Interview with Kelli Anderson

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Aaron Zarovsky. [00:00:03] Speaker B: And I'm Austin Shaw. [00:00:04] Speaker A: This is between the Keyframes episode 32 interview with Kelly Anderson what's up, everybody? [00:00:13] Speaker B: We are here with Kelly Anderson. Super excited to get to chat and to learn some more about Kelly. Yeah, Reese. Uh, Kelly did a workshop with the students at Western at Western Washington University. It was super fun. Students were engaged basically from the start, like, right from the get go all the way through two day workshop. And it was really was it was a great end of the year celebration. So just to get a chance to chat with you some more. Yeah, we're real excited for that. [00:00:49] Speaker A: Welcome. [00:00:50] Speaker C: Thanks for having me. [00:00:51] Speaker B: Absolutely. Just to get things started, because I think you're a very interesting person. And I don't know if you would necessarily call yourself like a motion designer, right? Like a traditional motion designer. But you do a lot of motion work, but you seem like a really eclectic, creative person. Right. And then you kind of work between fine art and commercial art, design work and education, professional practice, all of it. Right. I know you've spoken at the Blend Festival, so I know at the minimum, you're at least motion adjacent. Yeah, but I don't know, would you consider yourself a motion designer or how do you even describe yourself? [00:01:33] Speaker C: Yeah, I guess there's a couple of different things that I do, but motion design is part of it. And I accidentally became a motion designer as much as that's possible because I had constructed basically I was working on all of the illustrations for an app for my friends at Tiny BOP. There were illustrations of 265 parts of the human body. And I thought, what would be a fun gift to give my friends but to cut out all of these body parts and make this giant, child size paper corpse. And so I did that. And then as soon as this thing was on my desk, I was like, well, it needs to be animated. Like, it needs to eat pizza. It needs to pump blood through its veins. And so I started trying my hand at stop motion. I don't know if it's arrogance or what, but I figure if someone else has done it before, then I can figure it out. And so I had seen that other people had done stop motion, and so I shot a stop motion of this, and it was very popular. It ended up on Radio Lab all over the place. And I had a lot of fun doing it. It didn't feel like work because it really wasn't in the future. It kind of felt like work. Once people start hiring you to do anything, for some reason, it becomes less fun. But I don't know why. It's like a law of physics. But yeah, so I started doing animation that way. And recently, these past few years, kind of like whatever technology I've access to, I'm very curious about technology. I gained access to a Rizo printer, so I have my paper cutter, which has been kind of unloved. It's a new piece of technology, is the Rizo printer. And I came up with this technique where I would do animation on the Rizo and that's really taken off and kind of become like a worldwide phenomenon. Every month we teach a Rizo animation workshop. That's kind of my experience with animation. I haven't ever taken a class. [00:03:41] Speaker A: Maybe I should, maybe you shouldn't. I think, like, that is what is awesome about this. And I think so many people think of technology as a barrier, but it's not. You just got to get started. You just got to start making thing. And usually not knowing how to do it creates a process that adds to the whole motion vocabulary. In a way, it's really kind of cool. Because then what happens is a company like mine will get that as a reference, and we'll try and figure out a way to do that in a procedural way, which means that a client can add comments and things along the way. And we're not going back to square one and reprinting and doing all that kind of stuff. So it evolves everything in a really beautiful way. [00:04:31] Speaker C: Yeah, I think you really just have to embrace the idea of being okay with using technology the wrong way and totally being like, this is my style, this is my artistic style. It's not that I don't know how to use the Rizo, but yeah, if you really don't care what the thing is supposed to be used for and just develop your own way, that's a very efficient route to having a unique style. [00:04:57] Speaker A: Love that. Kelly, tell us about your background. [00:05:02] Speaker B: And I think maybe even just to go a step back too. I mean, I'm real curious just to hear I know we talked a little bit about your background, but maybe just where where you got started and what were some of your early interests, maybe even before college. Yeah. What was your artistic drives? [00:05:21] Speaker A: Totally. [00:05:22] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, I've always really been interested in both art and science, art and technology. So in high school and I have the most boring bio as an art kid also, like, I was in the talent art classes when I was a little tiny kid. And then when I was in high school, I went to an arts magnet high school. Then when I got into college, I studied studio art. And so it's kind of like the most predictable biography you can ever imagine. But when I was in high school, most of my work was doing paintings of kind of, like, absurdist, surrealist math problems, like two hamsters divided by carrot equals toast or something. So I was always kind of combining this analytical, scientific way of thinking with absurdity and things that typically don't belong there. But I think that in my professional life, I went to grad school for studio art and for art history, but all the while, I was being hired by friends who know bands or cable access TV shows or production companies. They were like, oh, Kelly, you should do the visuals for this. And it was only after I graduated with two degrees not in design, that I realized that, oh, I'm a so I think that I began embracing that after grad school, that I was a designer and then started doing more client work and products. It just never really appealed to me, the idea of being a fine artist, having to kind of, like, hide in my studio for half the year and work on a body of work and then only emerge to have a gallery show. The pacing of a designer's life is more fun because it feels more like kind of like a tinkering give and take with the external world, rather than just coming out dramatically a couple of times a year and saying, look what I've been working. [00:07:36] Speaker A: Fun. [00:07:37] Speaker C: It's a more fun way to exist in New York City too, because there's a lot that happens here that's fun to be a part of. Culture is so vibrant here that it's nice to be a part of that. So I'm rambling, but that's some no. [00:07:50] Speaker B: I totally resonate with that because I studied studio art in my undergrad and similar. Right. I always had the interest of always drawing as a kid, and it was really normal for me to go into that. Came from a family of professional artists and even grad school. I started as art ed and had, like, an elective in design and was just like, what's happening over here? When you just shared about that thought of, like, oh, I'm a designer, I was like, yeah, I totally resonated with that because not that I always love making, and I love that whole process and the expression, but there was definitely I don't know. For me, the design gave me a bit of maybe a focus to kind of put my energy and have a little more of a framework that, at least for me as a studio artist, I didn't really have, especially it's like a young 20 something. I just didn't have it. [00:08:53] Speaker A: I think the way you describe art and design and how it relates to was really beautiful. I've never heard it put that way. I don't think there's really a big difference between art and design except for what you describe. Like, when you're a designer, you have a brief and a client, but the process is the same, but the world is giving you inputs to work from. You're still creating the thing in your special, unique way that makes you you. So I think I don't know. This is, like a really lovely conversation just about the difference between art and design and how you can be both, but how I do think that most artists are designers to some extent, you know what I mean? Without question. [00:09:45] Speaker C: Yeah. I feel like having a degree in studio art. It prepares you so well for kind of like what you're going to do when you're alone, working on things, whether you're an