It's an invigorating way to work with students. You're designing with them. You're working with them. You're modeling for them how to think creatively, how to do design, how to take a project and imagine several ways forward for it, how to see obstacles that come up and find ways around them. So it's very interactive. And I love that. And I can see it's the format-- at least in my experience-- that students are the most engaged by.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library, rock-and-roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Marlee Givens and Fred Rascoe. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you tune in for, we hope you dig it.
Our show today is called "Creative Disorientation," which is also the name of an upcoming academic presentation at the Georgia Tech Library.
It's the inaugural event in the interdisciplinary media arts center's theory and practice series, which is a tongue twister and a way to bring artists and Georgia Tech faculty together to explore, well, theory and practice of media arts.
You might ask, what is creative disorientation? Well, it could be the way you open your mind to new ideas when launching a creative project. It could also mean changing the orientation of a physical object from the expected to the unexpected to get a transformative result. CHARLIE BENNETT: That's my favorite. It might even be what happens when you get two people with different areas of expertise talking about the same subject.
Speaking of which, our guests are the presenters for "Creative Disorientation." And we're getting a sneak peek into the presentation and a little bit of behind-the-scenes creation of the event.
Our songs today are about looking to start a creative project, breaking out of a mental rut, and opening your mind. And those themes do lend themselves to psychedelic rock. So there's a thread of psychedelia throughout all the music today.
I want to change my answer. That's my favorite disorientation.
Ah. We will start with one of the standard bearers of psychedelic rock. This is the incomparable 13th Floor Elevators with their song about getting to a higher creative plane. This is "I've Got Levitation" by The 13th Floor Elevators, right here on Lost in the Stacks
[THE 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS, "I'VE GOT LEVITATION"]
That was "I've Got Levitation" by The 13th Floor Elevators. This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called "Creative Disorientation." Our guests are the artist Mark Wentzel and the architect Stuart Romm.
Mark is a visual artist based in Atlanta who works in sculpture, drawing, large-scale installations, and public art projects, including a long collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Stuart is a professor of the practice in the School of Architecture here at Georgia Tech and a close collaborator with the Georgia Tech Library in many, many projects, Stuart-- everything from an appearance on this show all the way up to being part of the award-winning design team for the library renewal.
And next week, Mark and Stuart will be co-presenters in an event at the Georgia Tech Library called "Creative Disorientation."
OK, full disclosure, everybody. I am actually part of the team that's organizing this event. I was in the room when we were finding our way to the topic of creative disorientation. So I'm not going to try and recreate that moment. But I do want to mention the things that got us here and then ask Mark to start talking about this idea of idea generation. Stuart said something about the Media Bridge and how it was sort of pointed the wrong way for a public art or multimedia installation.
And shortly before or shortly after that, Mark talked about being in a place of uncertainty or confusion at the beginning of a project and that being a good thing. And I think that I said, well, creative disorientation sounds like the proper subject if we're going to put you all in a presentation. So I have two questions for you, Mark. Is that how you remember it? And what do you think it means? MARK WENTZEL: That's pretty close. Thanks for having me here. I really appreciate this.
CHARLIE BENNETT: Thanks for being on.
I think what happened was I was in a situation where I didn't know exactly why I was there. And I was listening for words that I might cue into. And Stuart mentioned the word disorientation. And I felt it. I was like, that's it. And I think I followed up by some of the references to an artist that I've followed, James Turrell, who works with light, architecture, and disorientation and his earlier works, in works that involve the Ganzfeld. So I maybe remember those parts of it.
But that's when I knew, I think, we had a through line, that that disorientation is something that I felt. I felt the room sort of buzz.
What does it mean when an artist works with disorientation? You said that almost like someone working with paint or acrylic or something like that.
I think it works both ways. It's the media that you might use. It's part of the tool kit perhaps. But it's also something internal. It's part of the process. So putting yourself into a situation of being disoriented or unfamiliar-- not unlike traveling to a foreign country-- what sort of experiences put you in the mindset of having to recalibrate your awareness of your being?
