full interview_daniel rozin_1.mp4
Daniel Rozin [00:00:00] My name is Daniel Rozin, I'm a digital interactive artist.
Speaker 2 [00:00:05] Perfect, thank you. So tell me how this all began. What were you doing years ago that led you into this?
Daniel Rozin [00:00:15] I started my career as an industrial designer. So I learned how to build stuff and design things. But I always found it a little bit superficial the way that I was given products to kind of design their enclosure, the last few millimeters of the plastic around a product. I came to New York, to NYU, to the department where I now teach called the Interactive Telecommunications Program as part of Tisch School of the Arts. And here, there, I learned how to program computers and how to do some basic electronics. And together with the skills I had before, suddenly something opened up with me. And I didn't want to work for clients, for sure. And I wanted to do my own self-expression. I felt very creative with these new found tools. And it's kind of a conundrum. Other artists, if they're lucky, maybe they can paint. That's super simple. But for some reason, my creativity lies in this intersection of very complicated tools and programming and electronics, but those are the tools that I find most inspirational and my creativity lives there.
Speaker 2 [00:01:28] In some ways, the tools kind of stay the same, but your purpose changed. So you said you just didn't like working for clients. What was the only more about what you wanted to express that you weren't getting out of industrial?
Daniel Rozin [00:01:41] I think I'll always be a designer. My process is very much a process of a designer, I use CAD to draw out everything before I build it, I use software to simulate things before I actually create them. And I think about the audience, I think communication, a lot of things that a designer would or a design project would rely on, but I'm doing it for myself, I'm going it for my own ideas. And I maybe that's what art is, so. It's for my own self-expression and not someone else. In terms of what I want to express, it's a bit more vague, but I can pinpoint two pillars of interest of mine, which maybe also will explain my obsession with mirrors. One of them, I'm really interested in the creation of image. How do we create image? How do perceive image? Color, brightness, how do we how do create it? So that's most of my pieces actually are trying to get at that from different directions digitally with sculptures, with mechanics, with kinetics, but they all are creating image and relying on the human ability to perceive image. The other pillar of interest that I have is participation. This idea of interaction, that the end viewer, the viewer of my art is taking part in the creation of the art, or at least participating in it, either by lending their likeness and their image by being reflected, or in some of my other pieces, they actually take a more active role by painting or actually doing something. But the art will always be different for every one of these viewers. If you come and see one of my pieces today versus tomorrow, it'll be different because of you.
Speaker 2 [00:03:34] It's interesting to hear you talk about that, because as an industrial engineer, people are interacting with your work all the time in a way, right? But it's a bit more passive. If it doesn't fall down, then they've interacted with it. You've switched to something where people are very much the controller. It doesn't happen if they're not there.
Daniel Rozin [00:03:53] Exactly.
Speaker 2 [00:03:53] Can you talk about that a little?
Daniel Rozin [00:03:54] Of course, so my pieces, I think because it's important to me, maybe because of my background as an industrial designer, I love objects. I love pretty objects. So I think most of my sculptures are pretty objects, it's really important to meet that they're very beautiful. However, they are not complete until the viewer stands in front of them and interacts with them. And then that whole circle is complete. And the the sculpture fulfills the potential that it had just as an inanimate object when a person interacts with it.
Speaker 2 [00:04:34] Given that you're do-
Speaker 3 [00:04:35] Could you, that was great, could you say it one more time?
Daniel Rozin [00:04:37] I'm not sure what I said, ask it again?
Speaker 3 [00:04:38] I was talking about how it's not complete until somebody comes and does it. It was great. I just wanted to get another version.
Daniel Rozin [00:04:44] So, you know, when I complete a sculpture, probably doing the physical part of it, building it, and it's up there erect on the wall, it already looks like it's going to look in the end, but I haven't turned it on and there's no person standing in front of it. It's not it yet. It's kind of an empty shell of what it's gonna be. And it's something different for every person interacting with it, because every standing in front of one of my pieces will make the piece. Look different and they will of course absorb something different from it. You can argue that all art is interactive in such a way that every person perceives it differently, but my art and a bunch of other interactive art, they really change themselves according to the interaction of the viewer.
Speaker 2 [00:05:30] What do you suppose, and this is a super heady question, but what do you supposed makes it art as opposed to the engineering work you were doing?
Daniel Rozin [00:05:41] You know, the question of what is art and what is not art is one that I'm not very good at answering. I'm I'm sure it's a very important distinction. When I go to galleries or when I walk around the world, it's sometimes hard for me to say what is art and is not, but it's super easy for me to say, what is good and what it is not. And I really hope that what I'm creating is good. And if it's art, that's in the eyes of the beholders or... Different definitions that might change from generation to generation. Definitely, I feel a very deep need to create this art. So for me, it definitely is very much an act of self-expression. My pieces sometimes seem, especially those maybe that are on a grid, they're very repetitive. And you can see how they might be designed. But maybe something that's not apparent is how personal they are to me. When one of my pieces is in a gallery and people are in front of it. I feel very exposed as if I am there and the piece is a proxy of me. Maybe that makes it art.