artist or designer, like how to have a conversation with material, how to think about the larger context of culture and where you fit into it, how to engage with that subject matter. But I think ultimately we all exist in capitalism and that means different things in different fields. And you kind of need to both find a good philosophical fit for how you think, but then also something that will make your lifestyle sustainable. And for me, I kind of just need interaction with I start feeling shut off from the outside world very quickly if I don't have conversations with friends or clients or just release products into the world. See, this is why I'm always posting on Instagram because it feels like, oh, that's like outside of my head. That's what I want to engage with. [00:10:55] Speaker B: But you do some fine art projects though too, right? Like installations. Am I correct? [00:11:01] Speaker C: Yeah, I guess it depends on who is defining it at this point. I recently had a solo show at the center for Book Arts here in New York. But there was sort of a didactic dimension to it. And so I think a lot of times, a lot of people would call that design. It wasn't heavy handed didactic, it wasn't like walking into a children's museum. But it was a show that is all about where letter forms come from. Why do we have this diversity of typography? And the answer is usually some mix of culture and the technology that produced the letter forms. That's where those specific shapes come from. And that's why you can look at a letter and be like, oh, I get a medieval vibe from that, or like whatever. And so it was a show that was about for example, there was a pixel table where I had polarization filter that you could turn and turn on and off pixels, which explained in a visceral way, like how antialiasing works. Like why this early video game fonts look kind of like blocky and stairsteppy? And why this technology of antialiasing was introduced to feather those things. And so playing with materials, with a curiosity that is similar to an artist. But ultimately, I think within the context of that show, I think it was probably more of like a designer, but I want to work on things that are less didactic, have less of a know in the future. But I made that show with the center for Book Arts because I have a book coming out next year about typography and technology, which is like an interactive pop up book. And so I had a lot of good material that was just like bursting out of me that I needed some kind of form. [00:12:56] Speaker A: That's great. Why does art history matter? [00:13:04] Speaker B: I think what's interesting too, I mean, you had said something about studio art practice and having that studio art practice is a great preparation for really a commercial art or designer's ability to practice. The other thing I think is interesting is that you had that double master's, second master's in art history because I've been thinking about that a lot and I think about the workshop that you did and the interspersed and I'll just kind of paint the picture for Aaron and for our listeners. Had you introduced techniques and you showed the students how to do it and they got into it and they were making stuff and folding, but then you would kind of dip into a lecture presentation lecture, right. Where you'd show some different studio artists, like real art history, whether it was like Calder and Bruno Menari I think yeah, which I thought was great because it was giving a little more context beyond just, okay, this is a craft technique. It was like, no, this is a technique, but this is where it's rooted in a tradition of other artists and creative processes and thinking. I guess the big question here is why does art history matter? And it's one of those questions I have with students all the time, especially students who are complaining, why do we got to take all these art history classes? And I try to explain why I think it's important, but to me it seems like it's a pretty important part of your practice. Why do you think it matters? [00:14:41] Speaker C: Well, I don't want to be prescriptive and say that it matters to everyone. I think that there are some people's art practice that really comes out of their first hand lived experience and it doesn't matter as much. For me, I am really interested in the history of ideas. I get really inspired by the history of ideas. And I find it very satisfying that things have an answer to the question of why? Why did it look like that? Why did someone make it like that? And the kind of human and emotional truth that it connects to and how it can illustrate an entire era's values and way of thinking. There's something about that where it's something that I just really crave. We're all stuck within our bodies in terms of experiencing the world. We only have these eyes to see the world through in these feet. But art is a way of experiencing beyond. It's like having a superpower, an empathic superpower where you can experience things beyond your own self. And so I find that really compelling. And no matter what period of art history I'm studying, I can get really deeply into it. But from a practical perspective in the studio, I've never really considered myself a verbal person. And maybe I'm getting to the point where now I've actually written a couple of books. I have to change that opinion of myself, but I've always felt like I could understand viscerally a lot more than I could verbally communicate. And so forcing myself to take our history, to try to articulate these ideas, which were visual ideas or sensory ideas, was something that felt important, like I should push myself to do it. And it's paid off that Ted Talk did very well. And I keep on getting invited to speak at different universities, and I'm able to teach what I do. And I've also honestly, I feel like there's something a little bit embarrassing in admitting this because I think a lot of people are kind of like Cartage formalists. I find a lot of ideas when I write about what I'm doing. I figure out what the next step is, not in a strategic way, just getting excited about the thing that I just made, understanding it on a deeper level. And then that just gives me a path to go to the next project to understand what the next thing is. Sometimes people can just find the next path through making. That's great too. I don't think any one way is better than another, but I think as an artist, you just need to have these different paths for legitimate ways forward that you're excited about. And that's kind of like the oxygen that keeps you going and keeps you from saying, oh, fuck it, I'm going to go become an investment banker, or whatever. [00:18:00] Speaker B: Well, you mentioned earlier about that idea of the conversation with materials, and then it's almost like this process you just described, it's almost like a conversation with self. Right? Like working it out through making. [00:18:14] Speaker C: Yeah. Oh, go ahead. [00:18:16] Speaker A: I was going to also add to that just the way you talk about speaking and writing about your work. I think that's often, at least, I see it a bit in our industry where the artist kind of feels like or the animator or the maker doesn't necessarily feel like they need those skills. And I don't think they need to have those skills perfected. But I think venturing into developing those skills makes them so much better at the actual thing as well. And whether we like it or not, we have clients, we have coworkers, we have peers that we need to communicate with that in a non visual way all the time. So I do think that that is a very important aspect of art and design. So it's lovely to hear how you've incorporated that into your own. [00:19:10] Speaker C: No, the wild thing is that I found with me that it's also about communicating with myself, like getting clarity. So a lot of times I want the freedom in the studio to not have an objective or a brief right, just to be able to see like, oh, that feels cool, and go with it. Because I feel like, a lot of what we do as artists and designers is intuitive that you're picking up on a vibe, you're picking up on you're, like, what is exciting to me and what feels cool and having faith that that will also resonate with other people. But I oftentimes feel like, oh gosh, I should have a reason. This is my career. It's important, whatever. But I found that it's really important to protect that. I'm just going to follow the this is cool feelings. And then it's called post facto rationalization. Sit there afterwards and be like, okay, why was that cool? Why is this interesting? And in that process of thinking things through. A great example of this was