full interview_justin gitlin_2.mp4
Justin Gitlin [00:00:00] My role is a creative technologist, a creative coder, basically a software developer that is translating Succi's artistic vision onto this canvas, so animating LED lights in a volumetric way, so turning words and letters into three-dimensional patterns that respond to visitors as they're interacting with the sculpture. And trying to translate the sentiment analysis that's happening on the back end with the machine learning tools from AWS and turning that into something beautiful and emotive with software.
Speaker 2 [00:00:40] So what does that mean in terms of your creative role?
Justin Gitlin [00:00:44] My creative role? Um, well, right. The canvas that's being created has happened in real-time. It's been a collaboration. I think the people dealing with the technical aspects of the project need to understand the canvas that we're creating together and then what can be done on that. And obviously, Such has been directing and orchestrating the creation of the canvas and the sort of painting that's going into it. Considering all these user interactions, the human-computer interaction that's happening, there's so many sort of elements to this. And my role has been to kind of translate, you know, translate the technical requirements into something that becomes doable, doable in the sense of the animations, the esthetic output, doable, in terms of the computing power that's needed, the and then doable in terms of what is Succhi asking for this the esthetic to be. She had some really cool ideas about subdividing a sphere into these sort of almost fractal patterns and, you know, taking that and translating it to a grid of almost a thousand LEDs for each one of our mandalas. What does that even mean? How do we take a two-dimensional video output from a computer and make that three-dimensional when it's displayed on these really unique, interesting arrays of LEDs. And that's sort of, I think those are some of my roles.
Speaker 2 [00:02:21] So in terms of the creative process, does it all flow from Tsu Chi? Is that the beginning of it all?
Justin Gitlin [00:02:31] Yeah, as the artist, this is definitely her creative vision. But it has been a really fun process as the technologist, like what can we do? And so there have been some fun instances for me of, you know, Sushi has a million ideas at any given moment. And that's such a blessing for this type of project. Like, what can you try? What's doable? So, one idea might be, like, really not. Technically achievable but the next idea totally is. Maybe it's easy to achieve that and what can we sort of build on top of her ideas that are just flowing out of her. So yeah, in reality that means me prototyping different concepts, different graphical algorithms that make different types of pictures, that create different volumetric displays of animation on these LED arrays. And there's been a lot of great back and forth, like, does this look like the direction that you're going for? And Suchu will say, yeah, keep going with that, or maybe not, let's switch directions and maybe try something more like this. And it can be, you know, maybe it's a pretty concrete statement that she's making to look for an esthetic, or maybe it a bit more open-ended and I'll go and sort of try some things and bring them back and see how that just sort of moves it forward.
Speaker 2 [00:03:55] Do you see your role as being creative? Yeah. My role is creative.
Justin Gitlin [00:04:00] Oh, I definitely see my role as being creative. The buzzword for the type of craft that I work within is creative coding. And that just means being creative with code, and mostly in a visual esthetic sense. If you talk to any experienced software developer, writing code is a creative act, whether you're writing software for a bank or to generate. There's so much creativity and problem-solving along the way, but my particular expertise recently has been in creating emotive visual, sonic, and experiential pieces of software that react to people, that respond to your presence, your input, maybe physical motion, things like that. So this project has all of that, it's such an interesting spatial experience for walk up and not touch but speak to, and hopefully really get something back. Make sense in their interaction with the piece.
Speaker 2 [00:05:14] So, would you call your... Would you call yourself an artist, or a creative engineer, or what are you?
Justin Gitlin [00:05:30] What am I? I've always struggled calling myself an artist. I'm definitely a musician. I make music. I think there's a lot of baggage around the term artist, but I'm getting more comfortable with it. I make digital art on my own, I make small scale interactive digital work, non-interactive digital work. I make instruments with code, musical instruments, so I'm more comfortable with that, but I really shine when I work with someone like Tsuji who really does have a really on creative vision. I don't really have a really strong visual creative vision. I recently found out that some people can close their eyes and visualize things, and I can't. So a lot of my own esthetic comes from the tools, like my own visual work looks like code made it, because that's how I can sort of conjure visual things out of thin air. But someone like Suchi, we were talking about this the other day, and obviously... To me, she's someone who can close her eyes and just create a world. You know, that's really a great place, a great collaborative space for me to be in to help someone else with their creative vision with my tools.
Speaker 2 [00:06:57] So do you ever get into a situation where she makes an esthetic choice that you would do differently, but you're going to go along with it because that's your position?
