Episode 592: What's on the Price Gilbert Windows?

So the full interview will land on the podcast feed sometime next week. Don't write me a letter.

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So taking on this residency, the question was how and why do you do a residency at Georgia Tech in the library? It's got to be specific to that. And so that's this question of art and technology and the conversation between the two. I mean, that's something that I've been working on in my practice and also when I was teaching here for a long time. But this was a real opportunity to challenge art and technology to challenge each other and to make something new.

And so that was really important to me to be engaged with students and faculty, to test and push research such that we can make something totally new. And that was really important. And the end product, honestly, hopefully, it's going to be really beautiful. Actually, it's going to be really beautiful, no question about it. But in some ways, the end product of a residency is much less important than the process of a residency.

You don't necessarily know where you're going to end up when you go into a residency, whereas if I have a professional commission, it's much more linear, and there are the thresholds and approvals. And if you get to the end and it's not what you all agreed on, that's less OK than when you're doing a residency. So this is much more about experimentation. CHARLIE BENNETT: And so the artwork that's on the terrace of the library, that was a commission. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Correct.

What were the guardrails on that project? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: The literal guardrails-- so the project is called Crosland Chroma. Croslin is the tower, Crosland tower-- Chroma, which I'll explain in a second, but let me tell the back story to that. So the way I describe the piece is that it's the love child of public art and public safety after the renovation of the library.

And they have this incredible double terraces on the seventh floor, spectacular views of midtown, downtown, spectacular sunsets. So students were loving it up there. But there was a safety concern in terms of students being able to get to the edge or put themselves in unsafe positions because people really liked the view. And so they would sit on the edge and hang their feet over it literally. So there was a safety concern there.

And then I think the dean, along with other leadership at the institute said, OK, if we've got this safety issue, let's not just think about it in terms of safety. Let's think about how do we merge a need with a desire. And so that's why I describe it as a lovechild of public art and public safety.

So the piece is called Crosland Chroma and it's 182 dichroic polycarbonate-- sorry for all the verbiage-- dichroic polycarbonate fins, so basically a kind of multichromatic film, which takes light and breaks it into component colors. That's the simple version. But it does it based on the angle of incidence. And so the fins start in one direction and twist 90 degrees as they go up and are then tensioned to create a kind of barrier so that people can't get to the edge.

So that's kind of satisfying the public safety component. The conceptual component and the artistic component is dealing with the idea of knowledge. So historically in the Western tradition, probably in most traditions, light, white light, fully constituted light having all of the spectral components represents the body of knowledge, a diverse body of knowledge. And then each of the components, or each of the colors, represents the diverse body of knowledge.

So the idea is that you can take sunlight, which is fully constituted knowledge, and break that into all of its constituent parts. And really, that's what the library does. That's what the library is. The library is a universe to itself. Diversity is about diversity of thought that all comes together to create this whole that's greater than the sum of the parts. And this is almost like the opposite of library.

If the library is all of the constituent parts coming together to make the universal knowledge, what Crosland Chroma does is it takes white light and breaks it into the constituent parts. So it's like playing the library backwards. Did you have that metaphor in your mind before you got to the project? Is that kind of how you thought of things and thought of the library? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: That is-- do you mean for the residency or for Chroma. For Chroma. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Oh, for sure.

Certainly. So that was in your head, kind of floating around, and then you found a place for it? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Nothing is ever linear like that, in my experience. And this project that we'll talk about here is also not linear. It's elliptical. These things are very much elliptical. I'm going to talk about elliptical--

And so there's a distance between the idea, the representation, and the material artifact. For me, that space is collapsed. And so I'm always working directly. I build my own work, make my own work, fabricate it, always with many collaborators. Is that a pleasing tension for you? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Pleasing and exhausting. Yeah, it is.

It's actually-- up to this point-- I mean, who knows what the future will hold-- but up to this point, that tension is, in fact, the fundamental tension because I'm not really that interested in ideas that are devoid of the material world. And I'm not really interested in material things that don't have ideas. So one of the other things that was sort of a core idea of this residency was how to take a text and how to read that text and translate it into some sort of artwork under the library.