that paper record player wedding invitation project that I worked on where I was like, oh, this is really fun, and I'm into it and literally my house could have caught on fire, and I would have still been pursuing that project because I was so determined to get it right. But yeah, afterwards I was like, okay, I trust my feelings. Why did I have such strong feelings about this? And I started thinking about how even in our time of really high tech things, sophisticated tech things, where we're supposed to really that's how technology has progressed, is that things get more and more sophisticated. And so the fact that my audience responded in this oversized way to this very lo fi Paper record player, I was like, oh, well, this is interesting. I've stumbled upon a dimension in our relationship with things that modern tech doesn't get yet. And so it's kind of like my process was just kind of dumb. Like, this is cool. This is cool, following it. But then afterwards, I was like, actually the reason this resonates with me and resonates with other people is actually something profound which will help us think about our time and our things and technology. [00:21:38] Speaker A: Now, that record project, was that the piece that launched you? What was the big thing? Or was it a cumulative thing, like little slow baby steps to becoming known. [00:21:51] Speaker C: For would I would say it was kind of like these inflection points, and that was definitely one of them. Very close. That record player project, that was a wedding invitation for my friends Mike and Karen. And I just made a documentation video of it, wrote a little bit about it in a blog post and put on the Internet, and it went truly viral in a weird way. Like, I was invited on morningtime television shows and stuff. So I wasn't prepared for that because it was such an absurd object. It barely worked. It did not play music well. You could hardly even hear that it was a song. But people were really into it. And so it kind of started me thinking about Paper Tech and what the appeal of lo fi tech is and why that's still appealing to us. So that was a major moment. And then this is why Paper has kind of become a theme in my work. And another thing that came out a little bit earlier that year was this counterfeit New York Times that I worked on with the So. So there's an activist group called the yes Men. And they and a lot of our friends just were gathered in my apartment for like three weeks piecing together this fake New York Times which declared an end to the Iraq War, which was not over know, free tuition at all colleges, which was not a thing. Basically all of these progressive victories that people had been fighting for came true in this newspaper. And so we made a couple hundred thousand copies of those, got a ton of volunteers and just like blanketed Manhattan with this paper. Like here's the alternate reality for those were the beginning. [00:23:47] Speaker A: I'm super curious for that New York Times. Did the Times ever reach out to. [00:23:51] Speaker C: You guys about that or did they stay mean? The Times is interesting because they're not a monolith. Like for example, we had some writers who wrote for the New York Times, writing for our was that was a thing. The New York Times, like the branding department, I guess that department was displeased with us and sent us a cease and but we had the Electronic Frontier Foundation as our lawyers and they were clearly in the domain of parity and is protected. And so we were kind of like welcoming a fight because it would have been good for publicity and we felt like we were pretty protected. We also didn't personally publish the paper. We made an LLC and put like $1,000 in the bank and they published the paper just to give us some legal coverage. Yeah, just in case. Always a good idea. [00:24:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the project, it's like one part parody. It's kind of one part kind of performance too. And also just like a happening, which goes more into that, I guess, what we call fine art tradition, right? Like a performance based flux is happening. [00:25:09] Speaker C: It's funny because that was definitely a graphic design project. Like we designed a newspaper, but it is kind of like more fine art, right? Who knows? [00:25:20] Speaker A: That's definitely fine art. And it's parody. It's almost comedy parody, like late night style. It's interesting. I just often wonder, especially when we promote projects like that, when you have a college student or somebody looking to go out into the world, we do look into legalities of things before we put our neck on the line like that. So it's just a little reminder to people, like, you can do things, but there could be repercussions. So I'm like, it's good to hear that you guys did the thing and made the thing and put it out there. But it's also equally good to hear that you had the conversations beforehand. [00:26:00] Speaker B: It was thought through. [00:26:04] Speaker C: I mean, it's parody pro tip. It's parody. If you're not selling it. If you sell it, even if you sell it for $0.10, it's not parody anymore because then they can make a legal claim that you're using their brand to sell a product. So don't sell anything smart. [00:26:21] Speaker B: Good tip. There's something I wanted to dig into, is this idea of balancing, I guess, what I kind of thinking of as sense versus nonsense. And you talked about it a little bit where, especially as a designer, I work with type all the time. As a designer with clients, type is super important. We got to communicate and got to be able to elegantly handle it and set it and especially in motion, make it move in a way that's compelling. But then, for me, my passion practice, where I do a lot of abstract typography, a lot of what we call right. Non meaningful type and experiments in that way, and I think I've shared maybe a little bit with you. I mean, Aaron's seen it a lot of the stuff I do, but the idea that it's almost this sort of other side of having to work commercially all the time and work with type, that makes sense. And then I got this other practice where I could just, hey, it is more intuitive. It is more about just going where the feeling takes me and experiment takes me, and then what that does. You described that process when you were working on the record player, the paper record player, where you get so into it that everything else can kind of fade away a little bit. And I just feel like that's a really healthy spot for sustainability for designers, right. Having that practice where you can get really ignited in what you're making. Yeah. Get almost a little lost in, too. [00:27:57] Speaker C: Yeah. I don't know if you all are familiar with that. There's a book, it's a biography of Robert Irwin, and it's called Seeing is Forgetting the name of the thing one Sees. And it's a Paul Valerie quote. And Robert Irwin, I don't know. He's funny. Some of the book is great. Some of it's kind of like iffy. But I really want to focus on that title because I think as a visual person, there's a certain language has its limits, right? Like, if you try to describe what Cilantro tastes like, you'll find that we all relate to language as if it's a complete interface on human experience, and it really isn't. And so when you are a visual person, where you want to play is in color interactions, form interactions, all of these things that are very difficult to describe verbally. And in fact, you probably wouldn't they're better experience. But when you're doing client work, it's like clients have briefs, they report to someone. Everything has to be translated into words. And so I think that there is this tension and almost like this constant warfare between what can be described in language and what is just play. I mean, I think we call it play, and I think it's easy to diminish it when something's called play. But what you're doing is almost like engaging with a different language, a different set of considerations, and it's like a very serious thing. But just because of how humans work and how capitalism works, it's always going to take a backseat to those verbal rationalizations. So I think for that reason alone, it's helpful to learn how to write, learn how to communicate verbally, even if it doesn't really resonate with you or relate to your practice, because then you can justify things and express things to clients. But, yeah, it is something that I find a constant source of frustration, but also joy is seeing that difference between what can be described and what just has to be experienced. [00:30:23] Speaker A: It's always fun when we can say to a client, like, okay, these