nine-foot arm.

And it’s beautiful and mesmerizing and haunting and loving and all these things you don’t expect with robots, which I think is the brilliance of Ken’s work is here he is spending all this time at the lab in this very technical way and then to take that same kind of robot and have people reimagine what it could be in this other way.

Debbie Millman:
And I believe that performance was with Catie Cuan-

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah. She’s terrific.

Debbie Millman:
… a dance homage to physical labor, which is this engagement between a dancer and a robot. And I think it can be found on your website because I know I watched the highlights and it was really, really beautiful. So I want to talk more about your art.

You, Ken, you’ve collaborated with various artists over the course of your career with Gil Gershoni on Are We There Yet? with Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, with Catie Cuan, as I just mentioned. And with your partner in life, Tiffany Shlain, who is here with us as well.

You work together on numerous documentaries, including the Emmy-nominated series The Future Starts Here, and the documentary The Tribe. Your Latest collaboration is part of the Getty’s Art Initiative, Art & Science Collide. And your exhibit is titled Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology. It is currently on view at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Congratulations. It is a tour de force. It is really, really beautiful in utterly unexpected and really grand ways. But before we talk specifically about the art, I do have one very important non-art-related question I wanted to ask you. You met in 1997, you married in 1998. So was it like wild love at first sight? Tell us about your first meeting. Tell us about that aha moment.

Ken Goldberg:
Oh, but okay, that was an aha moment. You’re right.

Tiffany Shlain:
That was definitely an aha moment. The big aha moment.

Ken Goldberg:
I’ll start off just to set the stage because I was teaching at USC in LA at the time, and I had been working with research as we were talking about and also doing this art project. And several friends had given me the same book, which was called Art & Physics. It had just come out and it was by Leonard Shlain. And I read that book and I thought, “Wow, this is fascinating. This man has written… He’s not an artist, he’s not a physicist, but he’s a surgeon and he’s writing about these topics and such insight.” And so I thought, “I’d love to meet him someday.” So that was in the early ’90s. And then I moved to Berkeley and the day I got tenure, or two days after, I was invited to a lecture by Leonard Shlain. And so I went to that lecture and-

Tiffany Shlain:
Wait, I have to jump in on my side because my father was this incredible speaker and I had 10 of my best friends with me going to hear him speak at this art gallery on art and physics. And the way that my father tells this story is that this very handsome man comes up to him and says, “Dr. Shlain I’m a huge fan of your work and had the copy of Art & Physics. I’m a new professor at UC, Berkeley, and my name is Ken Goldberg.” And the way that my father tells it, he’s like, “Loves my work, check. Professor, smart, check. Goldberg Jewish, check.” And he is like, “Have you met my daughter, Tiffany?” That’s the way he would tell it.

And we did fall in love right at first sight. Right at that moment my father introduced us very stuttle like, I mean, there’s another person who will also take credit, which he really should, David Pescovitz, who was in this moment as well. But at our wedding, my father said, “I wrote Art & Physics to bring you two together.” It was so incredible actually to get an email from this wonderful curator three years ago saying, “The Getty Pacific Standard Time theme is Art & Science Collide.”

And I couldn’t think of a better two people to do an exhibit around it. And it’s so… The fact that the theme is Art & Science Collide, and that was really us meeting was this art and physics colliding talk. So it’s felt like a very auspicious part of our whole journey that we have been doing this art show together. And it was a very immediate experience when we met that has… I’m so grateful.

Ken Goldberg:
Yeah, I knew she was the one. I think your dad said it was like Velcro.

Tiffany Shlain:
We were just like… That night. And you can imagine our first date was with my dad and 10 of my best friends. We went out for drinks after the book talk. And the way my dad describes it is like, “You two were like an inch away from each other’s face the whole night.” And-

Debbie Millman:
Oh, that’s such a wonderful… I love romance, I love romantic stories. Well, I believe this current collaboration, this current collaborative body of work came out of the initial artwork that Tiffany has been exploring in the last few years. In 2022, Tiffany, you exhibited a solo art show titled Human Nature, which also included your feminist history dendrochronology piece, Dendrofeminology: A Feminist History Tree Ring. So for our listeners, can you describe what dendrochronology is and how that evolved into your piece, Dendrofeminology?

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah, so basically when you look at a tree ring slice, every ring equals a year. So years of drought, the rings are really close together, and if there’s been a lot of rain, they’re further apart. So what else have trees witnessed? And the feminist history tree ring is imagining a completely different narrative than what you normally see in a national park. And then that just started my whole journey of imagining all the different narratives.

I have one on the evolution of perspective and technology, and I did my own self-portrait. And I was on this journey working with a lot of tree rings and light boxes and photography. So it’s been this really exciting journey for me. And I was working on it, and we got this email from this wonderful curator, Selma Holo, and Ken at the time. Do you want to say what… It was just kind of auspicious that you were working on something related to trees at the time different, but do you want to mention what?

Ken Goldberg:
Sure. I was doing a project with Google and MIT researchers on trying to develop new data science techniques for classifying trees from images from above. And it was because there was this challenge of urban landscapes and trying to do tree census and see how trees are changing over time in cities.
And it’s very costly because it usually gets done by hand and people walk around street to street with these clipboards, but we wanted to see if we could do it. And it’s actually from the air, but it turns out to be very tricky because the resolution of the images are not necessarily good enough.

So we were developing these new techniques and so it was a nice match for what Tiffany was doing. And I was obviously watching how her work was evolving. And we got this call from Selma Holo who was this wonderful-

Tiffany Shlain:
Amazing woman.

Ken Goldberg:
… inspiring legendary curator out of LA. And I had worked with her years before at USC and she had put together-

Tiffany Shlain:
And followed both of our work. Yeah.

Ken Goldberg:
And she had been in touch with us. So she came to our wedding, in fact, right? I think she was there. Yeah.

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah.

Ken Goldberg:
And she basically had this idea in her head that we would work together and do this for the Getty and put it together with the Skirball Museum, which also has a strong Jewish background. So all these ingredients were really… It felt like they just meshed really naturally.

Tiffany Shlain:
Because when she came to us to do this proposal for an exhibit… And I should say that we have done stuff before, we’ve co-written movies and we’ve done specific art installations, but this was by far the most complex opportunity, which we were excited about.

