Hi every­one. I’m Sarah Brin. Thanks so much for hav­ing me, it’s fan­tas­tic to be here. 

As Sophie men­tioned, I’m an art his­to­ri­an and a cura­tor. I’m based at the Pier 9 work­shop facil­i­ty in San Francisco, where work as a pub­lic pro­grams man­ag­er. But before that, I did a lot of oth­er stuff. And grow­ing up, and even in my younger adult­hood, I nev­er ever thought that I would get to have a cre­ative pro­fes­sion. I always thought that peo­ple who got to do that kind of work were luck­i­er, or smarter, or cool­er. But it turns out that feel­ing of intense dis­com­fort, of not belong­ing, is some­times how peo­ple, includ­ing myself, devel­op new ways of doing things.

So, with that in mind I’m going to speak very briefly about three things today that kind of shape my prac­tice as an antidis­ci­pli­nar­i­an. The first is my under­stand­ing of what it means to be antidis­ci­pli­nary, and kind of how I came to inte­grate that into my prac­tice. The sec­ond is about my inter­est in expe­ri­ence as an art form. And final­ly, I’ll go into a lit­tle bit of detail about the projects I’m work­ing on cur­rent­ly that involve inte­gra­tion of art, tech­nol­o­gy, and industry.

So, what does it mean to be antidis­ci­pli­nary? To me, it means strug­gle. Sometimes, work­ing in inter­dis­ci­pli­nary fields, I felt like I’ve maybe tried real­ly hard work­ing and work­ing and work­ing on a project, and I was­n’t see­ing any dif­fer­ence. Sometimes peo­ple would look at me and be like, ​“What are you even doing?” Kind of like this lit­tle guy right here. So, to me antidis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty means not only not work­ing in one spe­cif­ic field, but rather instead draw­ing from else­where to imag­ine some­thing new.

And so I want­ed to give you all an exam­ple of how I learned to do this, and I thought oh, what’s a bet­ter exam­ple of think­ing about how you don’t fit into some­thing than high school? So that’s me on the right. As you can tell I had a very cool haircut. 

I went to a very spe­cial high school, although it does­n’t look espe­cial­ly spe­cial in this pho­to. But part of what sort of set it apart was that it was an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary mag­net pro­gram. It was a pub­lic school. And so every­thing we stud­ied, we took an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary approach to.

So, this is an exam­ple of how we’d do this. Say we were study­ing ancient Greece. And so we would study The Odyssey in our lit­er­a­ture class­es. In our his­to­ry class­es, we’d study kouros fig­ures. And in our phi­los­o­phy class, we learned about Aristotle’s def­i­n­i­tion of virtue. And in our his­to­ry class­es, we learned about Greek democ­ra­cy. And we always did this by weav­ing togeth­er seem­ing­ly dis­parate areas of cul­ture by find­ing themes that unit­ed all of them. And so this would con­tin­ue to shape my prac­tice for a very long time.

So, okay, why am I talk­ing about some­thing that hap­pened fif­teen years ago? Why am I talk­ing about high school now? So yes, it was impor­tant because I learned actu­al facts and pieces of arguably rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. But more impor­tant­ly, I learned to think lat­er­al­ly. So I learned to think more com­pre­hen­sive­ly about an expe­ri­ence of cul­ture rather than iso­lat­ed phenomena.

So I brought this approach with me to col­lege. I themed my semes­ters. That means I would take mul­ti­ple cours­es, focus on a par­tic­u­lar time peri­od or region, includ­ing phi­los­o­phy, art his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture, etc. This is also when I start­ed to study art his­to­ry more for­mal­ly. So, I learned very ear­ly on that I have an aller­gy to for­mal­ism. And as my favorite pro­fes­sors taught me, art isn’t just about form. It’s not just about what things look like. Artworks are lens­es to give us a look into our par­tic­u­lar moment of cul­ture, to look deep­er at a real human’s per­son­al expe­ri­ence of a par­tic­u­lar moment.

So at this point I already knew that art, his­to­ry, sci­ence, and every oth­er capac­i­ty of cul­ture were all deeply inter­twined. But I also became very inter­est­ed in this idea of expe­ri­ence. Both the expe­ri­ences of the artists, and the pub­lic’s expe­ri­ence of an art­work. And I felt like this would shape my research prac­tice in grad­u­ate school, and it did. And I moved on to study at the cura­to­r­i­al pro­gram at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. 

So, as soon as I got to USC, I noticed that I felt very very iso­lat­ed from most of my peers and my col­leagues in my pro­gram. And part of that is because art is a very priv­i­leged dis­ci­pline. And USC has rep­u­ta­tion for its very priv­i­leged stu­dent body. And real­iz­ing this, I felt like I had made such a huge mis­take going to art school. I real­ized that all my class­mates look like this. They all had very com­pli­cat­ed shoes. I felt like they had fam­i­lies that could pay for them to do unpaid intern­ships at fan­cy gal­leries. I thought, ​“I don’t belong here.” 