And, Stuart, does this make sense to you as a connecting to the Media Bridge? Can you maybe rephrase what I said about the misorientation of the Media Bridge?
Yes, well, disorientation is an interesting particular word about orientation. We kind of originally conceived it as a crossroads on the campus, the library, the hub of all of these different orientations from all the different schools that are in silos, and wanted to converge them and have the town square feel like it's this intersection of many orientations.
But we did feel it was important to disorient also, in a sense, because we find that everybody comes to their own perspectives from a kind of solitary viewpoint. And we were looking at ways that, with the books going out, which was a challenging proposition, and information flows coming in that are digital, how do those flows now get perceived and worked with by students and researchers?
And we thought that it would be important to have them open up their minds-- again, as we're talking about as art can do-- to kind of open up and reset the expectations that you come into it with so that new creative things can come out of it, which is really what the library is all about as a source of collaboration, convergence, and opposing viewpoints that were represented in very diverse volumes on the shelves before. Now how do we do that with digital information?
And what I find interesting about Mark saying you didn't know why you were in the room, why you were part of this. The original idea behind this presentation was simply bringing a faculty member and an artist together and build, from that, some kind of idea of a presentation. And mural work was kind of what connected the two of you, which has sort of been left behind, inappropriately so.
But the idea of a digital mural, which would be the Media Bridge's screen on the bottom of the bridge, and then your work in murals, Mark. But the more I got to know your work, the more I understood that was very not a small part, but a not complete part of the work you do. I guess I'm just telling everyone the deal now. So which part of your work in public art did this kind of trigger something for? What are you pulling into this presentation from your corpus of work?
Well, what I'm looking at always when I'm making art is the interface. And the material makes the transaction for that interface. And Stuart and I were talking before this about the library being a place and the Media Bridge being a place for shifting from a library housing information to putting information out. So the information is moving into space. And that's what artists, particularly in the public sphere, do. A mural does the same thing. It's a surface that transmits information.
What I think is interesting about the digital bridge is that you can modulate that information over time, which is something that I've only rarely done in my work and maybe not so much in public. Most of the work that I do is static. So I think the vibration of the Media Bridge and its role as a-- I might call it a wayfinding mechanism, which, also, if you turn that around into the language of disorientation, you might use it in the reverse. So my mind works in that way.
So just looking at the properties of the medium, how can we manipulate that to function in other ways other frequencies.
I think it's probably a good time to remind listeners who maybe didn't hear our show about the Media Bridge. The Media Bridge is actually-- it's literally like-- it kind of looks like a jumbotron. Except the screen is actually pointed at the ground. There's a bridge between two buildings in the library. And there's a screen that's pointed directly at the ground. And that's kind of the media that we're talking about here today. And so there's kind of a limitation there.
There's a little pedestrian bridge under that. And you have to walk under it to see it. So you're looking at a space. You're trying to imagine a space that has these limitations already. So how do you approach those limitations in how the media is already set to display to the public?
Well, the limitations are inherent in any work that you might do. And the architecture is often responsible for that. So when we were talking about one of James Turrell's series, which are the Skyspaces, which is built architecture with an opening in the ceiling that confuses your relationship to space, as when you look up in it, there appears to be a skin that connects across the opening in the ceiling. It's a mind trick.
But we were talking about it and how the Media Bridge does just the opposite. The image that's floating above you is real. And the space is open around it. So that inversion was really fascinating to me. And the content being almost infinite in possibilities allows you to just place in simple wayfinding information but also, I think, potentially some Ganzfeldian sort of things. A Ganzfeld is a room or a circumstance where you have no bearing on your surroundings.
So you can't tell which direction is up or down. It happens in plane flights oftentimes. When you're unfortunately in a death spiral, you don't know it because you don't have any sense of bearing relative to the outside experience. But what James Turrell did was filled rooms with haze and smoke so the people in that experience could no longer potentially tell which way was up or down.