were the boxes you asked us to check. And we did that, and then we started playing, and we realized that these experiments also check all those boxes, but they're more something. It's taking it to another level because you got to check the boxes. Everything has, like, a commercial objective. Like, if you can't understand the logo or hear the voiceover or read the offer, we got a business objectives. But being able to do both of those things is rare, is very rare. So it's nice when you can say, yep, we checked the boxes, and still manage to also explore, experiment, and play and get to this other place. [00:31:22] Speaker C: Yeah. Austin, I don't know if you have this with your client. Like, with every client project, there are zones where I'm like, okay, I'm accountable here. And then there are zones where it's like they don't even know how to talk about it. So I can do whatever I want. I just kind of, okay, how do I make this project cool? But like you were saying, Aaron tick all of those boxes so they can tell their boss. Like, yeah, it says this. There was a snowman. There was yeah. [00:31:56] Speaker A: It's almost like in spite of their communication baseline, in spite of all that, we still were able to do our thing. That makes us excited. [00:32:06] Speaker B: You know what's interesting? I find it sort of at what level I'm engaged with a client, right. So if it's very much like, okay, it's gone from a client to an agency, and then it's getting to me, I'm kind of executing. Right. But when I'm working direct to client, and especially if they're sort of trying to get a proof of concept internally to somebody higher up in there, there's a lot of freedom in those opportunities where they're kind of coming to me and I'm interpreting what they're asking for, and then I can go and really jump in that sandbox and be like, Here. I don't have that all the time. But sometimes that happens, and it's pretty fun. [00:32:52] Speaker A: That's true. The closer you are to the decision maker, the final thumbs up person whose money it is, probably. Yeah. Sometimes. The easier it is to get to that thing because it's less layers of filters to kind of go through before they're seeing it. And you kind of lose the CYA. Cover your ass. [00:33:20] Speaker C: Yeah. That's where the conservatism sneaks in, I think. [00:33:27] Speaker B: I think this whole top oh, what were we going to say, Erin? [00:33:29] Speaker A: I was going to say but that's also where we tend to show versions like, okay, this is safe, this is medium, which is usually what we like. And then here's the extreme addition that you're never going to go for, but hopefully that you never know they could go for it. It's happened. But usually that medium territory is where they land. And for us, usually that's like where we want it to be when we're showing work in that pocket because it feels out of comfort zone, but not as far as that other one. [00:34:02] Speaker C: I wonder if you could strategically go even further than you should and show that as like a first version and then be back up to something where it's more reasonable or whatever. [00:34:13] Speaker A: Yeah, the way actually we do do that, but we're very clear we're going to do that. What we'll say is we believe in the art of simplification, and that's about finding the sweet spot between chaos and clarity. Right. [00:34:26] Speaker C: So we're going to push it. [00:34:27] Speaker A: We're going to do all these things, and then we're going to work with you about how much we need to remove to get it just right. And I like that process a lot. And it stops at like, we just need more can you just make it extra? Can you make it more animated or something like that? And you're just like, fucking why? What does that even mean? [00:34:47] Speaker C: Turn it up for eleven. Yeah, exactly. [00:34:50] Speaker A: You're like, okay, but you do need to read it, and you do need to anyway, how do you maintain the feeling of play in your work? [00:35:01] Speaker B: I was going to say this topic of play, I think it's something I talk about with students a lot, and it's certainly my own practice how to maintain that feeling. And I don't know if the opposition if it's, it's not play work, but there's like play versus like there's just seriousness and you know, when there's briefs, it's like, yeah, you got to take it seriously and you got to deliver what is being installed, the problem that's being presented. But that certain attitude with the students, I describe it as the creative sandbox. Right. I'm like, okay, we're going to go into that because in that place you can make mistakes, you can try things, and trying to keep that attitude of, okay, I'm discovering and I'm being playful, but at the same time still doing the work. Right, yeah. [00:35:49] Speaker A: It's interesting. When I was kind of growing up, I was kind of seeking mentorship, and there was this person I spoke to that I really loved, the work that they produced. And they said, I won't say who it is so that they're not called out. But I was very intrigued. And of course I was young, I was like in my early twenty s. And they said, if you want to be creative, make stuff on your own. Your job is to execute the vision of the agency and your client. It's not about being like and I just left that meeting at one thinking like this person's insane. There's no way I'm going to have to feel like I need to work more on my own things to be creative. I work in a creative industry. Now, of course I understand a little bit what he was saying because of the conversation we're having, but I do fundamentally disagree. I think that you can maybe not on every single job, but certainly on most of your jobs come to it from a place where you're going to get your creative juices flowing enough to satisfy that, like, experimentation and development and all of that stuff that you don't have to sit at the computer all weekend, that you can spend time with your family. You know what I mean? So I don't know if that resonates with you guys, but for me, I do think there is a way to have that experimentation and also have it be a part of your work. Now that might depend on where you work and who you work with and the kind of bosses you have, but I don't think that's like a far fetched thing to look for. Because Austin, you get so much work in your style because of that work, you know what mean? [00:37:42] Speaker B: Right, right. Well, I think it's kind of like especially with the students, right. I watched them get tense and I could relate to it. But they get tense. Right. And you could sort of see like I know when a student presents work, I can usually tell if they had fun when they made it's right there in the work. Right. And I can tell when they haven't. There's a bit of a suffering that comes across in the assignment. I'm constantly thinking about how to motivate students to do the work, but stay loose and explore and try and how do you keep that joy in the process but at the same time still do the work? [00:38:26] Speaker A: Right? [00:38:26] Speaker C: Yeah. Honestly, I don't know how people do it who have real jobs because I have a sketchbook full of things that I want to do. Just like dream projects, little ideas. It's everything from color combinations to like, oh, here's like a book that I want to make. And I'm just kind of waiting. I'm waiting to get an email from a client or a publisher, someone saying like, hey, do you have any ideas for know? And then I have ideas ready to know that are kind of like their personal project ideas, like in search of some kind of funding. Because we live in America and we don't have public funding for artists, but yeah, I don't know how it works. And this is going to sound so unprofessional, and I guess it is. I'm really incapable of doing anything that I don't enjoy doing. I don't really understand work. There has to be joy in it. And Austin, I think what you're saying is totally right. It's not just your teacher who knows that you didn't have fun. It's like everyone who looks at the final piece, if you were miserable, if you were suffering, if you weren't into it, there's going to be something missing that's not going to have the vitality versus when you're excited about something, for whatever reason, you're excited about it because, oh, I've always wanted to work for this client. Or you're excited because this is exactly what you want to do with your hands this week. Or you're excited about it because you're getting paid a lot. Whatever. If that excitement isn't there, then I feel like your audience is smarter than you think they are. They know they can feel it. [00:40:03] Speaker B: Right? Totally. [00:40:05] Speaker