full interview_paul friedlander_1.mp4
Paul Friedlander [00:00:00] Well, uh... I guess I first started thinking about waves some way a long time ago now, decades ago, as an art form. When I first starting thinking about ways, it was really more an accident than anything else. But sometimes accidents can be very happy accidents. And this is one of those cases. I was really trying to make. Just those two words together, when you say light sculpture, that was what I was trying to say to myself. I wanted it to be kinetic, I wanted it to move, but I wanted to feel like it was made of light. And everything to do with light shows, well, that's fun, but it's flat. Holograms, well they're interesting, but it is like this little magic window. Sculptor is something that you share your space with the sculptor. It's something that can be personal, or it can be monumental, but the whole point is it occupies the same space that the... The humans do, the visitors do, whoever they are. And so how can you make a light sculpture? That was the question I was asking myself. And I had various different ideas I was playing around with. And one day I thought, how about a skipping rope? A jump rope, as you say in the States. Jump that rope, it's making this amazing envelope, this very, very faint ghostly envelope around the skipper. And I thought wow. That might be really nice. I think I'll try building a little miniature one with tiny motors and just get it to spin. And the moment I got it spinning. It's not doing quite what I expected, but it's doing a whole bunch of other stuff as well. And yeah, I could make it do the classic spin shape, but off its own bat, as soon as you turn the speed up a little way, all these other wave forms emerge. And I thought, wow, that is very curious and very interesting and very beautiful. And so that's how my fascination with waves began. It was a serendipitous moment. It kind of entered into my kinetic. Adventure, exploration and inventiveness. Started I did stick with the little ones but pretty soon I thought well I need to make something that's more literally sculptural shape now having discovered something that is truly worthy of being that. So this is actually a very early one, I recently reassembled this one, this one comes from the 90s and it's kind of the first time I'd made a piece that was substantial, good enough to last indefinitely.
Speaker 2 [00:02:33] That's your art background, but you also have a science background, right? It must have influenced how you were thinking about it.
Paul Friedlander [00:02:39] I think that's absolutely true, and of course, the point about waves is that they're not just waves. It's like, okay, you know, if you ask somebody what a wave is, they're going to say, well, it's like waves on the sea. Oh, yeah, sound waves like waves. There are quite a few different kind of waves, aren't there? But to a physicist, what's so fascinating about waves, is A, there's sort of like one mathematical toolbox that explains all waves, and secondly, even more enigmatically, maybe everything is waves, like matter is waves. This is an idea that's been rolling around now for a hundred years and we still don't really understand it. It's like one of those big enigmas and that's why it underlies why everybody kind of gets scared off by quantum mechanics and even even the experts say if you think you truly understand quantum mechanics you've got it all wrong. What we can be certain of is we don't understand it and it's this this damn waves that kind of have been teasing us, frustrating us in providing this. Element of enigma in our insight. It's just not, it's there but it's not quite a hundred percent in terms of, well, yes, certainly. So anyway, as an artist, I take all of that on board. I love the enigma. I love that we have all these beautiful science theories, but they don't give us more than a kind of a hint of what's going on, a very precise mathematical hint, but still, it's not the whole story. There's something there which has that kind of artistic quality of a sense of deep puzzlement, deep mystery, like a muse. The whole reason you become fascinated by something in art. Is because you don't truly understand it. And that's actually exactly the same in science. Both artists and scientists are drawn towards that which cannot be comprehended. We get fascinated by the, whether you're trying to talk, describe problems of society, which obviously are very complicated, or just trying to walk along the seashore and explain why is this pebble like that or this shell like this. They're all. You're always, it's always that kind of, it's the bit you don't understand is the bit that fascinates you and that's what drives you on. Once upon a time, there was no distinction. You go back to the Renaissance, science was a new subject which didn't yet have a name. So in a sense, the inquiring mind is the kind of the underlying quality and so there is no separation. It's just different parts of the brain doing different jobs. So yeah, when I'm being rational and I'm. Being more scientific and when I'm being intuitive I'm apparently being more artistic but hey you know what gets a scientist interested in something in the first place? Is it logical to decide that you want to just try and understand stuff? Not necessarily. It must be some kind of emotion that drives your curiosity to exist so I don't really see there is a boundary in that same sense between the module or the art, the art-y bit of me and the science bit of me, they're all just being driven by whatever curiosity is and that's, that's the biggie, isn't it? That's what makes people either have a kind of something special that makes them want to try and understand things or do stuff or create stuff or whatever it is that they do, but in the first place, they have to have that drive and it makes them chase after immaterial goals in a sense.