Because we could co-write the tree rings that I had been working on and we’ve co-written scripts, so that felt very natural. We have a lot of AI components. There’s 10 artworks on the show. They all touch upon AI in some ways. And then there’s just a couple very specific to…

We did just like the feminist history cheering. We did a DendroJudeology, a Jewish history timeline. And then we have the Tree of Knowledge, which is a gigantic piece center-

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I want to talk to you about that one in a lot more detail, but in Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology, this show that we’re talking about at the Skirball, you reimagine both old and new ways of understanding trees through several lenses, time, technology, culture, politics.

And you do this through tree ring sculptures and the timelines address the histories, as you mentioned, of knowledge itself, California Trees, science, Judaism. How did you go about determining the narrative arc of the topics in each of the sculptures?

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah, I mean it was interesting because sometimes we had an idea and then we would find a tree that would be a great canvas for that idea. And sometimes we found a tree and it completely changed our idea. And I mean, Ken and I love talking to each other and it was such a fun subject to mull over and think about on our walks and talks and on our Shabbat mornings when we’re without screens and just wide-ranging conversations or a drive.

So it was really… I would say sometimes the actual material would speak to us and really… In one particular piece, which is one of our favorite pieces in the show, which is the giant redwood salvage wood that’s seven feet and it’s all about the history of mathematical equations. That originally was going to be a different subject, but the edges-

Debbie Millman:
That’s my favorite by the way.

Tiffany Shlain:
Thank you. Well, the edges on it were… Actually, when we went to the… we go to different salvage wood places and we wanted a really big tree, but when we saw it actually had these sharp edges on it. And at first, we were disappointed because normally, all the tree rings you see their natural edge we’re like, “Oh my gosh.” But then we had an aha moment that Ken can speak about too, where it realized it actually looked quite mathematical in some way and it made us change the subject on that tree ring.

Debbie Millman:
And I love the way you work with it as opposed to around it.

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah. And that was a really exciting one.

Debbie Millman:
I learned so much about the science of tree ring dating in my research and read that it was discovered by A.E. Douglass in the early 1900s. Beyond the year of drought or a lot of rain, how can trees help us visualize time?

Tiffany Shlain:
Oh my gosh. Well, I do a newsletter Breakfast @ Tiffany’s. I just sent one out today where I was… I think what’s exciting to me, and I did an image in it, which I wish I could show your listeners, but-

Debbie Millman:
Everybody should sign up for Tiffany’s newsletter.

Tiffany Shlain:
Well, but it’s because I suddenly… Thinking about the tree rings made me think of this ever-expanding tree of humanity, and we’re only on for 80 rings. And if you look at those redwoods-

Debbie Millman:
If we’re lucky.

Tiffany Shlain:
If we’re lucky, if we’re lucky, we’re only on for 80. And some of those… I mean the oldest tree in the world is over 5,000 years old, but some of the old-growth redwoods are several thousand years. And it puts things into perspective of like, “We’re just in this moment, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. You’re not going to be here that long. You better live the life you want to live.” And it always puts things into perspective for me.

So in my show in New York at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, I did one where you never saw the edge if we’re speaking of edges, and it just felt like it was forever going and it says, “You are here, you will be here.” Went a little further and then, “You will not be here.” And then there’s a whole bunch of tree rings ahead of you.

I think it’s very humbling, and I think it’s good, especially in these times we’re living right now, it’s to just not forget that this is a very long story we’re a part of, we are in a hard moment now and we have to keep pushing for what we want to have happen. But I love that about nature where-

Ken Goldberg:
Well, there are silent witnesses in some way to what is occurring in the world. And so they’ve become very interesting ways of tracking time individually. And so sometimes in neighborhoods, if you’re lucky to live in the same house over time, you would see a tree and watch it grow.

So one of the parts of the exhibit that we were very excited about is this idea that you can create your own tribute to a tree that you see in your own environment. And we like this idea that it can be very personal, that there’s a memory and then there’s something, maybe it’s in a periphery because you walk past it all the time, but you know it’s there.

But if you take a moment to look at it, really study it becomes really interesting to see its changes over time.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s really interesting to go through those renditions so to speak, or those individual pieces of art on the website because they’re so heartfelt where they can come up to describe that.

Tiffany Shlain:
Well, and that, we should say, I mentioned there’s a lot of AI in the show that’s an example of direct use of AI where Ken and his students ingested all this LA history. And so once you go see the exhibit, it’s open until March 2nd. You can leave with a tape measure and go in your favorite tree in front of your house or apartment, wherever and give us a couple reflections and the measurement of it. And then we will give back to this beautiful idealized version visually as well as a hundred-word tribute. And they’re really wonderful. That’s an example, like Kenny was saying, of a collaboration of a human and AI to make something really beautiful.

Ken Goldberg:
And to the point you raised earlier, Debbie, is that we spent all summer really or even longer on trying to figure out the right prompt to give to, in this case GPT so that it would generate images that were interesting. Because if you don’t do that, you just say, give me a tree image it’ll give you a very cartoony image. And we wanted to really push it to be thoughtful and to… So we give it prompts, we talk about the F-stop and things like that, which trigger it to start to think more photo realistically.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, they have soul.

Ken Goldberg:
Oh, good. Thank you. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Some practical questions. You’ve talked about all of the trees that you used being of salvaged wood. How did you get the pieces of the trees that you used? How do you find something like that?

Tiffany Shlain:
Well, a lot of time at salvaged lumberyards, and now I have all sorts of new friends that when trees fall or in storms or sometimes in fires, that they will get the trees. And actually I ordered one, there’s one that we fell in love with, that’s… the artwork is called If We Lose Ourselves. And Ken and I looked at it as a history of all the ways we recorded ideas in history, and it goes from oral tradition all the way to ChatGPT and to the Golden record and just all the different ways we’ve tried to transmit ideas.

And this wood is this incredible wood I saw online and I ordered it from Portland and it came and it was just as gorgeous as I was hoping it would be. As a filmmaker, I do collage a lot of finding archival, and it’s like you’re finding an archival piece of wood that you’re reinterpreting and it’s very exciting to find wood.

Ken Goldberg:
I always joke that Tiffany had never met a piece of rusted metal that she didn’t like.

Tiffany Shlain:
I love salvaged things. I love vintage, salvage and reinterpreting in images and artwork and wood.

Debbie Millman:
The ultimate combinatorial creativity.

Ken Goldberg:
Well, we should say, you mentioned the tree of knowledge. And I would say that was really important because that anchored the whole project. And we started there, we said we wanted something that would… The tree of knowledge was so interesting from its biblical roots to its whole connection to Western culture in general.

And I always love the idea that it was this forbidden fruit and it required Adam and Eve to basically subvert the rules, to break the rules. And then it opened up the whole world of knowledge. There’s all kinds of fascination about that. And so we wanted something that would resonate on that level. And we spent some time, and then Tiffany found this gigantic piece of with the stuff-

Tiffany Shlain:
Eucalyptus.