So here, when you're having people walk under this, you're already disorienting them a bit by turning their head backwards, which is an uncommon view for most artwork. So I think just by changing the physiology of the individual into that posture, you have the potential for making all sorts of predisorientation moments.
I kind of don't want to end a segment when we've been talking about death and haze. But I have to. Marlee, you've been kind of ambushed by this subject. Is there anything you want to finish off before you close the segment out?
I just want to say that my experience with the Media Bridge is often one of disorientation, just flat out because of having to look up at it. And I am always afraid that I'm going to forget where I am and tumble down the stairs.
The Media Bridge does also play music or audio. And often, early in the morning when I'm walking to the library, I forget that it's playing music. And I'm wondering to myself, where is that music coming from? And it's the library Media Bridge.
So we will be back with more about creative disorientation with Mark Wentzel and Stuart Romm, after a music set.
File this set under LB1062.D48.
[THE MAYBELLINES, "WATCH OUT"]
[BLAST OFF COUNTRY STYLE, "COME OUT AND PLAY"]
That was "Come Out and Play" by Blast Off Country Style. Before that, we heard "Watch Out" by The Maybellines And we started our set with "See Ya" by Homeshake-- songs about starting a creative journey and being open to what comes next.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks. Our guests today are the artist Mark Wentzel and the architect Stuart Romm, who will be co-presenters in an event called Creative Disorientation, hosted by the Georgia Tech Library next week. And earlier, we heard about the moment that this all sort of gelled for Mark. Stuart, what do you remember? Did you have an a-ha moment? Or what do you remember from any conversations leading up to the event?
Well, in that conversation, it was very interesting to get the perspective that Mark had about the bridge, coming at it as an artist. And we, of course, as architects, look at it as a visual experience to do this particular Media Bridge as the connecting piece between the two historic libraries.
And so the challenge we always faced is would people find it compelling as an alternative way to have a community bulletin board for information, and for artists to use and for so many different things that could happen there. And the disorientation of the main screen, as we were previously talking about, from being frontal, like a jumbotron or a scoreboard, to a ceiling, it does have some history. The ceilings in Baroque churches and others were very, very much a place of reorientation.
They had anamorphic perspectives and things so that having single faith or multiple faith in what you're seeing was something that we thought was valuable to, again, reset people's expectations.
So, for me, it was just great to hear that that did seem to have some creative impetus when, in fact, Mark is coming into it with a series of workshops that we've been having on campus with students that have been really using their imaginations experimenting with different kinds of interactive content that could be there.
Not only would it be a one-way street of information flowing from the library and the Institute or others, but also could be, in real time, interactive with those that are observing, viewing it, and interacting with it. So that is a kind of workshop that we'll be continuing next week, where you really try to let a different kind of canvas or instrument that the Media Bridge is, hopefully spark new ways of seeing things, communicating, and being creative.
MARLEE GIVENS: Charlie never likes it when we talk about libraries and cathedrals in the same breath.
But I don't have a mic. So go for it.
No, that is something that really resonated with me. And the fact that we don't have that kind of ceiling experience at the library, we do look at things from the side. Or we might look at them top down. Is that something, Mark, that you've explored in any of your other work, just changing the orientation of the view itself?
Yes. If any of you are familiar with my early work when I moved here in 2008, in 2009, my inaugural work in Atlanta was to hang a 1965 Ford Mustang from the ceiling at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. We got engineers in to put in a beam. We hung it from a chain. It made me very nervous as I watched it get dragged across the floor and then and then lifted up into the air. CHARLIE BENNETT: That's kind of work that people will be like, oh, he did that? Yeah, perhaps.
CHARLIE BENNETT: The work sort of will transcend your reputation as an artist and just be this kind of event, right? Yes, people refer to that when they think of me sometimes. But that was because there you have the issue of mass and weight and real mass to deal with. And plus, you're looking at a vehicle that people were tempted to touch and push and swing. And that had a real impact on folks. And I recognize that. And subsequent works, I don't need to go into them.