Speaker 3 [00:06:10] What was it that got you started? I mean, you had this whole story about Sputnik, as I recall.
Paul Friedlander [00:06:16] I had the whole story. Well, I guess I had a lucky upbringing. My mother was an artist. My father was a mathematician. So right from being a small... I had those two influences. And right from being a small child, I had an inclination to create. So there was probably the artist there, even if I didn't give it a name of artist. But I definitely was specifically being taken off to art shows by my mom, exposed to and introduced to art, and specifically having conversations with my father about mathematics or other, you know. The deep kind of, but more rational side of thought. So I think I was very lucky in that sense that I had that rich background.
Speaker 2 [00:07:08] This is remarkable looking. Well, as I explained.
Paul Friedlander [00:07:10] Well, as I explained, it started with the jump rope. I discovered that an electrically spun rope at high speed develops all sorts of complex waveforms, but they were changing so fast, those waveforms are just like too much for the brain to take in. So the question is, how could I make it a little bit more accessible? And maybe I could never truly show you everything, but I can certainly give you a better hint of it. And I realized that the key to it was the way it's lit. So this piece is lit with a special kind of light I developed, I call chromostrobic light. And chromostorbic light, it's changing color, but it's more than just changing color. At times it's changed color so fast that it appears to the human eye that there's several different colors. So it's breaking up the pattern into different regions which have different colors, and that makes it easier for the eye to take in the complex forms.
Speaker 2 [00:08:07] But now, is it doing it by itself, or have you programmed it to do this, or is it somehow figuring it out?
Paul Friedlander [00:08:14] I have programmed it and I'm tempted to go and tweak it because right now I've got it set in a mode where it's mostly just showing one color at a time because that's kind of easy to grasp, but at other times I can adjust the code so, and this is really an artistic choice, although I'm using code and mathematical methods to do it, but I could have hundreds of colors simultaneously showing on it so the whole thing becomes banded like a tartan And in that way you kind of you reveal much of the finer detail of how the waveform is built up with these different slices. Now we've got a stripe of red emerging from a faint background.
Speaker 2 [00:08:54] Yeah, because I see the colors changing and I just sort of wonder, well, okay, who's pulling the switches?
Paul Friedlander [00:09:00] And I have another piece I'm going to show you in a little while where I've precisely synchronized the movement of the waveforms with the color. This one is just kind of, it's still at a random stage being the, this is the relatively old piece as I explained. So yeah, I'm changing color at high speed and it will at times approximately synchronize in with whatever the wave's doing, but you can also exactly lock it in. So when the wave is doing a particular shape, it will have a particular color. And then I can more artistically make a judgment about how I hesitate to call it composing it, because there's still an element of chaos. I can't tell the way what to do exactly, but I can kind of decide very carefully how I'm going to color it.
Speaker 2 [00:09:46] Does that excite you, the fact that in fact some of this is sort of improvisation but beyond?
Paul Friedlander [00:09:52] I definitely, I think as an artist, what intrigues me always is I don't quite know what's going to happen next. And if I did, I wouldn't be interested. So the very fact that it's unpredictable is something I choose to leave in there and I'm drawn to something that's unpredictable.
Speaker 2 [00:10:11] I always talk about what writers often will say, like, well, you know, if I knew what was going to happen, it would just be a typing exercise.
Paul Friedlander [00:10:19] It probably is a widespread feeling that you are actually taking yourself on an adventure. So it's like going off to literally on an exploration, but all you're doing is you're in your studio exploring what it is that drives you on, sitting at your writing table, finding out what your characters want to do.
Speaker 2 [00:10:42] So how, what is it that we're looking at? How do you, is this, they look like they're a grave.
Paul Friedlander [00:10:46] They are acrylic engravings and so what you're looking at in a literal sense is a sheet of clear plastic. The important thing I've done to it in technical terms is I've lit it from the edge and then an edge illumination catches every little kind of mark so the engraved marks are what light up. Artistically what I'm exploring is my further fascination with waves. So the kind of ways that we were looking at. Dancing strings, that's a physical embodiment of waves, but somewhere along the line, the computer's got powerful enough. I said to myself, well, I can do all of this in code. I can write code that will generate waves. And as soon as I started doing that, what I get is something on screen that, well, a lot of people do stuff on screen. So yeah, it's very beautiful stuff, but there's a million other people at it. I wanted to make something, again, take it out of the machine. And bring it into the world, make it feel more like part of our lives in a sculptural sense. So I realized I could freeze my changing kinetic patterns at any particular moment and then convert that image from the screen into something that can be engraved onto a sheet of acrylic.