Ken Goldberg:
Eucalyptus.

Tiffany Shlain:
And it was normally… I mean, just to give you a sense, all the other tree rings I had been doing in my art were slices and they would hang on the museum or gallery wall as a slice, as a sculpture. And we saw this piece and it was like, “Oh my gosh, we need the whole piece.”

And I mean, we had a budget, we scrapped a whole section of the show so we could have that piece. It felt so powerful as an object and all the different parts you walk in, it’s gnarled. And to me that’s ideas fighting with each other before they become the elegance of a question of the tree of knowledge.

And we spent… And actually all the other timelines are timelines re-imagining what the tree has seen and playing with time. But this one, we decided to do questions. So Ken and I spent a good year thinking, “What are all the big questions of humanity?” Which was such a wonderful-

Ken Goldberg:
I think 160 questions and you organize them into six categories; mind, humanity, society, sciences, beliefs and philosophy. Some of the questions include, “Why do I exist? Can we create fire?” And as they fan outward, the questions evolve to prescient questions of our time, including… I mean, not that those aren’t, but, “How will we live in a changing climate?” I have a couple of really silly practical questions. Tiffany, the artwork features text and symbols and numbers that you burn into. You literally burn into the salvaged tree slices, and you mentioned it before, I believe it’s called pyrography.

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah.

Ken Goldberg:
Which literally means writing with fire. How did you discover this art form and how long did it take you to master? I’m somebody that’s really paying attention to typography? And this is pretty sophisticated for somebody that’s only been doing this for a couple of years.

Tiffany Shlain:
Yes. Okay, so on the feminist history tree ring, I had a pyrographer, somebody that had done it, a calligrapher, but with fire and a pen and I did the dots. I did what I could. I was so nervous of messing up on this piece of wood. And then as I was getting more and more into it, I’m like, “I want to learn this. I am going to learn this.” The 10,000 hours.

And I worked with this amazing pyrographer, Kancha and by the end for this show, there were some tree rings where I did absolutely everything. And then some abstract expressions, the mathematical one, the really fine equations she did. But I was determined. I’m like, “This is what I am loving creating. I am going to learn how to do this.”

But it’s very intense. I mean, it takes a long time. I love it. It’s very meditative. I can’t think of anything else. There can be no music playing. The phone is off. I am for hours focusing. I used to think my father when he was in surgery, he would tell me, just so focused. But then your mind does get into a wonderful state also.

Ken Goldberg:
Yeah. And also smells good.

Tiffany Shlain:
The smell is amazing.

Ken Goldberg:
The smoke-

Debbie Millman:
It doesn’t seem very forgiving. What happens if you make a mistake?

Tiffany Shlain:
Here’s the thing. First of all, I have made a mistake on a piece, and the feminist history tree was headed to the National Mall, and we had a print of it that was going to be in the de Young Museum, and a reporter wrote a story about it, and I said… I’m like, “Oh, they misspelled.” I’m not even going to tell you what they… They misspelled someone-

Ken Goldberg:
You should say it. I think you should [inaudible 00:48:11].

Tiffany Shlain:
Okay, okay, okay. So I thought, “Oh, the article’s great, but they misspelled Gloria Steinem’s name.”

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Tiffany Shlain:
And then it was one of those talk about an aha moment in reverse. I’m reading the article and then I walk in my studio and I’m looking at the sculpture that’s just about to be shipped to the frigging National Mall to be on display. And sure enough, it was a mistake. It was on the tree. I was like, “Oh my God, I’m human. I’m not a robot.” No, that’s how I talk to myself.

Ken Goldberg:
No, but then… Okay, so wait, I have to tell you part of this, because then Tiffany was like, “Oh my God, I have to arrange… We don’t have time. I have to arrange someone to come in and sand that off and we have to redo this.” And this whole elaborate thing. And I said, “No, just leave it. It’s actually part of the piece.” Just like in coin collecting, how special those coins that are misprinted are. I always love that. And I was like, “That’s great. And so don’t change it.”

Tiffany Shlain:
Ken, did you say that and my gallerist, Nancy Hoffman, who’s amazing, I was going to go to the de Young and get that. I’d just gotten a frame, break the glass, reprint it, redo it. And she was like, “Tiffany, do not. No one’s going to notice.” And she confirmed what Ken said, “It makes it more valuable and interesting and human. You’re human.” But I did fix the one that went to the National Mall. I could not. I could… But anyways-

Debbie Millman:
I’m sure Gloria will appreciate it, but I don’t think she would [inaudible 00:49:35]

Tiffany Shlain:
It’s all corrected on the sculpture. But-

Ken Goldberg:
Just I also want to mention how the process of designing this, since you’re a designer extraordinaire, one of the things is that when we were thinking about the space, we spent a lot of time with the designer down there and the gallerist, the [inaudible 00:49:54]

Tiffany Shlain:
And both carry it or Selma and Fiki and… Yeah, definitely.

Ken Goldberg:
Yeah. And so what was process was what would fit in that space. And I’m so glad you actually got to be there. I really appreciate. Because we had to really adapt and we didn’t want it to be too full, but also make it full enough. And then even the trees, there was one story I quickly want to mention is that for the abstract expression, the one we were talking about with it’s all mathematical equations that we had to fit so many.

And by the way, there was a huge debate about which to go in and which not to, and the mathematicians all disagree about what should be on the… what are the most important equations, as you can imagine. And so we were putting it all back together, we were laying it out, and we found that because you had so much material there that the lines were intersecting and creating a traffic jam at the center.

And it didn’t look right and we were trying to figure out ways to do it. And at one point I thought, “Wait, man, what if we arrange the points in a question mark?” And then we were trying that, and then I thought, “Wait a second. That looks like something I’ve seen before.” And then another aha moment was that’s the Golden Spiral and that… Fibonacci. And we were like, “Oh, because it’s all about math and history of math.” That solved this problem.

Tiffany Shlain:
And that happened at midnight and we were working with this wonderful designer, Nicole Alzate, really struggling with how to fit it all. And the reason why there was a real deadline with the show. And it was midnight when there was that aha moment. And I should say we’ve talked so much about aha moments that those listeners in LA, there’s going to be a big festival of the trees at the exhibition, a whole day events at the Skirball. And the one panel that we’re going to be taking part of is called Aha Moments in Art and Science.