Speaker 2 [00:06:48] I wanted to ask you that, you in particular, because I feel like the work you do really democratizes art for the capital A. You know, there's a lot of art out there that is hard to access, and yours, I would say, is immediately understandable when somebody walks up to it. Is that part of it for you?
Daniel Rozin [00:07:08] I think when you go to a museum starting from the 20th century and you look at contemporary art, not all of it is very communicable. What would be the word? Communicable? No. I don't know. Communicable? When you go to an art gallery of contemporary art, not all the art is communi- Come on. Well, somehow my...
Speaker 3 [00:07:33] It's hard to communicate with it. Right. It doesn't always communicate easily.
Daniel Rozin [00:07:40] Yeah. I think when you walk into a gallery or a museum and see contemporary art, I think it's not necessarily the goal of the artist to communicate the art always, or to make sure that all audiences understand everything to a certain level. And also for contemporary art maybe it's not that important that a piece is beautiful or pretty. Or esthetically pleasing, or makes you happy, all of these things are kind of, you can choose to have them. In my art, I choose to them. It's really important to me that my art is beautiful, and it's important to be that it makes people happy. And I think some of it is in the interaction. There's nothing about the piece that makes them happy. It's something about the way that they interact with the piece, that they feel is joyful. And I find that that really crosses a big range of audiences. So people who typically go to museums and maybe know how to talk about high art maybe appreciate my art on one level. But I think other people who perhaps don't frequent galleries, they can enjoy the art on maybe the same level, but maybe on a different level, which I don't think belittles it or I think it's as important to me. And I'm always happy to see when I'm installing our. In locations, and I see the cleaning people, the maintenance people interacting with my art and kind of smiling, it's as important to me as to get a good write-up about my art from some high art, someone who understands.
Speaker 2 [00:09:18] Can you just sort of hit a few sort of notable examples for your best work that kind of exemplifies what you're talking about?
Daniel Rozin [00:09:28] I remember installing a piece early on in Korea, a big interactive kinetic installation in what would be a lobby of a hotel. It was still being built. And there was a cleaning woman mopping the floor in front of the piece, and she didn't notice that anyone was looking. And she was kind of mopping and dancing in front the piece. And for me, that was very lovely that she enjoyed it. And it wasn't less important to me than the people who will later on pay a lot of money to stay in that hotel as guests. And it's as important. Or I have a piece that's installed at NYU where I work, and it has been there for 22 years now. And one year, we sent the piece off for an exhibition. And the UPS guy who comes in every day. Was asking about it because it was part of his routine to stand in front of the piece, interact with it, and then go on with his deliveries. So I like that, that it can be appreciated in a variety of, a variety what? That's the question. It's not levels. I don't think one level is better than the other. But these are definitely different viewpoints.
Speaker 2 [00:10:47] And if you want to take a sip of some of that, I can hand it to you. OK.
Daniel Rozin [00:10:50] No? Okay. Sorry if I ruined your...
Speaker 2 [00:10:54] No. It's all over. It's gone. Um. That's great, I did just want to get sort of, just list them out, you know, you talked about the trolls and the penguins, just to have sort of things that we can show images of.
Speaker 3 [00:11:10] Maybe tick off some of the materials you've worked with over the years.
Daniel Rozin [00:11:19] Most people who know my art recognize me from my series of pieces called Mechanical Mirrors. And my Mechanical Mirror started in the year 1999 by me creating a kinetic interactive piece from wooden tiles. Over the past 20-something years, I've really dug a bit deep into that in terms of the materials that I love using. I've used wood a lot of times, and steel, and plastic, but also some more esoteric things, such as. Penguin dolls, or fur puffs, or trash that I picked from the streets of New York in my pockets. It's kind of a, I guess it becomes a habit once you start seeing pixels, you see pixels everywhere in trash, in dolls, in people, and now my latest thing is I'm seeing it in a growing plant itself. So I'm hoping that maybe even a living plant can become pixelated. Or maybe just be an image creation vehicle.
Speaker 3 [00:12:20] What makes the mirrors, we call them mirrors, what makes the mirror?
Daniel Rozin [00:12:27] The idea of mirroring, of reflection, is really foundational for my practice. And it's a way, it's platform that I really enjoy working. And there are many reasons why. One very pragmatic one is that when you're creating art with technology, you need to establish an interface. How will people interact with your piece? And typically, when you interact with technology you see buttons and sliders and things on screens. And I don't want any of these. I think there's this agreement of reflection. That you stand in front of the piece, you see your image there, and you're activating the machine, is a very simple one. I think most people get it intuitively very early on. And then they can start thinking about the other aspects of the art, perhaps, that I'm more interested in. But the whole idea of the user interface is kind of established by that mirroring. Beyond that, mirrors are an amazing object. So if you look at about on a real in it a real mirror that you might not want to include. If you think about a real mirror, the material of mirror, it's magical. If I would have a mirror behind me here on the wall, and you would look into it and I would look into it, we would both see different things. So that surface is actually calculating our point of view and creating an image customized for each and every one of us. And it would do it for any number of people in a room. If I would try to calculate that with a computer, it's almost indefinite. It's infinite. And a piece of shiny tin metal does that, or a pond does that. So that act of reflection I also find, of course, very magical. Now the idea of mirroring, if you want to go to mythology and think about narcissism and vanity and why we enjoy mirrors, so of course we can go there. But for me, there's something... Very different. When I think about how I experience myself internally versus how people see me from the outside, there is a huge gap there. And that gap is changing over the years and probably becoming more and more. I imagine myself still much more useful than I see myself in the mirror in the morning. So that gap it very big. And a mirror has the ability to collapse that gap immediately. You can see yourself from the out side just like other people see you. And that tension between what you feel from the inside, how you experience your being from the inside versus how you appear externally, a mirror negotiates that. And that's really important to me and profound for me.