But I quick­ly for­got about that when I found video games. In 2009, there was a very piv­otal moment for artist-made video games. Roger Ebert had just made his very con­tro­ver­sial claim that video games could nev­er be art. And simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, there were all the stu­dents at uni­ver­si­ties like Parsons, NYU, and even ITU Copenhagen, who were real­ly chang­ing peo­ple’s ideas of what video games could be. I did­n’t grow up play­ing video games, but I was so moved by this. I loved the idea that games were acces­si­ble, games were ubiq­ui­tous, in a way art could­n’t it be. So, I want­ed to reach out to peo­ple with art, and I want­ed to do this by using some­thing famil­iar. I want­ed to reach out to the same kinds of peo­ple who might’ve felt iso­lat­ed by art in the same ways that I might’ve I felt.

And so I start­ed to research and curate exper­i­men­tal games that chal­lenged the pop­u­lar con­cep­tions of the medi­um. These weren’t rac­ing games. These weren’t fight­ing games. These were games that com­plete­ly blew every­one’s expec­ta­tions away. This is actu­al­ly from a game called Lose/Lose cre­at­ed by an artist named Zach Gage. It looks just like the video game Space Invaders, except for every alien you kill, you ran­dom­ly delete a file on your com­put­er. This is a pret­ty unusu­al con­cept because nor­mal­ly when you take actions in games there are no con­se­quences in real life. Not so with this project. And I thought that was so, so, so fascinating.

But my class­mates and my pro­fes­sors were extreme­ly skep­ti­cal of this. And they often dis­cour­aged me from mov­ing for­ward with my stud­ies in games. But slow­ly, labo­ri­ous­ly, I knew how to legit­imize my work by pro­vid­ing his­tor­i­cal prece­dents and cul­tur­al con­text for the projects. And so grad­u­al­ly I was invit­ed to do more and more cura­to­r­i­al projects with muse­ums and insti­tu­tions like the SF MoMA in San Francisco, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. And my work became hard­er to dismiss.

This is an exam­ple of one of my games projects, which we called ​“Horizon.” It was a press con­fer­ence and exhi­bi­tion ded­i­cat­ed to exper­i­men­tal games, includ­ing a Swiss project called ​“Laser Cabinet”, which you you see up here, by artist named Khalil Kloush. And it’s a lot of fun to do

This is from anoth­er project called ​“Ahhhcade” that we did in 2013 at the SF MoMA in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Babycastles, an artist-run space based in New York. This show was called Ahhhcade, and it was a show of med­i­ta­tive and non-competitive video games.

So, I worked with a lot of inde­pen­dent cura­to­r­i­al projects with video games. I did some arts jour­nal­ism. I worked in an edu­ca­tion depart­ment at a muse­um. But it was all very very piece­meal. I was always kind of look­ing for the next thing, try­ing to fig­ure out how I could piece all of my inter­ests togeth­er to make a liv­ing. And I did that for a long time, and then I was invit­ed to come work at Autodesk Pier 9 workshop.

Autodesk, as Sophie men­tioned is a soft­ware com­pa­ny that makes these prod­ucts, as well as many oth­ers. And we make design soft­ware for basi­cal­ly every indus­try you can imag­ine. We have offices all over the world, includ­ing in Neuchatel. 

And this is our office! It’s pret­ty cool. That’s where I work. It’s Autodesk’s dig­i­tal fab­ri­ca­tion facil­i­ty, and that’s where we real­ly have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to refine the con­nec­tion between our design soft­ware and dig­i­tal fab­ri­ca­tion machines that bring those designs to life. 

So when I talk about dig­i­tal fab­ri­ca­tion, what does that mean? That can mean a lot of dif­fer­ent things. Here is a CNC mill. So if you take a look at this big blue machine up here, that’s our DMS 5‑axis mill. The way that works is we start with a dig­i­tal design in a soft­ware pro­gram, and then we put a block of mate­r­i­al into the mill, and the mill will sub­tract mate­r­i­al away to make that design come to life.

In addi­tion to the machines in our CNC lab, we have a laser lab, and 3D print lab. We have an elec­tron­ics lab. Textiles area. A test kitchen. Wood shop, met­al shop. We have all kinds of stuff going on. It’s pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar. So, that work­shop, among serv­ing many oth­er impor­tant func­tions to our com­pa­ny allows us, my team, the cre­ative pro­grams team, to show­case our prod­ucts by part­ner­ing with oth­er cre­ative enti­ties. So, some­times that means exter­nal part­ner­ships, and some­times it’s through our Artists in Residence pro­gram.

The Artists in Residence pro­gram is kind of a mis­lead­ing title, because over the past few years we’ve wel­comed over two hun­dred archi­tects, chefs, fine artists, fur­ni­ture mak­ers, fash­ion design­ers, to real­ly push the bound­aries of our soft­ware and of our tool­ing. They are inter­dis­ci­pli­nary provo­ca­teurs, who are invit­ed to col­lab­o­rate, research, and test the lim­its of what’s pos­si­ble. One of my favorite artists was work­ing on a project on the DMS (that big blue machine I showed you just a minute ago), and he actu­al­ly drilled through the mate­ri­als bed of the machine, with the machine itself. And he was real­ly wor­ried, he’s like, ​“Oh, no. Am I going to get in trou­ble?” And instead he just got a bunch of high fives because we were all like, ​“Well, now we know not to do that.” And so that’s kind of how what our space feels like to be in.