Because there’s so many beautiful similarities of aha moments in art and science where something you figured out changes the framework of how you see everything or how you do something and that whole, you were saying mystical, you mentioned earlier. It’s almost like a holy mystical moment when you have an aha moment. So we’re going to try to… And the theme for The Getty show is Art & Science Collide, and there’s that similar aha moment. So that’s going to be one of the panels on February 2nd for Festival of the Trees.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely wonderful. Another nerdy, practical question, some of the text goes all the way out to the edges of the tree ring and some don’t. Was that intentional? Was it done to leave room for the future or?

Tiffany Shlain:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Talk about the layout of the typography.

Tiffany Shlain:
And all of the tree rings? We definitely want you to think about the future. I mean, we’re taking great liberties and I’ve taken great liberties with these tree rings, sculptures. They’re not literal. We’re going back millions of years on some of them or thousands of years. And some of these trees most are 400 years.

But I think again, this idea that trees are such an interesting way to think about time and to contextualize where we are in this moment. So on each of the subjects it’s like, “Let’s go into the deep past. Let’s go into the present and let’s imagine what will the future…” We have a whole tree ring on the history of California only told through trees. So any fact on there is directly related to a tree fact in California.

And there’s a big space on what is going to happen in the future. And I think Ken and I both, in both of our work throughout our careers, asking questions is such a theme of imagining what something will be. And I think that that’s what that space on each of the tree rings except for the tree of knowledge. We wanted those questions on the edge to be like they’re on the edge of knowing.

It’s that kind of grasping. And on the side of the tree of knowledge, we love the way, the shape of it, whereas one side is very gnarled, the face of it looks like a brain or a hand asking a question. I don’t know, it feels so evocative to what the subject is.

Debbie Millman:
One of my favorite and the most surprising piece in the show is a video homage to Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. And you created this image using images of trees or you created… I’m sorry. You created this film using images of trees along four major Los Angeles thoroughfares from Google Maps and Google Earth. You then feed this into an AI to create a film that you’ve titled Speculation, Like Nature, Abhors a Vacuum. Talk about the title. That is such a great title.

Ken Goldberg:
I’m so glad-

Tiffany Shlain:
That title is such a-

Ken Goldberg:
Oh, I’m so glad you asked that. So I’ll just back up a little bit because this is where the connection with the project with Google and MIT came together because one of the things that was frustrating me was that the way that we had been listing the data or portraying the images of the city data was just painfully ugly, visually. It was just using the wrong set of colors and it was just very hard to look at.

And this is actually a problem with a lot of my engineering colleagues and myself. They’re just not tuned to the visual nuance of really good design. And by the way, when it’s done well in science, it really makes a difference and it really helps science advance when it can be done right.

But in this case, I said, we’re dealing with these beautiful subject of trees and they’re so beautiful inherently, but why are we portraying them with this very crude and clunky kind of graphics? So I wanted to try and push that. And that was actually very much a motivation when we started working on this was, could we take this opportunity to take that same data and make it into something lush and engaging?

And so that was the idea that we would do the same timeline, but then take these trees and animate them so they would move ever so slightly and have this visceral richness to them. So the trees, we were looking at streets already and we were looking at these trees and then we started realizing that there was a huge disparity between the different streets and neighborhoods and this shade inequity, which is a huge issue.
And especially in a city like LA where you have so much sun and you have these… Some neighborhoods are incredibly lush like Hollywood, and then you have South Central where it’s very rare to find trees. And so we wanted to juxtapose those. But at the same time as we started thinking about that, we also remembered Ed Ruscha.

And we had seen that actually in New York, MoMA had a big exhibition on Ed Ruscha and retrospective. And so his streets of LA where the video pans down the street of LA. So then it all again clicked and we started thinking, “Okay, we can do that same pace of moving along the street, but now from the top. And use those streets and the variations between them to suggest in a subtle way these disparities.”

Tiffany Shlain:
And going back to the title, I think actually the title of this piece is a great illustration of how we work together because we love titles, we love words, and both of us have a lot of fun thinking of titles and in our writing and various things. And this one we could not figure out the title for. And it was getting very close.

One of us is upstairs, one of us is downstairs like, “What about that title?” And it’s a constant one conversation that’s happening over a year. And then it was weeks before we really had a deadline that was wall text that had to be made for the museum. And I remember on, “Ken, Nature abhors a vacuum. I’ve always loved that idea.” And then Ken was like, “Yes.” But then he built on it and then tell Debbie from that.

Ken Goldberg:
Well, it was… Nature abhors a vacuum is a great phrase and you use that in science a lot. It comes back from Aristotle. When I looked it up, because I was trying to think of, “Where did that actually come from?” That Baruch Spinoza comes up. Baruch Spinoza has a variation where he says, “Speculation, like nature, abhors a vacuum.” And he’s making a comment about science and technology and culture really, because he’s saying, “If there’s any vacuum, somebody’s going to start speculating about it.” Right? And it’s such a genius twist on that I-

Tiffany Shlain:
But we were so delighted. But that wrestling, trying to figure it out and then having this wonderful exchange, and then it got to this place, we were so excited by the title almost [inaudible 00:58:56]

Ken Goldberg:
And I think also… And it was interesting because Tiffany started with the idea of the vacuum and the different tree disparities, the shade disparities that there was in a vacuum. Some is filled and some isn’t. But then when we saw it connect to Spinoza, because he’s this art legendary Jewish philosopher, and we were in a Jewish environment, then again, that was another aha moment.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s really wonderful and ingenious on lots of different levels. So my last question for you, how are you feeling about the future? Are you feeling optimistic? Are you feeling cautious? Tell us how you’re experiencing what might be coming.

Ken Goldberg:
Well, I can say I’m very optimistic. I really do feel this. I’ve always been somewhat of an optimist, incurable optimist, but I know that there’s so many difficult things happening in the world and suffering. And so I don’t want to minimize that in that in any way.

But I also feel really positive about where we are and that there’s a enormous amount of potential for change that is going to open up new possibilities. Technology, I see is the entire field is changing in really interesting ways. I don’t think it’s going to be as nearly as fast as people think, but it’s evolving.
I see students being smarter than ever and using these tools in new ways, and I really feel very, very excited and hopeful about where we are.

Debbie Millman:
Tiffany Shlain, Ken Goldberg, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Tiffany Shlain:
Thank you, Debbie. Always.

Ken Goldberg:
Thank you so much, Debbie. Such a pleasure.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Tiffany and Ken’s interactive multi-sensory installation, Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology is on display at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. You can also see more of their work at Letitripple.org.