But I often cue into those things. What are the types of works that cause people to have a certain response? This won't be the case in the Media Bridge. But for a lot of my work, I'm very flattered when people say, can I touch it? And I try to make some works that I can say yes to, that are durable enough that that response is there.
But there are other responses, I think, that are equally as affirming that the work is performing its function as offsetting the individual psyche about what's going on.
So I want to open a can of worms right now that we won't be able to fully put back in until next segment. But part of what this event is going to do, we hope, is give folks who are maybe students in studio classes, who are having, if not trouble, then have only a few strategies to open up their creative space. Right?
And so when I hear you say the car and it scared you because it was this massive thing that I assume could kill someone if something went wrong, I wonder if you start in that place of saying, I want to do something shocking, something dangerous. Or if you find your way to that through some other sort of mode of bringing in ideas. At what point are you saying, I want to do the thing that will disorient the viewer?
And at what point are you simply saying, how can I find an idea that I can work with?
I think if you just go for that effect, the phenomenon, I think you lose a lot of value in the work in the long term. And it gets lost behind that. I think if the object or image behind it has a reference to something more about what you're doing, I think that's the key point for me. Right now, I was telling Stuart earlier I have a scale model of the Washington Monument at 10 feet hanging perpendicular off the wall at a current space at the Westminster schools.
It's only 22 inches off the ground, seating height, it's called Seat of Democracy. But the same effect applies. And this is a prototype for an actual work. But the students are walking through the space already. I got to see them last night. And so you can see them stop and look and then move toward it and then touch it because it has a certain instability. My point wasn't to get people to look at a thing that's cantilevered off the wall 10 feet. My point is to direct them toward a concept.
And I'm hoping-- I'm doing parallel programming with Westminster over the next couple of weeks. And I want to see how they can interact with that and understand the potential and the meaning and the value of it, but using that initial, like, oh, wow.
Well, this is Lost in the Stacks. And we're going to hear more about creative disorientation on the left side of the hour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey this is Damian from OK Go. And you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.
[ANGRY ANGELS, "SET IN STONE"]
Our show today is called "Creative Disorientation." For the midshow break, I'd like to read to you from a book called Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future by Margaret J. Wheatley. "We can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion. Cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for the new. Of course, it's scary to give up what we know. But the abyss is where newness lives." Excuse me, everyone.
"Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing. If we can move through the fear and enter the abyss, we are rewarded greatly. We rediscover we're creative." I had a kind of a creative pronunciation of "lives" there. I was sort of disoriented.
It worked though. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, all right. Thank you, Fred. File this next set under NC750.G5 and say all the words right.
[THE CRIBS, "DIFFERENT ANGLE"]
That was "Different Angle" by The Cribs. And before that, "Set in Stone" by Angry Angles. You're just trying to screw me up here, Fred. Angles all over the place.
The angles and the cribs. And those are songs about being stuck in one way of thinking and then breaking out.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks. And we return to our conversation with the co-presenters for the upcoming Georgia Tech Library event Creative Disorientation. Speaking of disrupting the creative process--
Hey, dude.
And we're with the artist Mark Wentzel and architect Stuart Romm. So, Stuart, I'm going to start this section with you. Creative disorientation is all about surprise connections and so, as an architect, when you're designing something, there's the creative disorientation that the artist experience. And then there's the creative disorientation by the person perceiving that art or architecture or building or design. Do you-- I don't know if the right word is priority.
Do you put a priority on either one? Do you want to lead the person seeing your work to a particular kind of disorientation? Or do you want to inspire their own?
Well, interesting question. It really it's a kind of reciprocal action I think. As an architect we do try to provide an impetus for that creative disorientation. And that's why, in fact, the bridge was designed in a particular way. We've already talked about-- in fact, your last music was about different angles. The different angle of viewing and that ergonomic difference from looking ahead or up does have an important mode of re-seeing things.