Speaker 2 [00:15:13] Well, and when people walk up to one of your pieces, whether they're the most revered art critic or the UPS guy, they both look the same.
Daniel Rozin [00:15:23] They, when different people stand in front of my art, of course, they see different things. They don't look the same. They are treated the same, so the parameters of what they see, like a real mirror, they see themselves in very high fidelity, and then they can see all their blemishes and be critical of themselves. In my art they are abstracted in some way. Perhaps just the low density and the mechanics. Gives them a more abstract image of themselves. I think ones that perhaps is more pleasant, then you don't have to dwell on your, like I said, blemishes or if you, the way you imagine yourself. And I think because of that abstraction, I think people are happy to share that in view with other people. So if you're in a gallery and a bunch of people are viewing one of my pieces and maybe one of them is featured on the piece, I don't think that that person... Feels like their privacy has been infringed on because of that level of abstraction.
Speaker 2 [00:16:26] Do you want to take a sip of water?
Daniel Rozin [00:16:31] I know, my voice does that. Can I get you a Coke or something like that? No, I have this...
Speaker 3 [00:16:36] The chai might be making work.
Daniel Rozin [00:16:38] You think so? No, it's the way I am. I don't know why it happens. Thank you.
Speaker 2 [00:16:43] So you touched on the idea that you're now moving to plant form. Just touching on that idea of what to do next. How does that evolve, and how did you get to now working with the plant?
Daniel Rozin [00:17:03] So that's really a bunch of questions together.
Speaker 2 [00:17:05] So starting just, how do you decide what to do next?
Speaker 3 [00:17:08] I mean, do you get tired of what you've done? I mean are you always looking for something else, or sometimes it's like, I can do this easily, or I can just do what I did before.
Daniel Rozin [00:17:19] So this series of mirrors that I've been basing my art upon has been going on for about 25 years now. And every year I ask myself, is it over? Should I do something else? Do I want to do something? But I'm still so curious about this. And I really have other ideas that are there germinating in my mind, that some of them will take five years or 10 years to come to fruition or kind of. Become clear enough for me that I can say, okay, this is the year that I will build this piece. So, pieces that I did in the past, such as the pom-pom mirror, for example, which is my first mirror that works with soft material, is something that I wanted to do for really, I think, maybe 10 years, but I couldn't figure it out. And then I went to a concert one night, and the inspiration came to me about how soft materials can kind of move around each other. And that solved that piece of the puzzle. And I decided that that year I would build it.
Speaker 2 [00:18:24] And so now you continue to evolve and you're working with a completely new.
Daniel Rozin [00:18:31] A lot of my pieces kind of reference nature or reference science or reference laws of nature or materials of nature. But I've never really gone all the way to actually using nature itself. I use wood, which has nature in it. I have pieces that are about evolution, which is a law of nature, but nothing that is nature itself My last piece that I'm working on right now... Is actually going to be using live plants as the material for actuating to create a display, a mirror. Something that's interesting about that piece also is that not only the material of it is going to be a living plant, but actually the subject of the piece is a living plan. So unlike my other pieces that reflect a human being, the viewer, this plant mirror. Is we're going to be a real plant mirror, and it's gonna mirror another plant that will be the subject of it.
Speaker 2 [00:19:36] And what is the sort of underlying idea behind that that you're hoping to express?
Daniel Rozin [00:19:42] So when I'm reflecting a human being, I usually use their likeness. So the image captured by a camera is then shown on the piece itself. When I was thinking about a plant, I'm not sure that the appearance, the visual of a plant captures the essence of the plant. So what I'm about to do is actually connect sensors to the plant, And those sensors will capture things as the level of CO2, the humidity of the air, the amount of brightness in the light. These are things that I think a plant would care about very much. And that information is going to be reflected on the plant mirror. In order for a person to interact with this whole system, they would have to actually influence the plant. They could probably cast a shadow on the plan. They can breathe on the plant and then elevate the CO2 levels. But everything will go through a plant.
Speaker 2 [00:20:45] So I wanted to touch on the idea of creative process. And one of the ideas we've thought about is the blank canvas in that moment for every artist. But you have put a framework of mirrors around what you do, but explored every possible variation of that. I'm just curious if that has meaning to you, if you avoid a completely blank canvas, talk about that framework of mirror. Yeah.