A: Totally agree. [00:40:06] Speaker C: So how do you keep yourself happy is actually a serious question when you're making things for other humans. I don't know if you've ever gone to see someone give a talk, you can tell whether they're enjoying themselves or whether they're freaking out and are miserable. And it's the same kind of thing. It almost doesn't matter what they're talking about. If they're enjoying themselves, then you'll enjoy yourself too. [00:40:36] Speaker B: Yeah. I was told I got a really good tip I was given a bunch of years ago. Was I'll paraphrase it? It was like the quality of my presence is just as important, if not more important, than the quality of the presentation. And I'm great small group classroom, put me on a stage with lights on a pedestal. I can get like my heart starts beating fast, turning red. And I know from experience what you just said is if I'm not having fun up there, it's going to be painful for the audience. Right. So it almost becomes a little bit of the mission. And some of that is just public speaking, but it is, I just want to have fun. If I know the material, then my mission is just about having fun while I'm up there and trusting that the presentation is going to come through. [00:41:33] Speaker C: Yeah. And I think we always talk about entitlement as a bad thing, but I think as creative person, you really need to feel as a human. I don't know how we got to this state, but where we have to tell people this, but you really should feel entitled to feel joy in your work. Yeah. If you're not, then there's something wrong and it's going to catch up with you or it's going to catch up to the work. And Austin, you've been posting a lot of work that probably started out as personal experiments. Right. And then you started getting hired for it. And this is the good thing about social media and the Internet. We all know about the bad things, but you can kind of tell people what you do and someone will pay you to do. [00:42:21] Speaker B: Absolutely. I was going to say Aaron, because you could probably speak to this whole topic too, because you have spoken on really big stages in the design community. I get to kind of medium level and I'm like, okay, the big stage does make me a little nervous. And both of you have really spoken on bigger platforms. Yeah. What are your thoughts? [00:42:46] Speaker A: Well, I just pick one poor sucker in the audience and talk to them. And I tell stories, so I have like, an outline and I'm very aware of the time, but I talk to people the way I want to be talked to, and I have a lot of humor to it. I don't take myself seriously. I make sure to not sugarcoat things, but to talk, like real talk a little bit. And I think that helps people understand that it's not just like, look at how great and shiny we are and everything's perfect. And all of my team loves working on this. You know what I mean? I think the real key to happiness is not just the work, it's who you work with and what you work on. And for me, that's having balance in the studio from a hiring standpoint, from the practice of now having a company for 15 years ish I don't only hire on the portfolio. There's a lot that goes into just personality type and yeah, like, people not taking themselves too seriously. Ego is a real big thing that we want. Not that we don't want people to have a good sense of self, but if somebody is coming in and that's like what they're presenting forward, that's not a good you want a team player, right? And even as a creative director or director or a senior level, actually, the higher up you get, the more you should really be talking about building other people up because creative directors, it's all about being a compromised machine. I'm like helping these people, the artists kind of have their vision and a point of view and ownership over the work. And I want my clients to feel that. And then they have clients beyond that. So giving the tools to them for how to talk about the work, to sell it through. So for me, I'm just kind of the person holding the rope in the middle, keeping it all together without anybody falling down on either side and still having a beautiful outcome. Something that I can really be proud that we created. And I think if everybody feels listened to and everybody feels like they put a piece of themselves into it and that was appreciated, and they're collaborating with people they enjoy being around, and there's laughter amongst them, then that's the best case scenario for a job. And that can come on a creative job or an amazing creative job. And you'd be surprised some of the stuff that is so creative. And everybody would be like, oh my God, I would have died to work on it. And I'm like, oh my God, you might have died if you the worst. For me, if there is a project going that way, it's not letting that show in the work. It's somehow just like, okay, just holding it all together as the lead and always be professional. Yeah. And not having a show in the work. Because to Austin's point, if you're a student, that's okay, that that come across in the work. But in our work, it has to look effortless. Whether it's just a simple thing sliding through frame or like a really complicated CG thing. You can't see the makers in the know it's hard. What's the draw of paper for you? [00:46:29] Speaker B: Should we talk about paper now? [00:46:31] Speaker A: I think. [00:46:34] Speaker C: Paper? [00:46:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Why paper? I know you've got all this really amazing paper craft work and even like with the Rizzograph, I mean, it all comes back to paper. Something you said I thought was really cool was just at the workshop you did for us was the as a medium. It's everywhere. I mean, I'm just looking around my desk in my room, right. It's everywhere. Like paper is everywhere and it's a medium. So for yeah. What what's the draw of. [00:47:06] Speaker C: To quote I'm going to quote Ken Yehara on paper because I feel like he makes a really good point and I should just say that I don't know if I really what I care about is paper. So Kenya Hara. He's the design director of Muji. He has written a couple of books published by Lars Mueller that are really good. And he has this essay where he talks about paper is such an interesting material, not because of its delicacy in and of itself, but because of the sensitive human sensibilities that can awaken. So I am really interested in our experiences of the world that aren't mediated through tech and information technology. And so the fact that you can take a piece of paper, which is, as you're saying, like, ubiquitous everywhere, inexpensive, everybody knows it. Everybody yeah, everyone knows it. It seems very familiar, but that you can fold it and by folding it, you program it in a way that it never forgets, and you can have it tap into different functions. So our ears aren't sensitive enough to, for example, pick up the vibrations from a record, but if you attach a cone to a needle and place it on a record, paper is so delicate that it's able to pick up those minute vibrations. And so we did this workshop when I was at visiting Austin school called Paper as an interface. And I was really pushing the students to figure out how can you take a piece of paper and use it to interact with some invisible force in the world around you, something that you can't access just with your own human hardware, but you can build, like, a very simple device to tap into the world around you? And so I think why paper is it really engages our tinkering intellectual sensibilities the way that humans have evolved to think, where we push something and we witness what happens. Again, it's a way out of our own head. It's like a way of actually having a conversation with the external world around us. And I like it because no one assumes the paper can do anything, that we're in this for all kinds of reasons. Some of them, quite frankly, are a little bit racist, sexist. There's a lot of isms tied up in this. But I think that we assume a lot of these craft materials are humble and cannot perform on the same level as high tech materials. And it's just because paper is undergirded by the sophistication of the physical world that it's really infinite, and there's an infinite amount of things you can do with it. And so I think I'm really attracted to that contrast. And I'm also really interested in kind of like reframing tech in terms of not like, what does this thing do, but what can it do for you? What part of yourself does it awaken? How does it actually work in tandem with how we work? So it might not always be paper for me. I might move on to a different material, but it