Speaker 2 [00:12:07] Well, they almost look figurative.
Paul Friedlander [00:12:08] They definitely are, and it's one of, again, how these things emerge without exactly knowing what's gonna happen in advance, because I started out with very simple ideas of, well, I know enough math to easily make wave forms. You use sine waves. Sine waves are the kind of, the universal mathematical tool by which waves are created. Soon as you start to make a landscape of hills using sine waves, you think to yourself, well, that's nice, but I wonder what else. Bye. So, it's then the wonder of what else that then leads you off in another direction. And I was still working with sine waves because they're computationally simple, they're very fast to calculate. It's not like trying to solve a complex differential equation. It's just something the computer can zap it out and you can see it all happening in real time. My waves are still with signs, but now I've added extra kind of directions of pushing the wave surfaces. And I nicknamed this my mushroom function, but somewhere along the way I realized it's doing a lot of different and sometimes very figurative shapes, which are very graceful and beautiful. And underlies an awful lot of the work I've been doing recently is the mushroom function.
Speaker 2 [00:13:21] Anything that appeals to you about mushrooms, or is it just something you have to think about?
Paul Friedlander [00:13:24] Well, I guess it's the idea that they emerge from the ground and they're just as a little amorphous blob to start with and then, depending on what variety of mushroom they are, they develop very particular, beautiful, and kind of curvilinear shapes which, well, yeah, He's had a vaguely, vaguely vaguely maybe, a little bit like a muffin.
Speaker 2 [00:13:43] Obviously, the sine waves are very, very basic. Is that what drew you to them? Or is there something? Clearly, as I look around, yes, I could see sine waves. But of course, you've done many things to these sine waves, but what was it that drew you it originally?
Paul Friedlander [00:14:01] The sine wave in itself might seem like too simple, but I think the golden rule is when physicists try and use math is to make things as simple as possible, but not too simple. And they hit that sweet spot. So you don't want to write something incredibly complicated if you don't need to, and it's just going to exceed your requirement, but you need something that's just enough to do it. So, you know, it's like all these little magic formulas, the E equals MC squared. It looks terribly simple, but it... Has powerful consequences. So the same with the sine wave. Looks terribly simple, but we know you can build every sound in the world out of sine waves. And so in essence, you've got it all in there. It's the core out of which form emerges. Thank you.
Speaker 2 [00:14:48] Which is interesting to me because when I think of sound waves, of course, I think of sound. And these are actually talking to me, okay, in a different way. You know, I look at it, it's flat, but yet it has a sort of three-dimensional quality, and I'm almost hearing them do things, much the way I was hearing your other sculpture. Is there something going on in your head when you do hear the sound as well?
Paul Friedlander [00:15:09] I don't directly experience synesthesia but I am very aware of that idea and I have sort of played around with it in my mind as to what extent some kind of emotional response is universal. A literal synesthesia, no, I've never felt that at all. However, I like what you're saying and it kind of clicks with me, particularly because the discovery with the waveforms was so emergent in the sense that we've always... Had music being partly created with string waves, and then one day an artist comes along and says, hey, I can use the same tech, but a little bit rejigged to create a visual form, but it's still in essence, it's a stringed instrument that I'm playing.
Speaker 2 [00:15:56] Yeah, they look like unbelievably complicated stringed instruments. Yeah.
Paul Friedlander [00:16:01] Yes, so that's right. So once I'm writing code, then I'm not restricted by any physical limitations. I don't need to obey the laws of physics. The code can, as long as it makes sense in mathematical terms, can do anything I choose it to do. And so I can have variable speed, I can have waves that change their speed as they're going along. I can have waves emerge in different directions. Ideally I'd have them emerging in different dimensions, but for now... I'm just exploring exactly what you can do within that plane. So it's a bit like how perspective is, you're building upon our perceptions, our imaginations, ability to see a lot within the pictorial plane. And here I'm doing the same thing, it's the pictoral plane.
Speaker 2 [00:16:45] Why don't you take us on a little tour?