I’d like to thank you for listening, and remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Curtis Fox:
As of January 16th, the Skirball Cultural Center is closed due to the fires in LA. So please check their website before planning the visit. Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Design Matters: Tiffany Shlain & Ken Goldberg appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Siân Heder:
No deaf family would ever set up their living room this way.

Sarah Polley:
I mean, I think at first I felt tremendously guilty.

Kyra Sedgwick:
I think that they understand intrinsically that that’s something that I understand.

Announcer:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode to mark the end of 2023, we’re going to hear excerpts from some of the best interviews with filmmakers that Debbie did in the past year.

Kyra Sedgwick:
I think it’s a sweet movie.

Siân Heder:
You got to be in the silence that wasn’t actually silence.

Sarah Polley:
And then the most astonishing thing happened.

Debbie Millman:
Over the past 10 years or so, it’s been wonderfully gratifying to see how many more women are making movies and prestige television shows. We have a long way to go to get to parody, but at least things seem to be moving in the right direction. In 2023, I interviewed several women who have been forging remarkable careers as writers and directors. In this end-of-year episode, I’m going to play excerpts from three of those interviews. Sian Heder has written for TV shows like Orange Is The New Black, and she’s written and directed two films, Tallulah and more recently CODA, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2022.

Here’s an excerpt from my interview with Sian. When you were first approached to direct CODA, you hadn’t seen the original 2014 French film, La Famille Belier the story CODA is based on. What made you interested in this particular story?

Siân Heder:
I think it’s always striking when you’re presented with something and you think, “Oh, I can’t think of a film with a deaf family at the center of it”. And the fact that that doesn’t exist in the world felt like a driving force to put it in the world. When I did watch La Famille Belier, the character of the CODA at the center was very interesting. CODA as a child of deaf adults. It’s very interesting to me that most deaf people have hearing children, and most deaf people are born to hearing parents. And so there’s kind of this cultural divide that happens where a lot of times CODAs who are growing up with deaf parents in a way grow up more embedded in deaf culture than a lot of deaf people did as kids because they had hearing parents that maybe didn’t sign or live within the deaf community.

So that idea of someone who was part of these two worlds and also part of neither and living in this limbo where they culturally felt connected to a community that they actually aren’t a part of, which is the deaf community. And I had a beautiful thing that a friend said to me the other day when she was trying to talk about being a hearing person growing up in a deaf family.

And she said, “I lived in the oppressor’s body.” So even though I was their child and I was this, I also represented the world that had been oppressive, and horrible, and exclusionary. And holding those things and holding that duality was a really complicated thing to grow up with. So that was very intriguing to me in that character and exploring what that was. And having a teenage girl at the center where her feelings were not marginalized, her feelings were actually the stakes of the movie was exciting to me.

So all of those things, and then really the deep dive that I got to do with the deaf community, it’s changed my life. It’s changed my life, not just as an artist, but it really has changed my life, period. There is this idea of who should be writing what which I think is very real, and those conversations need to be happening. I was fully aware that I was a hearing person coming to this deaf story about a culture that was not mine.

But what that meant is I had to come in as this very pure listener and know what I didn’t know and really put a team around me of deaf collaborators, both in front of and behind the camera. But these moments that are almost embarrassing when you have them where my production and designer and I set up the living room of this family. I remember Ann walking onto set and going, no deaf family would ever set up their living room this way.

Deaf spaces are circular. Everybody needs to see everybody else. The living room is not centered on the TV in the same way, it’s centered on having a conversation with each other. The couch would be facing where they could see the door. They would want to know who was coming in and out. So there were all these moments where you kind of went, “Oh, shit. I’m such a dumbass. What was I thinking with the furniture?”

But I had that push and pull. I had the people there as a team to go, “Hey, no.” And it was a really powerful, amazing experience to make that film not just in the writing of it, but in the way we sort of re-imagined what a set could be, the way we shot it, put it together. Even the year-long press tour, I think it was a very transformative experience for everyone involved in the film, especially me.

Debbie Millman:
One of the really remarkable things about CODA was the way in which deafness was portrayed. In the past, hearing characters spoke out loud the entire time. And you talked about Marlee Matlin in the 1986 film Children of a Lesser God, a movie that she won an Oscar for playing the role she played. William Hurt’s character speaks all the lines out loud. And you look back at a movie like that, or even other movies that are much more recent, where the hearing character becomes the dominant character just because they are reciting or sharing the reality that the non-speaking person is having.

Instead in CODA, you provide the audience with the experience of what it’s like to really watch an ASL conversation taking place with the various sounds that you hear, the clothing, the fingers moving, slapping. I know that you put a mic on Marlee Matlin who was surprised because she’s usually not mic’d because you specifically wanted that physical experience.

Siân Heder:
I think sound is very important to hearing people. And you watch people who haven’t encountered an interpreter and a deaf person together before, and you will watch hearing people look at the interpreter as they’re talking. As the deaf person is signing, they will look at the interpreter and then they will address their question or their answer to the interpreter because they’re sort of drawn to the sound. It’s like, “Well, this is the person who’s talking, as opposed to this is the person that actually should be the interpreter’s there to voice the deaf person.”

So I’m watching it and I think it’s almost like it’s a process people have to go through to go, “Okay, let me become comfortable in this moment, giving my attention to the person who might not be actually speaking.” And so I knew that if Ruby voiced her parents or if Ruby talked too much in the movie hearing people would glom onto that. Or it’s almost like a safety net. Like, “Oh, I feel safer in this scene because I have this touchstone of this person speaking.”

So silence was a really big part of the movie for me and figuring out, yes, an audience will be uncomfortable for the first couple scenes, a hearing audience will be. And they are going to have to get into a different rhythm and a different way of watching and listening visually as opposed to actually listening. And that’s cool. Let me force the audience into that experience gradually. I was careful in the early parts of the movie to make sure that there would be an ASL scene and then there would be a music scene or a dialogue scene, and then we would… Then towards the back half of the movie, I think there’s six scenes in a row which are all silent ASL scenes because at that point I think the audience is fully immersed in this family and you don’t even notice.

I loved that audience members came up to me after the movie and was like, “I didn’t even notice that I was watching ASL.” And someone even said to me, “I felt like I was hearing Frank’s Boston accent.” And I’m like, “Yeah, he does have a Boston accent, but he has it through sign.” And sound was so important in the intimacy of an ASL conversation where if you’re angry and you say “Stop,” and you hit your hand really hard with the side of your other hand, which is the sign for stop, it makes a noise.