just seems like very interesting thing to think about at this particular moment in tech history. [00:51:14] Speaker A: I love that I feel like almost all crafts live in this space. To your point, I love the fiber arts, and it's like, right, when does it go from, like, I just knit my dog a sweater to that's art? And then to your point, at what point does it become technology? Like, the school I went to, RIT, they're 3D printing. [00:51:40] Speaker C: Oh, cool. I love RIT. [00:51:45] Speaker A: Shout out, right? [00:51:47] Speaker C: Tigers. [00:51:48] Speaker A: But they are like 3D print printing glass, like hot glass. And I'm just like, oh, my God, what kind of applications could that have? On the technology side, I've heard about 3D printing clay before into these very beautiful art objects. But once you kind of take a step back and you're like, oh, my God. This medium, this material can be manipulated like that. It's not just something that you buy at the Renaissance Festival, you know what I mean? It becomes this other thing, to your point. And I think it's really beautiful what you've done with paper. And just to resea something in a new way that you've been handling your whole life, that everybody's been handling their whole lives, that's magic, that's delight and wonder, because we all know what it is to hold a piece of paper, but none of us knew that we could do that with that. And so that gets me to the question of where did you either learn these techniques or how would you like is it just curiosity in developing those things? Once you have an idea like Elmo, I wonder what if let's try if it's that simple or if it's something that you've kind of learned to I. [00:53:07] Speaker C: Mean, I think it is kind of as simple as the Elmo, I wonder what if. I think it's paired with this almost like, teenage rebellious spirit that there must be more to this. I'm very motivated by possibility. And I think that finding possibility hiding in plain view is very appealing to me. That the future. That the possibilities that these alternate dimensions aren't elsewhere but are actually within our hands and within the materials in front of us. And I think that this is another argument for studying history and art history because, Erin, you mentioned the fiber arts there's. There's so much of how computers are set up and work today that came from weaving and came from the Jackport loom and it came from these things that are traditionally considered like women's work. And that whole history has kind of been erased in a way. And so I think that people who are in highly technical fields understand the relationship between craft and technology. NASA is using all of these origami structures, these deployable structures in their spacecraft design. And so they're looking back to this thousands of year old craft discipline to create things that we consider like the cutting edge of tech. But I feel like there are these deep biases that keep us from thinking about the functional, imaginative, possibility creating potential of things know, we associate with, like, I don't know, middle of America scrapbooking moms or. [00:55:03] Speaker B: Craft versus engineering. Like, when does craft become engineering or something else? That's where my mind went. [00:55:11] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, I think for the people who are in it, there isn't that big of a difference. I think that these labels these labels are not helpful. The divisions aren't helpful. Most of the time. They're artificial in terms of they don't really relate to the practice. Or, like during the pandemic for Adobe, I interviewed one of the people at NASA who was working on Starshield and he was talking about how this origami flasher form is what influenced the design of Starshield. But in order to fabricate it, they had to really study this sartorial history of how garments were constructed. And so it's kind of like when you talk to the people actually doing the work in these high tech fields they know that this barrier is not that significant. That whenever you're engaging in material and you're thinking about how it works, what its affordances are, how to control it, you're asking the same fundamental questions. One of my goals in teaching I taught a lot at the School for Poetic Computation which is sort of like this progressive artist run school. And part of what I was tasked doing there was kind of like breaking down this wall between craft and tech, which I feel like is very useful. And it's also just useful as an artist to break down those barriers for yourself because there's always an opportunity there, you know, that someone else has excluded that you can exploit. If people are willing to believe that these biases are the truth rather than the actual material truth of the thing. [00:57:03] Speaker B: Yeah, a few things. I mean, that idea of the possibility hiding in plain view, right. And then this idea of crafters tech. But my mind went to even biomimicry where science is looking at nature and using that to model. But almost like I don't know if is it craft mimicry in a way if that's sort of when you talked about the NASA and the origami super cool. [00:57:30] Speaker A: I just have this thing that everything's derivative art, technology, everything is reusing something from the past to move it forward and to resea something in a new way. So that's the end of that statement. [00:57:47] Speaker C: Yeah. I think a lot more things emerge from the human body itself than we acknowledge. When you think about why is a fork designed this way? I think a lot of things come out of real human need, whether they're physical needs or emotional needs. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that things appear derivative or related. And I think a lot of times students think of that as like a barrier for pursuing certain ideas. And I think that it's more a testament to the similarities from human to human than anything. But a lot of these divisions between disciplines were constructed by university systems. And I think more and more we're realizing the advantage of having these antidisciplinary spaces where things can blend that that allows different truths to emerge and be investigated. I think that there's also a usefulness there's a reason why science typically happens on the science part of campus. There's a reason social I'm kind of rambling, but there's a whole part of knowledge that's like social knowledge that you can landing words. You can package up. You can give someone your math equation and have them finish it or your code and your GitHub and have someone finish it. And then there are things that come directly from the senses, sensory, you know, how do you know things from intuition? How do you know exactly how to work with this material? How do you know how to shape the clay? How much pressure do you give? Those are all things that are like embodied knowledge that you can't package up and give to someone. You can tell them to repeat the experience. But there's that whole tension in universities and in formalized knowledge and with social knowledge that there's certain things that you can learn and know that you just can't unless you're doing it first. Yeah, so I think that our brains are like these shortcut making machines where we're like, okay, this goes in this category that's that I don't have to think about that anymore. It's just like how our brains work. But I think it's really useful to, especially as an artist, to just get kind of like restless and kind of rebellious with those classifications and say, okay, what's in between these things? Because that's going to be more interesting and more generative, and you're going to find a lot more truth that you can own as your own in those spaces. [01:00:33] Speaker A: What are your thoughts on cross disciplinary studies? [01:00:36] Speaker B: Well, I find that I like this idea of this antidisciplinary disciplinary in an educational environment. And it is something I've observed after a lot of years teaching full time in different university type environments, departments, and then colleges within a university, they get siloed, right? And they get siloed for different reasons. These budgets, enrollment, personalities, whatever it might be politics. And then you get into the industry, there's different types of siloing, but there is a lot more of a freer. You need those cross disciplines to get things done right. I don't know what the answer is in the university context, but I know that when the diversity, when things start mixing together, it's typically more interesting and different ways of looking at, yeah, what. [01:01:35] Speaker C: Were we