So how do you literally dematerialize the library and make transparent or illuminate the knowledge which is held within the library? So it's very Gothic in that way. Or you can think of the other classic example would be Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve in Paris, which has all of the names of the authors inscribed in the facade of the building-- that same sort of idea. So, to me, that's very site-specific, incredibly site-specific.

Yeah, beyond the idea of this is a piece of art that's in a place-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Correct. CHARLIE BENNETT: Something much more. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Correct. We're going to let all the listeners sort of see this for themselves, eventually, but we do have to describe a little bit what's going on. We've got these huge windows on the north side of the library broken into squares that are offset. So it's, like, 170 feet of glass.

And did you know that that's where you wanted to go with this artwork right away or did you have to move through the build and track down your canvas? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: The idea, the intent, originally, was not to work on the north facade, the glass facade.

The original intent, which we proposed and were denied, was to take the brick of Crosland Tower, either on the west side or the east side-- the east side would have been fantastic because it would have been visible from all of the towers in Midtown-- and to basically create a palimpsest of the robot drawing for six months nonstop and just drawing over itself and over itself and over itself and over itself. I can't imagine why that was denied. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: We got that close.

I found the anti-graffiti that would have allowed us to clean it and everything. We tested it, but no. It was denied. But the point there is that it started from that idea and then had to translate for practical reasons. But that also started from Gerry's original work. And I'd ask Gerry to describe the background of his work and what motivates it, if that's OK. We will discuss Gerry's work, but in the next segment.

So I use this cable-based robot which, unlike a typical robot arm, which is a bunch of rigid metal links and really heavy motors, instead, you have just strings and you have motors on the other side of these strings that wind up these strings or let out the strings. You can then tie these strings to the spray paint can in the center and then pull the spray paint can around.

And the nice thing about this is that if you want to make something that's 10 times as big, you just buy 10 times as much string. It's pretty easy and pretty cheap. So this is one of the reasons that graffiti is an excellent application for this type of robot. Of course, the weakness is that it's not very stiff, so if there's wind, it's going to flop around a little bit. And these are all engineering challenges that we have to deal with.

So this robot is like a skycam, except rather than moving around horizontally, you flip it on its side, and then it paints on a wall.

So one example in the library is because it does have these wobbles, a lot of the lines, especially in certain areas and certain locations, it is more wobbly than others. And there's some artistic value, I think, to revealing what actually was the artist that created this-- having the transparency of what created that.

Gerry was using the lab to test I guess probably not your original, but probably the first large-scale really functioning graffiti robot at the lab. And so I saw that, and I was really interested in what he was doing there. I thought it was great. He's a great guy. That matters-- comes with working with people. So it was sort of always in the back of my mind. And then, when this residency came to fruition, it seemed like the perfect opportunity.

And then again, thinking about this idea is how do we dematerialize the library with a six-month continuous live drawing. It was kind of a perfect match, though we didn't get to do exactly the thing. But the idea was there. And so I started talking to Gerry. Beyond the technical stuff, Gerry has been talking about what do computers do, what do robots do, what machines do, what do humans do, and where do you find the intersection between what each entity, element does within a system.

That's a question that I've been interested in for a long time. So myself and some colleagues around 2010, we're doing projects and working on papers around this idea of the DAM paradigm. So the DAM was digitally-augmented making. And it's almost obvious now, 15 years later, but the question then was how do we collaborate and create with machines, with intelligence, and then the whole thing of AI. We can-- that's a whole other thing.

But how do we collaborate with machines in such a way that humans are allowed to do what they do really well and machines are allowed to do what they do really well? And together, you get something bigger than either one by itself. And so that's what we're sort of calling the DAM paradigm. I was already interested in that.

And then seeing that Gerry was doing that, he was doing some other things with trying to understand how artists-- the kinematics of how artists move, graffiti artists, and sort of arcing of arms and all of that, and that came back into this project. I thought this is a perfect opportunity. So your original idea was on the outside of the library in huge scale. And then that was-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: 80 feet tall by 40 feet wide brick wall. CHARLIE BENNETT: Layer after layer.

TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Layer after layer, like just build it up. It would be, like, 3 inches thick and in six months, it would be amazing. How did that then translate into the window on the inside? I'm really interested in if there's an epiphany moment of this is where we're going to do it and this is how we're going to change the idea. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Well, there was just the practical-- the practicality of being told no. That's number one.

And so then the next question was, OK, well, what is a site in the building or what is a context within the building where this can work from a practical perspective? It can't be a permanent thing, so glass makes a lot of sense. And then the north facade of the building has an incredible view from both inside and outside as you're kind of coming up the hill. So there's this duality of inside outside.

You get to see your past as you're working on-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I get to look at the architecture building and have some trauma.

There's really spectacular day to night transformation that did impact the composition in terms of the color, the choice of colors, the white and black. Basically, there's a reversal offset-- --from the sunset or is it-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: No, simply that, during the day-- so in the final composition which, for me, is an aesthetic diagram more than a mural, frankly-- Hold on to that thought. We're going to get back to that. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: OK, so we have three colors.

One is pure black, one is pure white, and then we have this beautiful magenta kind of in the middle. So during the day, the black or the blue background has this really strong graphic effect. But the white sort of dissolves. Vice versa-- if you're outside looking in, the black dissolves. The white comes forward because you have the darker interior. And at night, that reverses. Yeah, is that just like a thrill, when you can find multiple viewpoints? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Oh, for sure.

I mean, for me, personally, I'll say that my work is generally difficult to photograph because it's really about how it changes, either through your movement, its movement, or the change of lighting conditions. So yeah, it's very thrilling. I mean, any work that has the capacity to transform itself and its experience-- that's sort of the holy grail for me.

What do you think of all the changes since you started school and have watched the library as a student and as a faculty member? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah, so like I said, I came to Georgia Tech campus in 1996 as a freshman. And this library was very different, very, very, very different. There were books. There were lots of books. And, of course, there are books in the library now, but there were lots and lots of books in the library. Crosland Tower was just stacks.

And we talked about Lost in the Stacks-- you could really get lost in Crosland in the stacks. And I used to. It was wonderful. It was really like a little labyrinth. So if you were in Crosland Tower, you were literally lost in a labyrinth of books. And it was quite fantastic. As libraries do, as libraries have, this library has transformed tremendously from that time until now. And at that time, it was still sort of a sacred library it was quiet.

Everybody was studying and you weren't really supposed to talk or you'd have to go outside. You certainly didn't take phone calls in the library. But now the library is a completely different construct. Now the library is really about-- for me, the library is really about creativity, collaboration, conversation. And I think that's interesting for this project because, literally, we are transforming the library into a studio.

Right now, we are actively making large-scale artwork, which is technologically enabled in the library. And that's pretty exciting. Certainly, I would not have imagined that in the '90s. Could you just wait? Now.

Our guests are Tristan Al-Haddad and Gerry Chen, two of the team that has created the work of art Polycentric Truthes, which is, yeah, on the Price Gilbert windows. The work is, in part, based on the text of the book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei-- that Galileo. I asked Tristan to explain the book and why he was using it. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: So basically, it's a dialogue. It's structured as a dialogue.

It's almost like a play, and it's structured as four days, day 1, 2, 3, 4. And each day is kind of a different argument. And there are three characters. There are two protagonists and one antagonist, Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio. Simplicio, obviously, he's the antagonist. And the basic premise is to make an argument, to make a rhetorical argument for the Copernican model of the universe as compared to the Ptolemaic. What does all that mean?

We collectively, in the West, used to believe that the sun and the entire universe rotated around us, the Earth-- very egocentric, right? I mean, obviously. But that's not what happens. And that's the Ptolemaic model. So Galileo was arguing for the Copernican model, that we are actually rotating around the sun and the universe is much more complex than we had generally believed, even though that's not true because there were ancient Greek astronomers who had this same model.