Daniel Rozin [00:21:13] I guess maybe it's my background as a designer is that I enjoy constraints, I think. These are self-inflicted constraints in my practice. But I seem to have zeroed in on this platform of these mirrors. And I think what we're filming today, I'm showing you mostly the mechanical pieces, the kinetic pieces. But there are many other types of pieces that I create that are still mirrors. I create software pieces and sculptural pieces. Investigate this idea of reflection. So I really enjoy that it has boundaries, that it doesn't have this empty canvas, that when you start an art piece, the whole universe is possible, and then you have to say, no, today I'm gonna do something about, it's gonna be a painting, it's going to be about flowers. I kind of know when I start, and I guess I find that comforting, but still expressive enough that I can investigate many things that are interesting to me within this realm or zone or mode of mirroring and reflection.
Speaker 2 [00:22:20] Is that a carryover, you think, from your industrial engineer days, where every problem was sort of presented to you instead of just being a blank?
Daniel Rozin [00:22:29] I think that my background as an industrial designer has definitely helped in developing my process of work. And in that process of working, usually there are constraints which are kind of dictated by a brief, by a client, by mechanics, by need, by audience, by markets, by many things. So most of these things I can shed aside, and I can come up with new parameters. But this idea that work is within parameters. In that there is a component of communication within the work is definitely something that I think comes from my background as a designer.
Speaker 2 [00:23:08] And similarly, do you feel like the tools, some of which are behind you, but that are always expanding as the years go on, do feel like that has expanded the possibilities of what you do, and your work has been affected by it?
Daniel Rozin [00:23:23] So working as a designer, I was exposed to many tools of the trade early on, such as drawing in CAD and working in prototyping and being able to create objects. But I didn't find a need to create art before I was trained in other set of tools, such as the digital tools, the ability to author on a computer, to write software, to actually create electronics. And once all of these building blocks were in place, suddenly I found that these are the tools that are meant for me. I really feel like I was meant to do that. I can't paint, I can sketch, I cant sing. I would love to create art in these simpler forms, but it seems like my creativity is in this very complex intersection of digital tools that other people find very hard to work in. When you're working on a project that is digital, there's a huge remoteness between what you're trying to achieve and what you're doing. Perhaps you're thinking about beauty and color and composition, but what you have to think about is numbers and algorithms and mechanisms. And some people find that disconnect very frustrating, this remoteness. But for me, that's the fun of it. I love having my mind. Operate on these two levels in the same time. I never forget what I'm aiming for, which are these higher ideas, perhaps, of beauty and art and concepts. But on the other hand, probably 90% of my practice, I am actually trying to solve problems and learn new things, tools, digital or physical tools.
Speaker 2 [00:25:09] On that topic you've mentioned before that you don't really separate the esthetic challenges from the technical challenges of the work you do. Can you talk about that a little bit and when you're viewing a problem or something you're aiming for, which lens you're looking at that problem?
Daniel Rozin [00:25:33] I'm not sure if I can answer that. I don't understand, but maybe I can answer something else.
Speaker 2 [00:25:39] Every artistic decision is ultimately a technological one.
Daniel Rozin [00:25:44] Right.
Speaker 2 [00:25:44] So can you talk about...
Daniel Rozin [00:25:45] I used to, you know, when I was an industrial designer one of the most frustrating things for me was that my art, my designs were implemented by engineers and they would have taken my beautiful sketches and turned them into something that I sometimes didn't recognize, compromising on what I thought were exactly the wrong places. The fact that I am now the engineer of my own art and my own designs is very Liberating and I can sometimes go on the limb For example, I have a piece which is called Shiny Balls Mirror, which is an arrangement of 921 chrome-plated balls inside aluminum tubes. And the front plane of it is not completely straight. It is on a curvature, which made the whole thing super complicated and pricey for something that I think an engineer would say is not worth it. But for me, as an artist, I could say, yes, I'm going to spend three more months in the studio because I think that little detail is really important to me. And I will compromise not on that, but probably on something else that an engineer would not compromise. So I think for me, I am not saying it's true for everyone, but for me the fact that I am the engineer, designer, conceiver, and builder of my own art constrains me in the way that I can't achieve anything, everything, because... Some things I don't know yet, but everything that I do achieve, it's my own compromise. It's a hundred percent me I really don't like the idea of someone else compromising on my art
Speaker 2 [00:27:22] It's very interesting that you do everything yourself and you love that autonomy, that control, clearly. And you're also paying that forward in a way. You're creating works that offer people a level of control, right? That kind of empower them. Is there some connection between you and the people viewing your art in that way?
Daniel Rozin [00:27:48] Again, I'll answer something else, maybe.
Speaker 3 [00:27:52] OK, so I have a good thing to say.
Speaker 4 [00:27:55] OK.