Paul Friedlander [00:16:46] OK, so really this is an exploration of a relatively recent past here. This is nearly all very new stuff. And largely as a result of lockdown, I had to get involved with doing a lot of small things. I couldn't work on a big scale. I could still dream on a big scale but I was very happily working on a small scale and something like this piece here is very much I was thinking about the big and the small at once and several years ago I did a collaboration with a physicist, Michael Longo, who was exploring whether or not the universe might spin and he did this by getting a bunch of students to look at pictures of spiral galaxies. And sure enough, the spiral galaxies do have a slight tendency to spin in one direction, preferentially to the other direction, which, at least locally within a small region, only a billion light years across also, suggests at least our little neighborhood of the universe is indeed spinning in one particular direction. He gave me all his data. So this is the data set. All these points in the background are locations of real galaxies. And I just artistically interpreted the galaxies as little sort of blob shapes that look approximately like galaxies, but they're not even intending to be exactly like galaxies. And I thrown in a couple of planets for good measure, and then my waveform. We said, I'll offer an explanation for, because I like to leave it just enigmatic. So make what you will of the waveform dancing in front of the... Well, that's what you said. Dancing, you know, immersed in the cosmos, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:18:21] Well, that's what makes it interesting. Yeah, so there is a picture of a Hubble telescope.
Paul Friedlander [00:18:24] Yeah, there is quite a bit of science, particularly in those ones with the background. Other times I'm just working with the waves alone, but in that case I put in a whole bunch of real-world data as well.
Speaker 2 [00:18:36] Well, as I look at these things, they're all extremely varied, though. I mean, the more you look at them, that's
Paul Friedlander [00:18:41] That's the surprising thing about waves, that they do, depending upon what you do to them, do different odd things. And sometimes there is a bit of science behind it as well. So for example, a piece like this, this is based upon something called the chirp wave. Chirps were invented originally in radar, so it's like a variable frequency that makes a chirp sound, and it helps to identify the different range that your reflections are coming off of you. Cheers. Then when it comes back again, you can tell from the sound, the frequencies that were in my voice. But obviously in radar, it would be the radio frequency, how deep in the range is. So I created a visual chirp. And then if you turn the frequency way up, the system starts malfunctioning. But it does it in a beautiful way. So again, it's another example of happy serendipity. So if I'm getting waveforms that are down at the level of individual pixels, then when I try and capture this data off the screen, my grid that I'm computing the waves isn't sufficiently fine. So it generates all these kind of little interesting wiggles which are all emergent from the kind of limitations or beauty of the computation. I don't know how you want to look at it, but I loved it. A lot of these fine details as well, if you think about it, they actually are much more like traditional waves, like when you walk out in nature and scene. A pond or some other quiet place, and so often you're tended to throw a pebble in the pond and you see all those little ripples catching the daylight around you. So sometimes the waveforms actually do relate very strongly to traditional waves, other times it has immersed in this kind of strange concept, you know.
Speaker 2 [00:20:22] Some of them look like sort of like, you know, protozoans.
Paul Friedlander [00:20:25] And, of course, there's always those associations, our paradoia, our ability to see something that's entirely chanced on this. This one is very obviously bird shaped and I spotted this shape. Oh yeah, I'll make a little piece out of my bird that I've come across. But it started out as some little tiny wiggle inside some more complex pattern. Oh, that one looks like a bird there. So I'll blow that one up and then see how she looks. And that's going on all the time. And I just playfully just muck around with things and I just spot something within the design that appeals to me.
Speaker 2 [00:20:58] Oh, that is all about the serendipity of something. That there is something that you see, but then you turn it to something entirely different.
Paul Friedlander [00:21:05] Yeah so and this different people tell me it's different things you know like it's a tornado
Speaker 4 [00:21:12] All those lenses are in the show now, so thank you. Oh, yeah.
Paul Friedlander [00:21:15] Oh yeah, yeah. That's right. There's always going to be these axle sensors, I just had a roll of toilet paper on my desk earlier. So yeah, so these are a typical example of people having different reactions to it when they see these pieces. Some people say, oh, this is just lovely, and they don't comment. Some people said, oh these look like souls to me. Somebody else says, oh they look like legs. It triggers a different response and a different imagination of tornadoes. All of them are interesting responses. I'm not trying to direct you to have a particular thought. It's just... Isn't that fun, though? That's fun, isn't it? Yes, it's got all these different layers of meaning, which, is it really meaning, or is it just our brain's ability to associate form with something that might have a meaning?
Speaker 2 [00:22:10] Well, that's sort of what we were talking about before, because it's like, there's a question, but some people, their art is very much designed. You know, it's very much, I know what I'm going to do, and I execute it.
Paul Friedlander [00:22:21] Yes.