Justin Gitlin [00:07:09] Well, the only reason I would do something differently from Sushi's creative vision is because I don't have the experience and just magic that she has. So I just don't that. And so I might have chosen something different because I just don't know anybody. And she knows where she's going.
Speaker 2 [00:07:32] Our series is about art and science and technology and creativity, so this is a great, you're completely speaking to the mission. Do the artists of the world, the sushis of the word, do they need people like you?
Justin Gitlin [00:07:45] I think right now, definitely, the collaborations like this, we all need each other because, you know, this type of art, this kind of, if you want to do something big and interesting and unique, you need to pull in people with all these different skills and backgrounds and tools, and it's just, you know I think that's, for me, that's where the magic really wise is combining someone like Sushi with someone like me or and and all the other people that have, you know, that know how to fabricate and do the mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. There's so much to it. Dozens of people have touched this project and we couldn't have built something so interesting and unique without all these different people and we're in a time when you just can't do everything. Like no one artist could have done this. There is just not the time to learn on all of the things that went into it. I love collaborating with people on teams like this.
Speaker 2 [00:08:47] One more question that if anybody else has, how can coding be creative?
Justin Gitlin [00:08:53] How can coding be creative? It's just an endless rabbit hole of opportunities to create something out of nothing. You can type some lines, or you can type some characters into a text editor and have a picture drawing on the screen, or responding to your motion, or making music, or all of the above all at the same time. You know, its code is just another type of paintbrush. Musical instrument and I think, you know, it's getting easier all the time through layers of abstraction that software developers are creating to make these tools even easier for less technically savvy people, it just, the barrier to entry is lowering and the tools at the same time are getting so much more powerful, so the opportunities to get into it and also do something really interesting are just getting better every day.
Speaker 2 [00:09:53] Cool.
Speaker 3 [00:09:55] I'm curious if you could explain a bit of the procedure, just the nuts and bolts of your day here working with Tsuji and how you operate together on this.
Speaker 2 [00:10:06] Just look at me.
Justin Gitlin [00:10:07] Yeah, so day-to-day on this particular project, I've been here for almost three weeks and there's, you know, I'm a team player. I'm helping move things around, clean things up if I have to. I'm the software developer, but I'm very interested in moving everything forward. So, like, can I help move some stuff to get it plugged in faster to where I can start using the computers that are embedded in the sculpture? Should I be here while a lot of the electronics are being plugged in so I can identify problems that may be better than other folks that aren't as familiar with maybe things that could go wrong. And really, you know, I'm sitting here looking at the sculpture, tweaking my code, making sure it feels right. And that's an interesting thing to think about with software, like the emotive quality of the output, it feels like such a different world. Code feels so non-emotive, it's functional, it does the thing that it's supposed to do. So I think that's a lot of my particular skill set and the techniques that I've developed have over the years allowed me to be more expressive with code and find those magic numbers that don't mean anything to anyone else but the numbers within the software that we're using that are going to give us the beautiful color gradients or the timing of when you step up to the sculpture and it responds with the lighting animation to let you know that it's time to talk. These are all these moments that are based on feeling and it's so subjective where most software is very objective in what it should do. So there's a really fun gray area to play around with there to make it feel right.
Speaker 2 [00:12:00] How do you code it to respond to somebody saying they're happy?
Justin Gitlin [00:12:05] How do we code it? So if someone goes up to the sculpture and says, my future looks happy, that audio is getting sent to the AWS built back end in the cloud. It does some machine learning processes to determine what you said. Then based on the word that you said, there are all these tools in place that I didn't write. And I'm not familiar with the machine learning part of this enough to give you a good explanation. But it will come up with a sentiment. So if you say happy, the chances are that's probably going to be identified in the fancy machine learning computer system as being a positive sentiment. So their system will send me back a little bit of data that says, you said your future is happy and we're telling you, me, that that is positive. And here are some colors that we have associated with some of our other machine learning tools in our static that have... Created a color palette that can be associated with any given word. So will it be orange, yellow, and green, and then a bunch of other colors, but those are the strongest associated colors with that word, then we can take that and apply it to these three-dimensional animations. So there's a really cool collaboration there between these two discrete pieces of software. They've built a service. I've built an animation system. As well as sort of the sensor that detects you. Turn on the microphone, there's sort of that human computer interaction layer as well. And so it's a series of pretty complex systems that all do their task pretty well. I think the machine learning part has been, there are very objective parts of that, like did you say happy? And so you wanna be sure that your software gets that word right and that's been one of their big concerns is making sure that word is right. On the more creative side, on the AWS machine learning back end, like what are the colors? How do we, like, do we think our machine learning tool with the data that we've trained it with is giving us the right types of colors for a given word? And it's been interesting, like if you say bright, you tend to get like bright colors. If you say black, you get like dark purples and blues because you can't show black on an LED light. So there are some really interesting... Challenges that we've all worked through creatively, both on systems that might seem really objective. And then some pretty hard engineering problems for me to solve. I'm telling you it's all the feel of it, but is it going to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and never crash? So we've probably all had computer programs crash on us, and so that's a part of my toolkit too that I really have to worry about. We have 10 computers in here. They're constantly talking to each other to take user input, to animate these lights, and we want to make sure that's always smooth, never slows down, never crashes, and if something does go wrong, can it self-recover? So we've built a lot of tools into the system to make it more resilient. Like, what if a Windows update happens and it restarts itself in the middle of the night? Will it come back up without anybody having to touch anything? And so there's a lot just sort of boring. Technical stuff that I need to think about in my otherwise like very sort of free-flowing creative part of the project.