And then we also introduced angles into the glass skin of the bridge. We've been talking about the ceiling. But it also, along its facades, has a prismatic series of angles that reflect the information and creates a disorientation. Because from the inside of the bridge, students experience, actually, that all of the information has been inverted. It seems totally illegible. And why would that be, in fact?
And that's because, in fact, when reflected to the outside, an outside viewer sees it legible. But that's, for us, an impetus to thinking about the sources of information. How dependable are they? Where your living in an age now where, increasingly, how do we trust information? So with that inversions and flips and things, it does cause then, we hope, the viewer to question things, the sources, their own orientations, their viewpoints.
You see different information streams if you're looking from the west side of the bridge to the east side, depending on the angles of refraction in the glass. So these are all tools that we as architects use to try to cause creative, in a sense, disorientation. CHARLIE BENNETT: No, go ahead, Fred.
Oh, I was going to put the same question to Mark. Do you have a thought on whether the disorientation is-- your priority is the disorientation that you feel to your creative process versus what the observer of your art might feel?
Sure, I think the thing that resonated when Stuart was talking is that, when you're talking about the public, you're inevitably talking about safety. And so you have these limitations that you can't step across.
When you dangle a Mustang from the ceiling, you can't use just a nylon rope.
That's correct. But that's also not in a-- it's in a public space generally, but not out in the open in the public under the auspices of a public institution, like Georgia Tech. So the compounding factor of safety I experienced at Westminster yesterday opening the show there with what sort of issues-- do we need to put stanchions up to protect the students, the work, so forth? So you have to be careful. I mean, you have to be somewhat pragmatic.
The sky is not the limit when you're working that way. So you look for those opportunities where it's within reason. And then you have to work with professionals to say, OK, get a structural engineer to put the beam up. So you don't have to worry about it. And that, to me, I love working with other people who have skills outside of mine that can answer those questions. It's a really fun challenge for me.
Although there's all sorts of work that I think the challenge is embedded in the content of the work itself. So those don't necessarily apply to the rules of, as we're talking about, disorientation. CHARLIE BENNETT: It's been really fun to hear you two talk about your responses to what each other has said. It seems like we lucked out, that putting you two together kind of created a creative conversation.
How are you channeling this into the event that we're talking about, this next week's Creative Disorientation? They're looking at each other like they don't know who's going to go first. Well, I think some of it will be spontaneous. And we haven't fleshed out the details yet. But the way I see it is we have two opportunities. One is to introduce creativity.
And the other is to introduce disorientation and then play on those two simultaneously, talk about the nature of them, give examples in our own experiences, whether they're creative or not, or in the architectural realm or not, but then to implement them in short term. We won't make any magical transitions into developing creative minds overnight, but getting samples of what are the conditions under which you might find new visions, new realities in the moment.
And then, for me, the workshop at the end, trying to learn how one might extract those things and get them into concrete information, like drawing material or some-- what's the matter that catches the ideas that emerge from those circumstances? So there's a bit of timing that goes on with it.
Nice.
Well, I would just add that, yes, the opportunity is really the convergence of different perspectives from different orientations to art and information and scholarship, all the different things-- which has been our own history, mine and others-- on campus to bring students together from different programs and different skill sets to crucible and common intersection of their ideas. Because they spark each other with different viewpoints.
And I think our different viewpoints really does provoke different ways of thinking about it that's always the very healthy form of collaboration. It's really the core mission of the library, is as a nexus, a kind of hub of people coming together from different backgrounds and knowledge bases, has been a really creative opportunity for us.
I really want to do a companion show to this where we get a bunch of weird studio experiments and people who've kind of crashed together. Like, somehow, I want to get into maggot brain and how that happened because I feel like it connects to everything that's being said in this show right now.
Charlie, I want to bring up AI. I don't know if I should bring up AI.