Speaker 2 [00:22:22] Right. And then, but what you're doing is something entirely different in my mind, right? You have a sense of what you are going to be doing, but it evolves as you do it. And then that's the kick.
Paul Friedlander [00:22:35] That's the kick, yeah, I think that's a fair description of it, so yes. I'm just fascinated by how much I can find within this, what is a very particular realm I'm exploring of what waves will do.
Speaker 4 [00:22:50] Can I just ask a quick question? We've met a lot of artists that use science in their process. But you are distinct in that you really seem to be putting the science as the subject. You want to put that in front of people. And can you talk about, it seems you have such a real reverence for the science to make it the subject of your work. Why don't we move away from there and change? Yeah, that's right.
Paul Friedlander [00:23:12] Yes, I have a little bit of a different background. No, I think that's a very good...
Speaker 2 [00:23:14] No, I think that's a very good... It's good for you. Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Friedlander [00:23:16] Yeah, yeah, I just have to watch out for that damn mirror in the background.
Speaker 2 [00:23:18] Yeah, we don't worry about it.
Paul Friedlander [00:23:21] Yeah Yeah, I don't think the reflections off the Okay, so now that's a very
Speaker 2 [00:23:30] We can talk to each other.
Paul Friedlander [00:23:31] Yeah, that's a very interesting point, the idea of a kind of an almost like a reverence for science because that's exactly how I feel about it. And I guess the easiest way to understand that also is when you think about how people who love nature truly love nature. So it's not like we need to start saving forests because they're so valuable and we have calculated the cost of them. We need to stop saving forests, because we love them. And it's the same thing that I guess I feel. About science, that it is actually in danger in the same way that nature is in danger, because there's this explosion of anti-science going on, and we should... Stay identifying with it and realize why it's something that's truly special in a way that is like magic almost because it's done so much, but it is science.
Speaker 2 [00:24:25] It's science, it comes from the same, as you pointed out, it comes from this same sort of wonder, you know, the idea of trying to find an answer to something. But the scientific method is quite different than the artistic method, don't you think? Or no?
Paul Friedlander [00:24:40] Well, as I said before, I feel there's a big crossover. So when it comes down to it, the goals are different, but the methods surprisingly have a big cross over. So everything is, it's gotta be nuanced in answer to that question. So yeah, of course, I don't have to collect data in the same way that a scientist does and then have it subject to scrutiny by others before it's acceptable and gets published. But what I am doing is I'm using that kind of, what is it? It's very difficult to say why it's so similar and yet it's so different. It's a really hard one because to me it feels very close what's going on. But I know it's different in the sense that my final objective is different because I'm not trying to prove some truth about the outside world. That's for the scientists to do. I'm more like an inventor, in fact. But perhaps the comparison is with invention, that I'm creating something that's definitely I'm sorry. Probably not there in the world before. So it's an invention, whereas the overlap for me is definitely particular to what I am.
Speaker 2 [00:25:48] How do you say the overlap between art and science?
Paul Friedlander [00:25:49] Yeah, the overlap between art and science, for me, is definitely very strong because of my own background and the fact that I have all this skill set, which I really, you know, it gives me a kick to use it. I like to be able to write code and get something new out of writing my code, but an artist who doesn't write code, does that make him less scientific? I don't know, but it's not for me to say. But for me, there's that very strong sense that I can use my logical skills to solve problems that are going to be used in this process of artistic invention. So I don't try and, so now I'm being a scientist today because I've got to do this boring job, and now I am being an artist today because I'm having fun doing something that's based upon a logical thing. On the contrary, the two are completely overlapping. There will of course be a dividing line that if I'm trying to find a bug in a code, then I've gotta use my reasoning powers. It's fine. Using a functioning piece of code to make a composition, then I'm using my intuition. So I recognize there are different things going on, but they all feel like part of a kind of, you know, like members of the band. If my brain's like a band and I need all these different things going on there's gotta be the bass player, there's got to be the rhythm, but there's also gotta be, you know somebody who's fancying up a tune, improvising around some other. Sensation that's triggering that tune.
Speaker 2 [00:27:18] But this is your laboratory. I mean, that's why when I think about it, I think, well, yeah, OK, yes, you're not a scientist, perhaps, now. But in fact, this looks like your lab.
Paul Friedlander [00:27:27] Well, it's my world, isn't it? So if you want to call it lab, studio, it is the space I inhabit. And it's developed to find so much of interest within that space, that's the key. That's what drives me on then.