This is actu­al­ly an exam­ple of what he was work­ing on. This piece is called ​“Smaller & Upside Down.” [ded­i­cat­ed site] It’s a series of facial dis­tor­tion lens­es that are 3D print­ed and CNC milled. As you can see, the effects kind of mim­ic what you might find in Apple’s Photoshop. And these are applied for pub­lic art installations.

Another project I real­ly love is the col­lab­o­ra­tion [at Coby Unger’s site] between an artist named Coby Unger and an eight year-old boy named Aidan Robinson. Some of you prob­a­bly already know that pros­thet­ics are very very expen­sive. And if you have a kid who’s grow­ing, they’re going to grow out of that pros­thet­ic, too. So what Coby did is he part­nered with Aidan to devel­op a series of attach­ments for his pros­thet­ic, includ­ing a Lego arm, a Nintendo Wii con­troller, and a vio­lin bow. But in addi­tion to cre­at­ing these real­ly amaz­ing attach­ments (Aidan referred to him­self as a super­hero cyborg) Coby devel­oped a 3D-printed sock­et for the pros­thet­ic that as Aidan grew, he could heat it up and resize the sock­et to grow the pros­thet­ic along with the child, which is pret­ty neat.

A final project I’m going to talk about is a series by an artist named Morehshin Allahyari. The series is called Material Speculation: ISIS. [at Morehshin’s site] And what Morehshin does here is she uses our Objet Connex multi-material print­ers to recre­ate arti­facts that were destroyed by ISIS. Not only are the mod­els exact recre­ations of the objects in terms of def­i­n­i­tion and style, but also there is a 3D mod­el file embed­ded with­in each of the objects. So this is an extreme­ly daunt­ing task, because these mod­els did­n’t exist pre­vi­ous­ly. So what Morehshin had to do was cre­ate these mod­els based on pho­tographs and exten­sive con­sul­ta­tion with experts around the world. Part of why I think this project is so fas­ci­nat­ing is because it’s not just an art­work. It’s an archive, and it’s activism.

So okay, why did I talk to you about these projects? Thinking back to what I men­tioned ear­li­er, the idea of con­text, of expe­ri­ence, of pub­lic engage­ment, all of these artists are aren’t exclu­sive­ly artists, they’re antidis­ci­pli­nar­i­ans. They’re work­ing togeth­er to solve prob­lems. And they’re bor­row­ing from mul­ti­ple pre­ex­ist­ing fields, while using new tech­nolo­gies to cre­ate cre­ative solu­tions. And per­haps more impor­tant­ly, these new ideas are invit­ing. They’re public-facing. And they ask for a response.

So, think­ing about the work all of these artists are doing, and some of the projects that I talked about ear­li­er, it’s not always easy to look for new types of solu­tions, for new types of prob­lems. Sometimes it can be extreme­ly dif­fi­cult and extreme­ly uncom­fort­able. But I thank you, and chal­lenge you, to look for that own dis­com­fort in your­self and apply it to your practice. 

Thanks.

Sophie Lamparter: It’s a real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing place. I swear, if you have the chance in San Francisco, maybe we can get a behind-the-scene tour, let us know. It’s real­ly worth going and see­ing how they real­ly embrace inno­va­tion, inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and anti-disciplinary. So, I don’t know. Is there one exam­ple, or one project, or I don’t know, one idea that com­plete­ly blew your mind? That the whole team was like, ​“Oh, we’ve nev­er thought of that,” or some­how changed a bit the per­spec­tive of the tools or…

Sarah Brin: Yeah, we have we have a bunch of artists who are always col­lab­o­rat­ing with each oth­er. And what’s real­ly unique to me, com­ing from a more tra­di­tion­al arts back­ground, is that artists tend to be very pro­tec­tive of their ideas. And there’s also this idea of secre­cy. And so fre­quent­ly, when we see art­work in a muse­um, we’re look­ing at the fin­ished object. We’re not talk­ing about process, because kind of the secret sauce, right? So we have all of these artists togeth­er at one point in time that are shar­ing ideas, shar­ing their chal­lenges. They’re help­ing each oth­er, they’re col­lab­o­rat­ing. And I think that real­ly shows, and I think per­son­al­ly it’s impor­tant to me that we’re devel­op­ing new forms of cul­ture, inclusively.

Lamparter: I agree. It’s also great, each time you you have a meet­ing with some­body at Autodesk, they show you their per­son­al project, because most of the employ­ees are also col­lab­o­rat­ing at night or on the week­end on, I don’t know, 3D print­ed music instru­ments, or what­ev­er they enjoy. And I think that’s also very very spe­cial. Thank you so much, Sarah.