going to definitely I think it feels more like vital territory that hasn't been explored yet, for sure. [01:01:45] Speaker A: I do think, like, universities are getting hip to this. I'm on the National Council at RIT for the School of Design, and a big part of what the university is doing is know science and technology, art and design, and trying to kind of weave those three things together in every kind of discipline and at least giving everybody access to those things, like encouraging somebody in the engineering department to take design classes. Because before it was very siloed to your point, and to a certain extent, it still is. But imagine if an engineer took some design classes, how their presentation skills would change in terms of articulating their idea and presenting their idea in potentially meeting other students who could team up together. [01:02:38] Speaker B: And all this, and how the design students might change. Instead of just flash, you might get a little more oh, system thinking. [01:02:46] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:02:46] Speaker A: Or like, what actual problem are you solving? Because that's what designers do. We solve problems where engineers, they make things. But is it always with an actual, real problem that's tangible? Because that's where real innovation happens, is when all of these three things kind of happen together science, technology, art, and design. And so I do think it is like the weaving of all of that together, where the magic happens in that. Yes, a piece of paper can create that kind of magic and intrigue that you're on talk shows. You know what I mean? People's minds. There's a component of all of those things, you solved the problem, you created a cool invitation for your friends. There was a technological aspect, but then there was also like an art to it. And all of those three things woven together created this holy, magical moment that people couldn't even believe. [01:03:45] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that articulates. Well, what I'm after in my projects, I want to reacquaint people with the magic of the world around them and just kind of remind them that it's always there, it's always accessible to them. Yeah. [01:04:07] Speaker A: So what do you enjoy about teaching? [01:04:10] Speaker C: Well, I enjoy just kind of like having a speaking gig or opportunity forces me to connect the dots of my own work and understand it and gives me different ways forward. I think teaching kind of does the same thing for me, where I have these sort of like halfway developed hunches about all of these things that go together that feel interesting and vital right now. And then having that pressure of being in front of a classroom, having to present it, really helps me. I mean, it's also just so much fun to take whatever it is you're excited about and interested in and get a whole lot of other people excited about it because then it kind of becomes like a mini research group. I think a lot of times people think about teaching in this very hierarchical way where there's like a very stark division between who is the student, who is the teacher. But if you believe that everyone has something to offer from their unique perspective in life, which you should, because it's true, then kind of giving the students the basic tools to play around with what you're thinking about and seeing how they explore and where they go can be really useful to your own practice as well. I feel like my paper engineering students have definitely discovered new things that I never dreamed of. And so I feel like perfecting the art of teaching for me is kind of like kind of like that balancing act between how much information to give them, what to withhold, so that they could run with it and really make it their own and keep exploring. [01:06:10] Speaker A: So you give workshops. How do you structure them? What would that be like? [01:06:14] Speaker C: It kind of depends on what type of workshop it is. This weekend, my friend Keegan, who co runs this community printmaking space that I work at, we're doing a Rizo animation workshop. And this is a very fast paced thing. So it's Saturday, it's Sunday, and on Saturday we take a whole bunch of different types of animation. People will just show up with like, videos from their iPhone. And then some people have been working on Cinema 4D for weeks to create a perfect animation. And so we take those animations, we break them up into frames, we automate them onto a contact sheet that's eleven x 17 that we can print out on. The Riso, we do color separations, and then Keegan and I daily stay up all night printing these things so that we can stitch them back together on Sunday. I like to structure workshops that way where we get something done that the students can feel like ownership in and proud. You know, Austin was mentioning that there's usually these little bits of historical context or philosophical know just to give people more angles to explore and connect with the subject matter. And we're not going to really have time for that this weekend. I do kind of float that idea of like, hey, it's fun to misuse technology. You can find new techniques by misusing technology. But then we kind of go straight into like, what is a Riso and why should you use it for animation? [01:07:52] Speaker A: That's great. That's like a little bit of a shout out. I would totally take that workshop. [01:07:58] Speaker C: It's hard. Yeah, we do it every month because yeah, it's great too, because you don't have to have a Riso to continue using a technique. You can kind of buy like, a crummy inkjet printer and just print one color at a time and layer it on there. And you get a very similar effect to Rizo. But it's also like I don't know if students are thinking about using printers and then scanning the back end to make an animation. There's a lot of different things you can do with drawing or painting on top of those animation frames. Somehow getting it out of the computer and into the physical world has been pretty generative for animation students to just think about, like, okay, how do I mess this up and go back and forth between the digital realm and the physical realm? What strengths? Because After Effects is amazing. A lot of these programs just give you this real precision control over the tween of your animation. Like how things slow down, come to a stop, I don't know. And that is delicious, but a lot of times it comes off as a little bit cold. And so if you bring it out into some printed process, then you get that nice visceral rain paired with that computer. Precision, which is usually what I'm after, is some combination of those things, like computers aren't good at making noise and computers aren't good at making drop shadows. [01:09:38] Speaker A: What are your thoughts on analog versus digital? [01:09:42] Speaker B: No, that's definitely one of the topics, too, that I think we wanted to dig into was this whole that the analog digital mashup, right? And I think even going back to the topic about paper, there's the tactility. There's just sensibilities and why that appeals to viewers and designers, too. And I know there was a big movement. I kind of observed it with tech know, whether it was Facebook or Instagram or Google, all of them that they were utilizing, because they're all these they're essentially digital products. But for a lot of years, they were doing a lot of real tactile presentations of their branding as a technique of softening and humanizing their look. Yeah, you seem really comfortable working between the two. And, I mean, you already spoke a little bit to some of the strengths and weaknesses of analog versus digital. [01:10:42] Speaker C: Well, I feel like when you jump back and forth, you can achieve effects that aren't possible in either. And I was complaining about computers aren't good at graph shadows, computers aren't good at noise. But it's kind of like whatever you aesthetically respond to, there might be things that in your digital process, you're like, oh, yeah, that's what I want. I want perfect desi curves for whatever, but you might not like the texture, the way the light hits it, or there is no light on computers. Yeah, so that is a good case for taking that design and outputting it to a laser cutter or paper cutter so you can get something that is like a physical object. But there's this great quote that I love by this 19th century physicist named Herman von Helmholtz. He says that everything as humans is an event on the skin. So if you read something in a book, you think, oh, I'm reading information. But really those are light photons hitting your retina every time