Daniel Rozin [00:27:57] Okay, do you want it? No, no, no. Same thing. Creating interactive art is really something that goes really completely opposite the control freakiness of most artists. Because what you want to do is control every detail to the last detail, every little aspect of the art. And when you're creating interactive art, what you're saying is that this art will not be complete. I'm going to put it in the public and allow the audience, the viewer, to complete the art." Okay, and I will probably never see it and it's complete because I won't be there with every person interacting. So there is a very big tension there with the need of artists to really control everything to the last detail and actually opening up their art to say, this I'm allowing the viewer to change. And that is a friction that I know many people who come to interactive art from background of normal art or non interactive art They find that a compromise very hard to do So it's a different question, so I love it.
Speaker 3 [00:29:05] I don't want to interrupt you, but technology, a paintbrush is technology, so you work with technology and people put a big capital key in it, but aren't you just simply in a kind of artistic tradition that's been going on?
Daniel Rozin [00:29:25] Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 [00:29:26] So maybe, I don't know if you want to reference something, but you did reference that book.
Daniel Rozin [00:29:29] I will. I'm sure it will come up with pretty much every person you interview. But I can probably reiterate that on my own take on that. I think that this separation between art and science is something that is new and maybe artificial. When we look back at art and artists, probably in ancient times, but definitely starting maybe at the Renaissance, that separation between art and people who were advancing science, they were the same people. Some famous ones, of course, are people like Leonardo. And I think artists, for the most part, are a pragmatic bunch. So. They care about science because they're trying to create something, very much like technologists. They really care about the implementation of it. So artists at the Renaissance time, when they discovered or developed the art of perspective, for example, of human perception and perspective, they did not care so much about actually defining it in a way that is academic. They wanted to use it right away. They really, that became the foundation of a lot of our understanding. And then later in the 19th century, the development of color and photography, again driven by artists, not so much because they cared about it or they wanted to develop the technology for that. They wanted to use it right away, but it was the same people. I think today it could be the same also. Some of science and technology is complicated and narrow in such a way that a general purpose artist perhaps would have a hard time. Having their hands on both fields, but I think it is possible, I think its important, and I really don't see a huge difference between the motivation, the creativity, and the mindsets of people who decide to be creative in arts versus people who try to be creative in science.
Speaker 2 [00:31:24] You know, using that as a touch point to just dive once more into sort of the qualitative aspect of creativity. Part of this shows we're trying to understand creativity. When you're coding, when you're picking the right motor, when you making these technical decisions, can you describe in some way that feeling as opposed to standing back and sketching out in your mind an esthetic look or a color choice? Is it a different feeling or are they similar?
Daniel Rozin [00:31:56] So let me start by saying something about the term creativity. I think the term, creativity, had been kidnapped. Just like the term design or some other terms that now mean something else than I think what they really are. Creativity nowadays means anyone who thinks outside the box or has some sort of novel thought. I think that the word creativity has in it the word create. Trying to create something new, something that was not there before, that's the act of creation. And I think people who are creative, people who create are the most optimistic person, people in the world, because what are they saying? It's in the opposite of people who are perhaps conservers, who say all the best art has happened in the past, let's conserve it, and the best thing we can do is bring it to its original state. While a creative person says, I think the world can be even better. I'm starting from whatever is there today, and I will dream something much more optimistic. The future can be better than it is today. And I think that is the art of creation. These are people who are creative. And I don't want to diminish other types of creativity that do not involve creation, but I think they perhaps need a term of their own. And that creativity, of course, doesn't necessarily have to take the form of you building something physical. You can definitely be creative by creating a music or a computer program or many other things. So it doesn't necessarily have to be physical. But the act of creation, I think, really is worthwhile defining that and separating that from just this, what it's used today, which is kind of thinking out of the box. But then your question, reiterate it so I'll answer that one.
Speaker 2 [00:33:45] Well, just maybe a bit of interest. Oh, the difference between thinking. Your personal feelings. OK. Yeah, about those different decisions.
Daniel Rozin [00:33:59] It's a common thing to think about the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain. I think it's been debunked already now. That's probably not the case. But it's maybe helpful to think about is if there may be the right side of this brain is thinking of the creative stuff or the artistic things and the Left one is more problem solving the pragmatic parts of it. I don't think that's the case and in any case I definitely enjoy it. When I'm thinking about big concepts for my Next piece. Or composition or color or things that you would think are right or left side of my brain, I don't feel like I'm thinking about it in a different way than when I am solving a problem in code or I am of solving a mechanism. It's really one and the same. And I love that soup of not thinking only about one or not working, thinking only the other. And that's perhaps one of the reasons also I love doing the whole thing myself. Because I think if I would delegate some of the problem solving to someone else, I'm not sure I would be very happy with the result. But more than that, the process of doing all of it, of carving wood and wiring wires and programming computers, I don't know why I would want to produce art if I'm building it. I have to touch everything. I think maybe that's why it's my art, and not just. A design is because I feel so invested in all parts of its creation.
Speaker 2 [00:35:34] What is your process anyway, without getting into the, we already talked about sort of how you evolve, what you make or what materials you use, but okay, you have an idea what happens next.