This was quite well-known. This comes back to the piece, which we can talk about a little bit more, which is called Polycentric Truthes-- how do we construct arguments? How do we build worlds? We really only looked at day one and translated day one because you've got to limit yourself. And translated meaning-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: So that it could be transformed.

And the way that I sort of described it is that it could be dematerialized and rematerialized code, and that code could then be rematerialized as image or symbol. So the dematerialize is talking about the translation. It's no longer the text that we can see and read. It's something else that can then be expressed through a different tool. Is that-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: That's correct.

Whenever I read almost anything, including novels, if I can't translate it into something that's nontext-based, it doesn't ever really stick. That's the first-order translation from text idea into some other format, some other symbology that makes sense to me. They're drawings. They're really drawings. You translate it first, like images and annotations and sort of a series of symbols or just symbols that seem to reflect-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Well, right now, this doesn't mean anything.

This is just me trying to understand. This is, to use the architectural analogy, this is like a Carlo Scarpa, sort of drawing in the margins, figuring things out. So this is not about composition. This is about this is about understanding and translating something into nontext format. CHARLIE BENNETT: One of the phrases that came up in our conversation and in descriptions of the project was human-style movement. I asked Gerry to talk more about that.

And this is a really core part of my thesis, which is, how do you translate these human motions into graffiti spray painting motions? The first is, when we record human graffiti artists actually spray painting graffiti, they're moving with motions that are reasonable. The spray paint-- you can't move it too fast because then it'll be too thin of paint. But you also can't move it too slow or else it'll drip. And humans, when they're actually painting, they have a very good idea of this.

So then, when we translate it to the robot, we have to do very minimal things to make it work well. But if you have someone, for example, painting on a piece of paper or painting on an iPad or something like that, suddenly, all that dynamics intuition is lost. And then when you translate it to the robot, it really looks like trash. So you really have to do a lot of fixing to make it work well.

And then, finally, this third stage, working with Tristan-- so he is taking the text and translating it into this architectural design software. But then I don't understand this architectural design software, and the robot doesn't understand this architectural design software. So we have to have another translation to go translate into code that both I can understand and translate that code into code that the robot can understand.

Each one of those steps-- there's always interesting subtleties about the particular features of each representation and what care you have to take in order to-- well yeah, in order to translate between any two representations.

Translating a lot of what we've been working on-- so I should say that we ran two mechanical engineering capstone projects to develop the wet dip because we're no longer using spray paint. And that was a technical constraint of being inside, of having the depth of the buoy [?] and all sorts of things. But also, for me conceptually, I wanted to get all of the imperfections, the drips, the dips, the starts, the stops that would be unique to the robot rather than to a human.

We did two mechanical engineering capstones to develop a small robotic arm that was capable of taking a brush, an actual brush, dipping it in wet paint on one side of the cable robot, and then turning around and going and pushing against the glass with 6 inches of depth. I'm nervous just hearing the description of it. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: It's been very challenging, but very rewarding as well.

Everybody's in their own little ecochamber and not necessarily talking to each other. That's going to become even more important with artificial intelligence and all of the kind of stuff that's going to be produced. So, on the one hand, it's a reflection and translation of the text.

On the other hand, it's a reflection and maybe a projection of society in terms of what the kind of conceptual content of the piece is, but then from a process, a research experimental perspective, it's all of those other things. CHARLIE BENNETT: I know you don't want to describe the end result like, oh, it'll be a square or it'll be-- I mean, it won't. But what will people see? What's the process that people will see when this artistic project starts, does its thing, and then stops?

And then so we'll paint about-- it's about 19 feet worth of glass, and then we'll pull down the robot, move to the next 19 feet, and then continue painting from there. And then slowly, slowly, piece by piece, then we can finish the entire bank of windows. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: The cable robot has limits in terms of what it can reach. So basically, we have to move the entire infrastructure, each bay of the facade. So there will be seven bays that we're actually painting on.

We're not painting in the flanking mezzanine areas for a variety of reasons.