Go for it. We got a couple of minutes. I'm delighted by everything we've gotten to. And we have a few minutes for you to indulge your basest nature's Fred.
Yeah. And I think, all three, you and Marlee and I were kind of mentioning this off air during the music break. But is AI useful as a creative disorientor, just putting a prompt in and getting something out that maybe you don't expect?
And you have one minute to answer.
[LAUGHTER]
It's disorienting me a lot.
Right.
Yeah, I remember the moment I was introduced to the concept as a threat. I went out for coffee with a friend. And he just started talking about it. And I was not totally familiar with the implications of AI at that moment. And he went on to say, you're at risk because you're a visual artist. Your information will go out there, inevitably, in digital form and then be available for other things to use.
It'll train the robots.
Exactly. So I've lingered on that quite a bit. And it leaves me with a sentiment, something to the effect of that the only thing we can really do is the thing that only we can do. And the we meaning the I, individual. And but then, it's a large beast to reckon with. So I mean, in all cases, when you're working with unruly materials or circumstances, environments, you're set up against a larger challenge. I just don't know the scale of this challenge. It seems daunting.
And let's not leave Stuart out.
Well, all right. Well, I would also just say that, for me too, there's some trepidation about the advent of AI. But I remember having that all along the way. I'm old enough to have remembered different thresholds we've crossed as architects into the digital world and being concerned about their threat to just replacing humans with automated labor and things like that. And I think that's still a concern out there for us as a profession in architecture.
But teaching it and starting to explore it, I have a current studio that's in an international competition on AI and biomimicry. And we're all learning. And it does seem to have some very interesting ways of opening up our eyes and our worlds to some very different ways of re-imagining the future and, well, even the present. So overall, I'm going to stay open to see where this goes.
And I'm really happy to be in an Institute like Georgia Tech, where students and researchers and faculty can explore what the consequences are of AI.
Aren't we all? Our guests today were the artist Mark Wentzel and Stuart Romm, professor of the practice in the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech. And they are co-presenters for the upcoming Georgia Tech Library event called Creative Disorientation. Thanks both of you for joining us today.
Thank you for having us.
Yes, very much enjoyed it. Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
File this set under RM324.8.P78.
[KULA SHAKER, "TATTVA"]
[BLACKBURN & SNOW, "STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND"]
That was "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Blackburn & Snow. And before that, "Tattva" by Kula Shaker. Those were songs about opening your mind and dissociating yourself from the familiar.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show is called "Creative Disorientation." It's named after the event at the Georgia Tech Library happening on Wednesday, October 8 at 2:00 PM in the Crosland tower.
Our guests Mark Wentzel and Stuart Romm will present an exploration of creativity, public art, and the Georgia Tech library's Media Bridge along with a hands-on creativity exercise.
You can find out more about the event at the Georgia Tech Library website library.gatech.edu. And with that, please roll a non-AI credit.
Maybe this will disorient you.
Mm-hmm.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens.
Legal counsel and some heavy duty chains maybe to hang up my 2006 Hyundai Tucson. I don't know. CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, please do, Fred. Yeah. That would be cool, from a ceiling. Those are provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Special Thanks to Stuart and Mark for being on the show, to Andrew Sawyer, Allison Volk, and everyone in the Interdisciplinary Media Arts Center for organizing Creative Disorientation. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week we're going to replay our "Under the Media Bridge" episode since it goes so well with this one. And we'll be back with a new episode the week after that.
It's time for our last song today. And it's another 1960s-era, psychedelic classic. We started with one. So we'll end with one. It's also a reminder that, if you let your mind get a little disoriented, it feels a little more free. And you can take your creativity far.
A little disoriented, Fred?
Perhaps as far as "3/5 of a Mile--
A little disoriented?
--in 10 seconds," which is the name of this song by Jefferson Airplane. Have a great weekend, everybody. Get disoriented.
[JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, "3/5 OF A MILE IN 10 SECONDS"]