Daniel Rozin [00:35:55] Most of my art pieces tend to be a complicated combination of software and hardware and electronics. And projects like that tend to mean that you can't really see what they are. They don't come to life until everything is in place. So then there's the challenge, how do you imagine these projects ahead of time, and how do you design for them? And I think maybe... The tools that I use for my art itself, such as computer programming and 3D modeling and things like that, really come in handy. So I usually simulate a project where I can really see what it maybe is going to look like even before I embark on actually building it. Because building one of these projects sometimes can be a lengthy and expensive process. So, whatever you can do to kind of... Imagine and show yourself or maybe share with others also what the piece is going to be like is very helpful. But you always have to take these kind of on screen or other simulations with a grain of salt because you really have to Let's grab that. Let me say something offensive. When you're creating a project and you're starting to work on it, for the most part, things look very bad when you start doing them. And hopefully, they get better and better. Now, as a teacher, it's something I coach students to do all the time, because sometimes they will create a first iteration of their project, see that it looks horrible, and then they'll discard it and move on. And it's really important that you actually at these prototypes that you're creating throughout the process with a kind of a distortion lens. I always think about it as a Donald Trump distortion lens, that you don't see what you see, you see what you think. So you're looking at your prototype and you're not seeing that horrible, ugly thing that it is. You're seeing what it could be, what you imagined, and how it will be there in the future. And you don't give up on it. You continue going at it and you do another one and it still doesn't look good, but you can see it with your own eyes. You have to see it what your mind. Because maybe snippets of it... Which you pick are actually pointing at its potential in the future. But most of it is still looking very, very bad. So then you have to, you know, there's a lot of, you have to give your projects a lot credit. You really have to kind of give them slack and say, I remember imagining this. It didn't look like this. In my mind, it looks something else. And don't forget what you imagined. Forget what it is now and work upon that one.
Speaker 2 [00:38:58] It's not only just learning to overcome seeing something that is not the way you imagined it. Do you find that failure has a direct purpose in terms of the creative process?
Daniel Rozin [00:39:20] You know, we always say that failure is an option. I think maybe it goes beyond that a little bit. I wanna kind of marry this idea of failure with this act of elimination. I think that the art of creation is really the art elimination. And when you start a project, or you know, let's say a blank slate or a white canvas, and you are thinking, what will I do today? Will I make a sculpture or will I make painting? And you choose one. What you did is you took the entire universe, you slashed it in half, and you say, I'm discarding painting. I'm doing a sculpture. Will I make it out of wood or out of stone? Wood. So you're eliminating. You keep eliminating. You keep throwing stuff away until what is left in the end is what you have. Famously, religious people or people with spirituality, like Michelangelo, kind of felt that there was some sort of divine intervention. And perhaps the sculpture that he was carving was in the marble, and he was merely revealing it. I don't have that feeling. But But I do find that the act of removing is very much, we should take that again somehow, my thought there. Yeah, but what am I trying to say? What are my tricks?
Speaker 3 [00:40:44] Take a moment. You were doing great.
Daniel Rozin [00:40:52] When you start a project, everything is possible. At that moment, your project, your piece, has ultimate potential. It has the potential to have anything in the world. And that potential goes and gets narrower and narrower as you're taking decisions about your project. You're deciding it's going to be a sculpture. It's going be interactive. It's gonna be digital. It's a gonna be a mirror. It's made out of wood. It's got to have 685 tiles. They're gonna be this big. They're going to tilt this much. You're gonna round the corners. And then you're done. And the piece is there, and you turn it on, and it works, and it's wonderful. And what it is is one of a million billion possibilities. So that is the point where all potential of the piece has collapsed. The piece, when you're done with it, has no potential whatsoever. It might be wonderful, but it has no potentially. It is what it. Is And maybe in the mind of the creator, all of these other pieces along the way, when you decided to round the corners, there is, in a parallel universe, a piece that didn't round the corners. Maybe it was better. And, you know, it's really hard to kind of come to terms with that act of elimination, these discarded babies, perhaps, that didn't t come to fruition, versus this one that survived this chopping, chopping, until it is what it is. It's a very bittersweet moment when that happens.
Speaker 2 [00:42:17] So sorry, I didn't hear the question you asked, but feel free to answer it.
Speaker 5 [00:42:20] What was the very first tool that you picked up as an artist as a child? Mm. The scan should have created it.
Daniel Rozin [00:42:30] You know, the first artistic tool that I picked up was probably as a designer, where I learned how to draw and draft and using the traditional tools of art. But for me, they were not at all tools of arts. So that was not an art creating tool for me. The first art creating tools for me was programming, when I learned how to program later in life. Actually, I was already in my late 30s when I first learned how program. Computers and felt very creative about that. I think that was the first time that I felt I want to create something that I'm going to express myself through it. So not the traditional tools at all.
Speaker 5 [00:43:10] Your students at NYU, you talked before about...
Daniel Rozin [00:43:25] Did I say that?
Speaker 5 [00:43:26] Yeah, well let me ask the question differently then. Do they come, do your students come with balanced interests between fine arts and technology? Right. Is it important?