I really wanted the sound mix to allow the audience to really participate in the intimacy of the language and the physicality and the sound your hands make when they brush up against your clothes when you’re saying excited or the little verbalizations that come out or sounds that come out, which are so important. And so, yeah, I really worked not only to mic and my sound department on set, but then as we were working on the sound design to elevate and bring up all those small intimate sounds to fill those scenes, so you really didn’t have to fill them with music. You got to be in the silence that wasn’t actually silence.

Debbie Millman:
Sian Heder. Sarah Polley was a child star on Canadian TV, and she starred in many feature films including the remarkable film, The Sweet Hereafter and The Weight of Water. Since 2006, she’s been directing films and her latest in 2022 is Women Talking about sexual abuse in a Mennonite community. I spoke with her about that movie, but in the excerpt you’re about to hear, we talk about her remarkable 2012 documentary, Stories We Tell.

Sarah Polley:
I found out when I was 27 years old that the man who raised me, my dad, who I’ve been talking about was not my biological father, and that my mom had had an affair with a man named Harry Galkin in Montreal in 1978, and they had conceived me. I was raised as part of my family with my siblings not knowing this. There had always been rumors that I was the child of some actor in some play maybe, but it was kind of a joke. It never was really serious. I mean, what was interesting was that after this happened, there was this revelation and my dad found out, my siblings found out, I would start to hear people tell the story to others.

And the stories that we were telling bore very little relation to each other, even down to the details of how I found out my biological father was my biological father. Everything had been shifted or changed or details were missing or added in many ways I felt in order to help fit into the context of the narrative that that particular person in our family had about our family. So I became really interested in the idea of capturing all of the competing and conflicting and sometimes complimentary narratives about the same event in a family and this idea of a story told not by one voice, but by a chorus of voices.

So I was just interested in looking at all the different ways we fictionalize and shift and change the details of our narratives, not willfully and not intentionally, but out of some sense that there is a narrative we are somewhat attached to. There’s a story, there’s a meaning we’re attached to that everything must slot into and the way we do this unconsciously. It just got its talents into me and I got so excited about the idea of capturing my dad’s version, capturing Harry’s version, capturing all of my sibling’s version and having them tell the story in these conflicting ways.

Debbie Millman:
What did making that movie help you understand about the nature of truth and memory, whether it be others’ versions or your own?

Sarah Polley:
I mean, it’s a good question. I think I became less dogmatic about truth and more interested in what people need emotionally to survive. People were telling the stories that had meaning to them, and sometimes they weren’t right, but it didn’t make it not okay from my point of view for them to live alongside that story that they were telling. It was a lot of, I think staying out of the way. I think one of the things that I loved about the process was I had to sit with each of my family members and really listen. When you’re making a documentary, a really great tip I got from another documentary filmmaker was when someone finishes answering a question, don’t jump in with your next question because it’s entirely possible they’ll want to fill that space.

And in that space, what they might give you is far more potent and unintentional than what their constructed answer might be. And how often do we do that with our family? If they tell a version of events we don’t agree with. We jump in, we correct, we argue, or we say… Actually, I remember it this way, but actually have to listen. And to hear people go to the end of a story and leave those silences, and let it be their version, and not impose my own.

You learn a tremendous amount that you’ve missed about how people think and feel and who they really are. I think there’s so much about our families where they have remained strangers to us in a way that so many others wouldn’t because we’re imposing layers and layers of years and years of small interactions that build into one kind of monolithic narrative that we then ride like a bull around that relationship. And so to have this very delicate space of listening and finding out where you’ve just been entirely wrong is really interesting.

I actually had a really interesting experience with a family member recently, which for me shone a light on this whole experience where I talked to a family member recently about something that was happening to me that was kind of exciting. And then I was inviting them to come stay at my cottage, and they were giving me responses that I’m used to over the years of, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” And in my mind, I knew exactly what was going on in this person’s head. What was going on in this person’s head was, “Why do I have to hear about this great thing that’s happening to you? I don’t care. And yeah, yeah, sure, I’d love to come to the cottage.” This person was never going to come to the cottage, and they were sort of humoring me.

I could just feel the cynicism and the judgment dripping. It’s someone I actually have a very good relationship with, but I know that there’s parts of me that irritate them, and these were present in the conversation. And then the most astonishing thing happened. They hung up the phone, but they didn’t hang up. And I was just about to hang up, and I realized they hadn’t hung up. I suddenly heard them call out to someone else in their household and say, “I just talked to Sarah.” I thought, “Oh, God. I’m going to hear all the criticism that I’ve always known is there, but they’ve never said out loud. This isn’t an openly critical person.”

What they did was they conveyed to this person how excited they were for me about this thing that had happened to me and how excited they were to come that summer to my cottage. It was so palpable, the joy in their voice and the pride and the excitement about seeing me. I realized that I had for my entire life been reading a narrative into this person’s tone of voice and gesture that did not exist. And it was so horrifying. I’m not somebody who’s constantly reading in negative things to the people. I know, but this was just something I knew from probably 800,000 misunderstandings built up over decades.

I had created a narrative that wasn’t true, and the only way I would’ve ever known that would be to have been able to hear this thing I wasn’t supposed to hear after a phone call they hadn’t hung up on properly. And so for me, that’s actually sort of in many ways what stories we tell is about, but it was an amazing moment for me to realize I’m still doing it. I’m still mapping and projecting stories about relationships onto people that aren’t real. And we all do that every day in ways we don’t get to have the big reveal that we were wrong.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. How did the realization about who fathered you biologically impact how you felt about your mother and your father?

Sarah Polley:
I mean, I think at first I felt tremendously guilty for finding it out, and it actually took a close friend of mine after months of just feeling terribly guilty for finding this out, to say, “Do you understand that by finding out this information, you didn’t cause anything to… You didn’t actually make this happen? You’re not responsible for your mother’s affair? This isn’t something that you did or that you’re responsible for that is in any way bad?” I didn’t know that. I thought by finding the information out that I had somehow hurt my father. I didn’t tell my dad for a long time. I actually didn’t tell him until a journalist threatened to print the story who had heard it from somebody else. And so that was actually the impetus for telling my dad in the first place.

I think with my mom… I mean, oh my God, my mom was one of that generation of women who was expected to do all of the housework, all of the cooking, and cleaning, all of the childcare and provide half of the income to the family. So she worked crazy hours in a profession that was incredibly dismissive and horrible to women. She had absolutely no support at home. We didn’t have help in anything. So she’s running around vacuuming and cleaning, and dusting, and trying to get meals on the table and doing all the grocery shopping because my dad also didn’t drive.