someone tells you a fact. That's like wobbly air hitting your eardrum. And so I think in the information Age, it's very tempting to think about everything in this flattened its information, and the delivery mechanism doesn't matter. But I think it's something we really viscerally crave. And the Pandemic kind of put a fine point on this because we're like, oh, yeah, we're going to a party. We're going to a dance party. We're going to drink cocktails with our friends. But somehow that 2D on the screen experience isn't the same thing, and you're all of a sudden aware of all of those sensory things. You're missing out. And I think a lot of my experience in working with computers and working digitally, even though I'm an early adopter of most technologies, is that it feels almost like a large part of my sensory experience is just cut off. There's this writer named Brett Victor. He designed the touch gestures on iPhones. So he's an engineer who's, like, a really great proponent of, like, hey, humans are sensory creatures. Maybe appeal to them on multiple dimensions. But he has this whole talk where he likens, our experience using computers to almost like a dog that's in this kennel box that isn't really allowed to completely experience life. And so I think that kind of like we're talking about language as an interface. Like, computers are definitely an interface on experience, and they pretend to be comprehensive. They definitely aren't. And so I feel like a good way to break out of that is just to start making things that appeal on multiple sensory dimensions. So even when I'm working on a stop motion animation, even though it's always going to be trapped behind glass on a screen. How can I get the viewers sense of touch involved? How can I connect to their memories of manipulating small things or whatever? So I think just kind of recognizing that and figuring out how to work with that in your own work. And it doesn't have to be like you might be completely satisfied with how drop shadows look like on computers, but whatever it is that you're dissatisfied, that's how you find your aesthetic, right? It's kind of like I'm dissatisfied and discontent with this thing. How do you solve for that? And a lot of times if you just go back flip between analog and digital, you'll find a solution in the other realm to that problem. [01:14:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I've been fascinated by the phenomena that if I scan a texture, a photograph, a really active texture, and then I composite it in my photoshop and my design frame without somebody actually touching it, just looking at it, that it can produce that experience of the tactility and just how to push that. [01:14:53] Speaker A: What projects are next for you? Super cool. I don't want to take up too much more of your time, but am very curious about what some goals you might have or what's next or know, coming projects that you're excited about that you can talk. [01:15:10] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, I know. I just worked on this pop up book for Apple which will never see the light of day. It's like an internal thing, which I'm so disappointed because it was really cool. So I can't really talk about that. But it exists. And if you're at Apple, then I hope you enjoy it. But I've been working with Letterform Archive, which is a graphic design archive in San Francisco. Been working with them since 2019 on this pop up book that is about typography. And just like how when you go to art history class, you learn about why artists were doing things in different time periods. This kind of brings that same level of sensibility to typefaces. So when you see a typeface, it looks like this. Why does it look like that? Where did that come from? And type is amazing to me just from the level of human perception because it's so small and letters are so similar, like a script a isn't that different than a Chiseled Roman A. But we get these transported to completely different places and times when we look at them. And so how does that much vibe fit into these teeny tiny shapes is kind of the question. And so it's an interactive book that really dives into the history of letter forms. Where do they come from, how are they made? And it's been a really big project. We've been working on it for four years now. And so that's supposedly coming out next year. So that's the main thing. [01:16:49] Speaker A: Who are your favorite artists? [01:16:52] Speaker B: I had one other question going back to art history, which was do you have favorite artists or movements? [01:17:01] Speaker C: Yeah, I think a lot of designers. I'm really into the Bauhaus, and especially, like, we were talking about a mixing of science and craft and making. So that period is definitely interesting to me. I am super interested in perception and the way that art and design experiences can essentially hold up a mirror to our own perception and make us aware of how our vision works. And so Olifar Eliasen is an artist that's really interesting to me. Hans Haka is really interesting to me. And these are artists that also work with scientists and physicists to figure out different sort of probe at different mysteries of our senses and then take that and turn it into an experience where you feel like, oh, I'm not only engaging with the art, but I'm learning something about how physics works, how matter how I work. Also talba arabach I really love she's another one who she's kind of in between fine art and design and does really interesting work about perception. I think those are some of my favorites. But really, I really like most art. I am very easy to please. You can take me to any museum anywhere in the world, and I will be happy. It doesn't matter if it's like 19th century art or modern art. I think I'm most comfortable with modern art because it is in such close dialogue with physics and science and contemporary philosophies that frame our understanding of reality. But I can get lost in a Monet painting. I just really love art. [01:19:05] Speaker A: That's amazing. I very rarely am in a conversation with somebody where I'm like, wow, I have to look all of these people up. [01:19:13] Speaker C: You know what I mean? [01:19:14] Speaker A: It's so great, though, because I think maybe what some students don't understand, or younger people, is that these are references. These are references by which we can talk and state opinions and ideas and thoughts. So it is really important to have a shared understanding, a shared knowledge, and that's why I think art history is important. So if this weren't being recorded, I. [01:19:39] Speaker C: Would be jotting everything down like a maniac. Oh, yeah. Actually, this is kind of handy. Like, tonight there's a show called Art 21. I don't know if you all have seen it. It's like a PBS series where they feature different artists. And so Talba is on the one that's coming out tonight. And Annika Yee, another really great artist, she recently had, like, a big solo show at the Tate where she created all of these little plastic, floating, jellyfish like things. [01:20:09] Speaker A: I know her work. I didn't connect it together. [01:20:12] Speaker C: Yeah, they both do amazing work. So I'm very excited about I love Art 21, but I'm particularly excited about this Art 21. And if you haven't watched the Netflix series Abstract, I would recommend oh, I have watched. They have one about Olifar iliac. [01:20:32] Speaker A: Okay. It's so interesting I'm not great with names, but as soon as I see the thing, I'm like, oh, yeah, that guy. I know that guy. [01:20:43] Speaker C: Yeah, totally awesome. [01:20:47] Speaker B: All right, so thank you so much. [01:20:49] Speaker A: So much. [01:20:51] Speaker C: Thank you all. This was fun. [01:20:53] Speaker A: Get to know you a little bit. I will come out and take a workshop, probably. [01:20:59] Speaker C: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. We actually do it over Zoom so people from all over the world join. [01:21:04] Speaker A: Oh, really? You do it over zoom. [01:21:05] Speaker C: We do it over Zoom, because this is going to make people sad who are dreaming about leaving their tech jobs. Most of what you do on the Riso is actually done on the computer, and so it's 3 hours of file prep. It's fun. But then we go and print them, and then we scan them back in, and so everything's online. We mail the contact sheets to people, so you get an artifact, maybe sooner. Yeah. That's great. [01:21:36] Speaker A: Okay, well, we always do our piece sign off, so thank you, Kelly. [01:21:43] Speaker C: Thanks for having me. [01:21:47] Speaker B: Thanks for listening. We'll see you on.