Daniel Rozin [00:43:42] So I teach in a program called the Interactive Telecommunications Program, which is part of CHIS School of the Arts. It's a two-year program. And we accept hundreds of students coming from a variety of backgrounds. You can kind of divide it that some of them come with a technical background, that they know how to program and do some engineering, versus the rest of them who come from some sort of artistic background. And I love that. So I find that it's much easier to teach the ones who come from an artistic background and you teach them some sort of technical skill and they take off. Versus if you get an engineer and trying to teach an engineer how to express themselves, I think is much more difficult than teaching an artist how to use programming. But I love both. And I really love having all of them together in a class because they complement each other. And I definitely don't see a priority or that one of them is more important than the other. I think that that separation between them is purely artificial. But they come through schooling systems that channels them to be either technical or artistic and hopefully what I can do in my classes is kind of bring that funnel back together that they can be whole again.
Speaker 2 [00:44:55] Just technically, do we want to just match the silver and the harrowing of a little on the, yeah, oh that was, I probably just fixed it. So now you're going to be like a burka. So we'd like to talk to people who started their life and career in a different country and came to America about the siloing of art and science and how it compares to different parts of the world. In America we talk about how it's very siloed. Is it different in Israel? Do you experience it differently elsewhere?
Daniel Rozin [00:45:38] Yeah, so I grew up and went to school and went to art school, design school in Israel. And in Israel, Israel is very famous for engineering. So nowadays, we know about all this cyber stuff and very, very high level, high tech in all of these startups. So it's a very technical, savvy. But a lot of the engineering there is a very no-nonsense engineering. These are engineers that perhaps were trained by the military to launch missiles and calculate horrible things like that. And then when they come to actually create products, I think that mindset is still there. So there's something very strict and very functional about design and engineering in Israel. I would find it very hard to turn myself into an artist in Israel. I had to come here to New York and free myself to start the second chapter in my life. Yeah, and be in a very non-judgmental environment that the department in NYU gave me to actually say, no, I'm not a designer. I'm an artist, and I don't justify it to anyone and I probably it's probably something that many immigrants will tell you but you know the act of moving from one place to the other allows you to reinvent yourself so it's maybe not the fact that it's from Israel but the fact I'm not where I grew up in allowed me to reinvent myself like that.
Speaker 2 [00:47:14] That kind of touches on something you mentioned earlier, which I thought was really interesting about the, how we view technology now. You were talking about Facebook when it first began, compared to social media. Today, it's a very different view. Just sort of broadly, do you have thoughts about how we utilize technology, whether it be for art or anything?
Daniel Rozin [00:47:39] I'm a very optimistic person in nature, it appears. And I talk about how I think creativity equals optimism. But beyond that, I have been around technology for long enough to see how things that we embarked on with total optimism, such as social media, for example, that I was around and was developed under my supervision in some of my classes, and took a turn. To the worse, that I now pepper my optimism with a little bit of caution. I still embark on new projects and coach students to embark on a new projects with optimism and with creativity and with great energy, but you can't do it without thinking immediately from day one about the downside of it, the dark side of it. How it could be perhaps manipulated into become something else. And perhaps even not to embark on it if it seems so eminent that that would happen. It's a very difficult balancing act. In my own work, I don't think that I encountered it as much as I do when I'm coaching students on their projects that seem to be much more wide in the net that they cast, and a lot of them are actually doing things such as social software.
Speaker 2 [00:49:03] Looking ahead, do you imagine where you might go 10, 20 years from now in your work, or is it so iterative, it's hard to imagine?
Daniel Rozin [00:49:19] I'm surprised I got anywhere in life. I really, you would think, because within the scope of my projects, I'm a very planned person. You have to be. I have to order parts custom made from a different country and everything gets integrated in the end. So everything is very planned out. But my career, my path in life has not been like that at all. I can't remember taking a single decision in my life that led me to where I am today, an artist in New York making interactive digital art. How did that ever happen? So, and I definitely don't have a vision for the future that I can say in 20 years. I, you know, I find myself in a pretty good place. So I enjoy my craft, I enjoy in my art. I'm in a place where I have opportunities, which is wonderful. These pieces that I'm showing you in my studio, I know that they will be shown, which is not something that every artist can say. So that's wonderful. But in terms of what direction that would take, I'm not sure, and I'm very curious about it, but not as if I have responsibility for it, as if on a journey and I have to discover it'll happen, and I can look at it back and say, oh, yeah, of course. And when you look back, so hindsight is always 20-20, and when you go back, you can say, of course this led to that, but when you're doing it, it doesn't feel like that at all. I find that with my students. Students come to me as they are. About to graduate to think about what they are going to do next. And they want to be artists and create their own projects. And then they say, maybe what I'll do is I'll take a job as a programmer, and then I'll make money. And then I can be a artist, because I'll have money and stability. And what they don't understand is if they a job and become a programmer, they will become a programmer. What you do is what you become. You will never be an artist if that's what you want to do. I'm not saying the path is easy, but that path of saying, I'm going to do one thing, is if it's not influencing you. I'm just going to acquire some skills and money. No, you will become that. And that's not the place to launch or be an artists. So it's really important to understand that what you do is what become. And what we do is what the world becomes. It's such an obvious thing, but it's not trivial at all. We think that we are fine jetting around the world and driving our cars and using electricity and polluting, and not thinking that this is the world that what becomes. What you do is you become, and it's what the word becomes. It's so obvious when you look backwards, and somehow it's so difficult when you forward. So I'm not good at planning forwards. I plan backwards.