She’s waiting hand on foot on kids and a husband. I just think any joy that woman got in her life, I feel no judgment for. So if she went away and did a play for a couple of months in Montreal and got to feel herself and have joy and not have to be responsible for everybody in the world for five seconds, I find that really, really hard to judge. I’m a big fan of monogamy in my own life. I live a very different life than my mother did with a lot more freedom and agency and support and an equal partner in everything.
So I just think it’s like I can’t find it in my heart to judge her on any kind of moral grounds that she had a beautiful affair and kept that for herself. I think that many people would’ve just snapped and not been able to care for their kids with that kind of pressure. If this was what helped her get through, good for her. And she lived a short life. My oldest brother always says that. He always says, “She only lived till she was 53, and I’m so glad she had some fun while she was here.”

Debbie Millman:
Sarah Polley. Kyra Sedgwick is now officially a multi-hyphenate. After years in front of the camera, including many years as Brenda Lee Johnson on the hit television show, The Closer and several film collaborations with her husband, Kevin Bacon, she recently directed her first feature film. I asked her why the change?

Kyra Sedgwick:
Well, I think there were a couple of things. I mean, I think that I had reached critical mass in seeing work that I had done as an actor, not cut well, not shot well, not written well. I think I had gotten to the point where I was like, “Why is my best stuff on the cutting room floor? Why did they edit it that way? Why do I not have any coverage in this scene?” Honestly. And I think I just got to the point where I was like, “Well, if you want something done right, you got to do it yourself.”

I mean, when I look back on my career, I had worked with so many great directors for so many years, like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then I think that kind of fell away it felt like. And so I was like, I think becoming increasingly frustrated with what was coming to me and also what ended up on screen.
Kevin actually, again, featured prominently and my eye for the way something is directed became more and more keen. He would always say, “I don’t know why you’re not directing. You think of things directorially, you see things directorially, you always… When we leave a movie talk for a long time about the way things were shot and the arc of the character, but also arc of things visually and you should think about it. And I was like, “No, no, no, I’ll never direct.”

And I used to say, “I’ll never direct. I’ll never direct.” I think that honestly, a big part of that was because I thought I would never be great at it as if one has to be great right out of the gate. But I think that ultimately what happened was I had this script that I had been trying to produce for 10 years called Story of a Girl. It was a book that I had optioned with my friend. I was meeting at Lifetime with Tanya Lopez to talk about producing stuff for them.

I was sitting outside in the waiting room and there was a little video that they had done about female directors. I watched the video, wasn’t thinking much of it, but then when I went in to speak to her, she said, “Hey, listen. If there’s something that you are interested, we’re doing this mandate here where we’re only hiring female directors for a certain amount of time if you have a passion project.” And I just blurted it out. I have Story of a Girl and I want to direct it, and turned around and was like, “Who the hell just said that?” And realized that was me.

She read it that night and said, “I want to do this with you, and I’ll give you a little money.” And that’s how that came about. But I think that it was one of those things where my soul was ahead of my brain at that moment, but it was daunting and scary and wonderful and turned out really well.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You said this about directing actors. I think that every actor is ripping themselves open and leaving a piece of their soul on the floor for you, so you better honor what that is. I feel like I know that intrinsically. That’s not something I had to learn. That’s something I deeply understand. Kyra, how do you best create a space for an actor to rip themselves open like that?

Kyra Sedgwick:
Well, I think that simply by virtue of the fact that they know that I know how it feels to be so vulnerable and to have this giant piece of machinery, this camera between you and the other actor, all you’re trying to do is tell the truth and you have to do it between action and cut. I think that they understand intrinsically that that’s something that I understand. Having said that, I just try to be incredibly kind and loving and celebratory and create a really safe place for them so that they can fly without a net and give them whatever they need to get there.

Every actor needs something different, but I think that you learn their instrument and then do what you can to try to help them play. And I help them try to play their instrument the best that they can.

Debbie Millman:
I want to talk with you now about your most current project, your first narrative film project, a theatrical movie titled Space Oddity. Your production company, Big Swing acquired the rights to the story, which in many ways is a love letter to the planet, but it’s also an intimate portrait of family connections and disconnections, and hope, and sadness, and grief, and new love. What drew you to this project?

Kyra Sedgwick:
Well, all those things you just mentioned. I mean, I’m like, “Sign me up. I want to watch that movie. I want to live in that movie.” There were so many themes that were in the script and that we spent a lot of time cultivating with the writer that were just like of primary importance to me as a human and as an artist. I think that storytelling can change you. I think that storytelling can help you to exercise your compassion in such a beautiful way. And only humans get to do that, although there are some mammals that feel compassion as well.

But learning about ourselves through art, whatever that art form is, is just a critical part of living for me. And so all of those themes feel critically important to me and more important as I get older, that idea of there’s no place that you can go, that you’re not going to be hurt, that people aren’t going to die, that there aren’t going to be struggles, and the way through it is with connection with others, and there’s no other option.

And being present means you’re going to get hurt, but it’s worth it. And the journey of it, the movie was so entertaining I found it on the page. I was flying through the script just thinking, “I love these characters. I don’t understand them necessarily, but I want to stick with it until the end. The payoff felt so beautiful. I love the book-ending of the movie of like, “I’m going to go to Mars. No, I’m going to stay on Earth.” And then everything in between is that, is how do you be that person who wants to check out in the ultimate sense because things are just too hard? And then you become that person who goes, “No, I’m fully immersed and planting myself in the soil.” I just love that journey.

Debbie Millman:
I do too. I also was so impressed with the way in which the decision-making was shown. So many times in a movie where there’s this sort of cataclysmic moment or this cinematic climactic moment of awareness, it sort of pops up. And here you sort of see the process of struggling through it. And that’s one of the things that I enjoyed the most about. It was really feeling like I understood the inner dialogue of this journey without it being a surprise to discover.

You felt like you were going along in that decision-making. I love the movie. It’s a beautiful movie. You said it was really hard to raise the money for this film. Why?

Kyra Sedgwick:
I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, I think there’s no question I’m a female director. And even though I was nominated for a DGA award with Story of a Girl, it’s not like it made a lot of money for people. It was a respected movie on Lifetime, which is not going to win you a lot of financial support for your next gig. I think it’s a sweet movie, which I think that in the world where it’s just so hard to get people to go to a movie, often they want it to be possibly about a true story or a horror movie or something that you look at it and go, “I know what that’s going to be.” And I think this movie demands more of you than that.