Speaker 2 [00:15:35] We saw Suchi coming in and looking around, do you think she'll ever be fully satisfied?
Justin Gitlin [00:15:42] I guess I don't know, I haven't seen enough of Tsu Chi's projects come to a conclusion to know what type of artist she is. I think that's one of the hardest parts of being an artist is letting go and calling something done. And you could say the same for a piece of software. Like you could always make your software more resilient, more flexible, more modular, like all these things that you think about as a software developer. But you need to stop at some point and deliver it to the world. And I think thats an interesting... Sort of overlap between the technical and the artistic side. It's like, when is it done? Like, I think for Succi, it's when it feels right. It's, like, obviously we could continue tweaking it forever, but every artist needs to figure out when that stops. And that can be really hard, and I know that feeling as a musician as well. It's when is the song done? Like, could you, are you gonna hear it a year later and say, oh, I wish that snare was in a different place? Maybe, but does it, as a whole, does it make you feel? I think that's... You know, as an artist, hopefully you can identify that cutoff point.
Speaker 3 [00:16:45] Indulge me and expound on that feeling because it strikes me, and you see this as a technical process in a lot of ways, but that feeling must relate to hitting the right note when you're playing music and something deeper than that, right?
Justin Gitlin [00:17:02] Yeah and yeah thinking about right continuing the conversation about when does it when does it feel done and just the excitement of how art makes you feel and how I mean for me it's also like I'm really drawn to computer graphics and this is much more natural there's no screen involved. Well, there is one screen involved, but otherwise all of the... All of the visual output of this sculpture is light and, you know, the work that I tend to be drawn to in lieu of such an amazing sculpture is really sort of computerized, precise graphical imagery that a computer can create. That really speaks to me and I love the precision of what a computer could do to create visuals and motion. And I think we're all obviously drawn to different esthetics, musically, artistically. And so different types of art, I guess, is going to hit different people in different ways and we all have that feeling when something is really speaking to us. And that is the magic. Like if you've ever been to a concert and wanted to, or like started crying at a particular song that just touches you so deeply. That's the goal, I think, for any artist to try to achieve. You're never going to touch everybody in that way. But the people that are sort of prone to appreciate what you've done, can you touch them? And obviously, can reach more people than not? And that's, or not, or I guess some artists don't want to reach a wide audience, and they really are looking for something more niche, and that's obviously a decision that every artist makes. But they still want to reach their audience in that profound way and you know it when you feel it and I think that's the sign of a great artist. Succi I think embodies that. I've had my moments on a very small scale of reaching people that were looking for the thing that I had made and it's yeah it's just so satisfying especially you know in this context of working with someone like Succi who you know has a much better sense of how to reach people. You can trust that how she's guiding this process and how she has been guiding me and collaborating together, that it's probably going to be great because she just has that sense and that vision. So yeah, I guess I don't entirely know who's going to show up at the Smithsonian building when this exhibit launches, but it is my understanding that it's a very wide cross-section of people who come to the Smithsonian Museum. So, you know, I think there are going to be people who will come in here and think, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. Like, what is this? And surely some people who walk in here and wonder, is that art? What is that? I don't care. And that's like the, that's the confounding part, I think, of having your work exposed to a really wide audience. I mean, obviously, if you're coming to a Smithsonian museum, you're, you have some interest in arts, probably. I'm sure, sure some people get here but but I guess people are probably pretty pretty open I'm walking into this space, and I've now completely forgotten. No, it's real.
Speaker 2 [00:20:39] No, that's a real question.
Justin Gitlin [00:20:44] I don't know if there's, if I can expand on that at all.