Speaker 2 [00:52:12] Well, I happen to agree with you, but just to push on that idea for a second, we talked to Anthony Howe, who said that everything before has sort of led him to this moment. He painted houses till he was 40, and then he became a totally different thing. There is that power. People are empowered to change.
Daniel Rozin [00:52:29] Right, I did the same. So I designed a product for a multinational company until I was 35, I think. So I did that for about 12 years. And that was the path. And I really had to come to a new country. It's not an evolution. I don't think you can evolve there. You need to shatter your old self. To do that, maybe, at least for me, that was the case. And I'm a great believer in education. A lot of people today think that they can maybe skip college and then go and do a startup. And we have many famous success stories like that. But again, I'm an educator. I'm firm believer in an education. And I think that the the safe environment and exposure to other people and other ideas that you get in school are a really good place for you to reinvent the future you. It's very hard to do it on your own or to evolve into a new you. So graduate programs, for example, are a very good place to you later in life to kind of say, I'm going to take a two-year break and I'm gonna invent the future me.
Speaker 2 [00:53:50] Let me ask, and then I'll let some other people, I'm sorry. Yeah, okay, let me, can I just ask one more question here. Just on that subject, how do you feel about art and science or STEM being taught on sort of the same level in education at an early age?
Daniel Rozin [00:54:09] You know, the whole STEM thing is wonderful. We call it STEAM. So we added A, which is art, to the other science technology. What's the E? Engineering? Art? Right, so anyway, STEAM, I think it's wonderful. You know again, like anything, sometimes it kind of gets channeled exactly to these very known outlets. So robotic competitions and stuff like that. But it's wonderful. Anything that it is, is wonderful. I think we're in the middle of a wonderful movement which involves younger people in the arts and in the sciences, involves young girls in coding, and people of color are kind of penetrating these closed environments. It's super important and super contemporary. It's really happening now, and it's so important and so right.
Speaker 3 [00:55:06] I just have one question that's simple. What's that? Okay, let me point first. Okay. Okay. Okay. We're filming at the opening. It can be the opening or late or any time thereafter. What do we see? Somebody stands and what happens when somebody encounters your work? Can you just walk us through the typical? Just give us a little. Yeah.
Daniel Rozin [00:55:31] Again, maybe I'm a designer, so I think how I communicate my art. So I'm trying to imagine a person coming to one of my art pieces. Maybe it's a mechanical, interactive mirror. And from far away, they see an object. Maybe it is a beautiful object. So now I bought a few seconds of their attention. They're coming closer to it, and oh, it moves, it's kinetic, right? Wow, I bought few more seconds of the attention. So, and then they move, and suddenly, the motion is in tandem with them. Wow, it's interactive. But bought a few more seconds of their interest. And now, suddenly, it is them, okay? Nothing captivates someone more than seeing themselves. They're all smiles, they start jumping up and down. And they have spent a few minutes in front of my piece, probably discovering a few things about the piece that maybe are not the most important things about it. But maybe after a few more minutes, they start thinking, why is this person activating rusted steel? What is he trying to prove? What is the essence of this? What is is the the essence is my participation here? How am I seeing it? Why did I not see it when I was far away? Maybe now they're thinking about the things that I thought. And if not, if they don't go to that level of understanding, Hopefully, they spent a few minutes with my piece and they enjoyed it and they walked away having had a good experience. But there are these levels of understanding. Beyond that, of course, there is interaction between people, there's the famous mansplaining. So there will really be a couple, a guy and a woman, and he will be explaining to her how the piece works. He will be totally wrong, and I will be eavesdropping. It's kind of, if you remember in Annie Hall, there is this moment with Marshall McLuhan, I think. I sometimes want to kind of bump in and say, you're completely wrong. But there is that. So people definitely go through this series of discovery as to, how does it work? A lot of people can't enjoy it, perhaps, before they kind of solve the technical mechanical enigma of it. And if it's helpful for them. I'm very proud of that as well. So. If someone comes to me and all they want to talk about is the mechanics of the piece and talk sharp, I'm delighted. In a way, I'm more fluent talking about that aspect of my art than talking about some more deeper art. I think that all, I had a art professor who was a famous art critic in Israel, and he said that art is too complicated to be left for artists. And I think in some way, he was right. I think a lot of artists, we work out of ignorance, we work kind of in a blindfold, not really understanding what we are doing, and it does take another type of person to kind of tell you, this is the context that you are doing it. I know it was helpful for me to kind of see my art and hear about my art by people like that who are much more analytic. The fact that I'm making mirrors was not apparent to me for the first three years of making mirrors. Until people pointed out that to me, And then I became very explicit about saying, oh, I can do mirrors like this, like that, like this. But that was not the case. I didn't know that. So it takes people of all sorts. And maybe creative people, people who choose to create, maybe can't necessarily have the ability to analyze their work to that level.