I do think that there’s something weird about Sweet Tales even though I feel like what we need so much is sweetness in the world right now. I mean, not saccharine like, “We’re going to take you on a ride and we’re going to give you some pain because there’s definitely some pain in this movie.” But ultimately it’s going to be hopeful and you’re going to feel good about life afterwards.

I think that’s something that we’re having trouble selling even though I think it’s what people crave. And I also think that what I heard a lot is execution dependent which just means, “We don’t know if you can do it. We don’t know if you can cast it. We don’t know if you can do it.” And I find that so shocking because I think everything is execution-dependent, but I think it means something else in Hollywood that I didn’t know at the time. But we have 15 executive producers and we made the movie. And I trust that it will find its people. You know what I mean?

Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Kyra Sedgwick:
Which is the good thing about, “Yeah, it was only in the theater for a week because that was the deal. It was only going to be that.” But the fact that it’s going to have a long life on streaming and that feels good about what’s happening in the world right now in movies, but even though it’s kind of painful that we’re not all together having an experience in the movie theater.

Debbie Millman:
Kyra Sedgwick. You can listen to the full episodes on our website, designmattersmedia.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you in the new year, hopefully a peaceful one, soon.

Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Design Matters: Best of 2023 with Filmmakers appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Aging.

While most people tend to abhor our personal passage of time, I hold a bit of a fascination with it because it grants objectivity, distance, the breathing room to look at where you’ve been in life, what you’ve been—and moreover, who you’ve been.

Who have you been?

This special live episode of Design Matters with Eighth Grade director Bo Burnham and star Elsie Fisher took place last fall at Adobe Max in Los Angeles. As Burnham told The Atlantic when discussing the film’s origins, “I think eighth grade is a time where your self-awareness is just flicked on like a light. All of a sudden you look at yourself and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, have I been this the whole time?’ And then you’re trying to build a parachute as you’re falling.”

As it likely does with most viewers, the film prompted me to reflect on my own eighth grade experiences … but when I went back to find them, they were fleeting, and mostly composite sensory images of place—the faded paint of school hallways, increasingly skilled levels of art punctuating the walls room after room, grade after grade; the taste of water from the humming gray fountains; the seemingly invincible faux wood of the desktops in the nicer classrooms, and that moment when you’d come across one with a chunk sheared off, revealing it to be plastic, and wonder, What could be so strong in this world to do that?

Pondering Eighth Grade’s focus on social anxiety brought more back, and caused me to ask the sole friend I maintain from those years: Who were we, really?

Given the relatively nerdy and quasi-reclusive adult that I am today, an author, design geek and journalism professor, people in my life might be surprised to learn who I used to be. Because I was decidedly not a model pupil.

I wasn’t popular, and I wasn’t unpopular (that would come in high school). I was just sort of there. And in the course of being there, I was bored. Perhaps going to the same school from Kindergarten to eighth grade had run its course—or the fact that it was a Catholic school had. My brain was alight with possibilities, futures, but all I could see were the walls around me. Given an inherent problem with authority that I’m long-delayed to decode with a therapist and a general disinterest in whatever my poor educators were trying to affix to my brain, the majority of the school’s faculty was exasperated by my friends and me. (It’s worth noting that, as a teacher today, and an admitted highly hypocritical one, I would have been, too.)

There were the innocent, troll-ish happenings—on a gardening day for a science class, we planted flowers on a hill in the configuration of a four-letter ‘F’ word, and anxiously awaited spring. On a day set aside for “reflective prayer” and meditative music in a religion class, a friend slipped a Nirvana cassette into the stereo, bringing the teacher to tears. I learned to smoke cigarettes behind Lookout Bowl (a poor decision that would haunt the next couple decades of my life), sought to trade a surplus of said cigarettes for marijuana from an older kid at Hardee’s (turned out to be oregano, or another spice of unknown provenance), made unfortunate fashion choices, like the sporting of wallet chains (which seemed so gratuitously long that had I actually ever dropped my wallet, I’d have had to retrace my steps for several hundred feet), and had my parents called into the principal’s office for an intervention/possible expulsion because, eclipsing my other crimes, I stood accused of huffing the breath freshener Binaca (something I still don’t believe is possible).

For an aspiring delinquent there were, of course, the more serious happenings: Getting ahold of psychiatric pills that would not get one high but would get one deeply in trouble (yet, awesomely, help one with bouts of depression later in life); vandalism (hailing from Kentucky, we had access to terrifyingly powerful “fireworks” advertised as quarter sticks of dynamite, which we purchased from an ice cream store that was later raided by the ATF); disappearing from one’s parents’ house for uncomfortable stretches of time (even though I was often just out playing mini golf); run-ins with police (see: quarter sticks of dynamite); an instance or two of petty theft (candy I could have bought with my allowance); cutting (a more serious matter that does not merit a joke to help me make peace with my past).

And then there were the constants in my life that arguably saved me from the jails and prisons (or worse) where a handful of my friends would end up: reading and writing, the closest things I had to religious rites; the aforementioned friend consulted for this essay; parents who were perplexed and irate yet wildly patient, who never believed that their son would condescend to huff Binaca.

When I look back on it all now, I recall an innate sense of screaming—of being trapped, not unlike the bugs encased in amber that I was fascinated by as a kid. Perhaps that’s why I avoid looking back. Or maybe it’s an elemental sense of shame, a desire to disown. Or it’s akin to reading someone else’s memoir, and I’m just the type of person who never reads the same book twice.

But it’s important to remember. And to reach within and seek to decipher.

All the acting out feels like just that: acting. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. So I chose various parts to play, as did the bullies and jocks I would get to know in high school when I moved on from such pursuits to writing and photography clubs and punk bands. Being so claustrophobic in the same tiny rectangle for so long with the same people—all, I should add, of largely the same background and socioeconomic status and ethnicity—would breed an intense curiosity for the rest of the world, which led me to become a journalist, a profession where you’re the master of nothing but an explorer of everything. It also bred an obsession with travel, of escaping, of absorbing.

Eighth grade. The last strap of the bridle was coming loose.

The film Eighth Grade captures one character’s experiences in a strange time we all share. And everyone’s experience is marvelously unique, a wonderful or terrifying or brilliant or painful microcosm in which you indeed build your parachute as you fall.

What was yours? If you’re so inclined, please share it with us, short or long, and how it impacted the creative you are today. We’ll be selecting a medley of our favorites for a roundup we’re putting together.

Enjoy this special episode of Design Matters—and, pleas
e, stay away from the Binaca.

—Zachary Petit, Design Matters Media Editor-in-Chief

The post Design Matters Live: Bo Burnham + Elsie Fisher appeared first on PRINT Magazine.