Tiffany Shlain & Ken Goldberg

0:00Ken and I spent like a good year thinking, like what are all the big questions of humanity? Now, I still haven't seen a really good joke from AI yet. I'm waiting for that.

0:14From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.

0:22On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, Tiffany Schlain and Ken Goldberg talk about their artistic collaborations. I always joke that Tiffany had never met a piece of rusted metal that she didn't like. I love salvage things.

0:49Tiffany Schlain is an artist, a multi-award winning documentary filmmaker, the founder of the Webby Awards, and the co-founder of the International Academy of the Digital Arts and Sciences. She's also the author of several books, including 24-6, Giving Up Screens One Day a Week to Get More Time, Creativity, and Connection, which we talked about on this podcast when the book first came out. Ken Goldberg is the William S. Floyd Chair of Engineering and distinguished professor of robotics at UC Berkeley, president of the Robot Learning Foundation, an author whose books include Beyond Webcams, An Introduction to Online Robotics.

1:34He is also an artist whose work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennial. Tiffany Schlain and Ken Goldberg are partners, partners in life and collaborators in several films and art installations. Their latest project together is currently on display at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It's a magnificent installation titled Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology, Trees, Time, and Technology. Ken Goldberg and Tiffany Schlain, welcome to Design Matters. Thank you so much. So happy to be here. Sure. Listeners of the show know that I've interviewed Tiffany a few times, but I've never interviewed her husband.

2:18And so I do want to talk to him about his really fascinating career. And then we're going to talk about their exhibit together. Ken, you have at least, by my latest count, 13 patents, several more under review. Your grandfather, Manus Glickman, had 10 patents to his name. Has your family always had this legacy of invention and innovation? Thanks for finding that. Yes, my grandfather, there's a lot of sense that we are very similar, many people say. And he was an immigrant from Poland, and he was an electrical engineer, and he developed all these patents in the 50s around hermetic seals, which was a way of sealing circuits that were very popular with the military and other applications for aerospace.

3:12So I've always admired him. I didn't get to know him very well because he lived in California. He actually lived in Pasadena and then later in Beverly Hills. And so I always admired him because he had a gold Rolls Royce. But he was very creative. And my grandfather on the other side was also an entrepreneur. And he started companies around various creative ideas. He was very interesting. And my father was an entrepreneur as well. So I think there is an element of that kind of trying to do things a little differently that's in my DNA. And is it true that you were born in Nigeria? True. My father and mother were both part of the civil rights movement in Philadelphia in the 60s, early 60s.

4:00And so they wanted to do something constructive. And so they wrote letters to different places and got a response from Nigeria. And they went there and taught in a school in a pretty remote area for two years. And you then moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And from what I understand, though you considered becoming an artist as you were growing up through high school, your parents wanted you to do something with a bit more security. And you ended up going to the University of Pennsylvania and majored in electrical engineering. You got your BS in economics. At that point, what did you think you wanted to do professionally?

4:39because 30 years ago or some range of that, because I know that you and I are both around the same age than maybe 40 years ago, people weren't thinking, I want to be a specialist in artificial intelligence when I grow up. I want to be able to create robots when I grow up. Well, maybe you could, because we both watch the Jetsons. Exactly, exactly. We are actually a month apart, like less than a month apart. 20 days, I believe. Exactly. Exactly. And we – but yes, exactly because we were both in that era when it was rockets and NASA and there was this whole idea of mythology around rockets and robots that were – and jetpacks actually was one of those things.

5:25And I think that I was very much a kid of the 60s. My dad was an engineer, so we built go-karts and rockets and things. And we actually did a robot that we developed. It was just a crane, basically, but it was controlled by a computer. And it was very primitive. It never really worked. We spent a lot of time in the basement working on this. But it was a way I got exposure to robots and also AI because he taught me binary numbers when I was a little kid. And so then I was interested in those ideas since, you know, from an early age. Now, I believe it was when you were studying abroad and took a class on artificial intelligence that you really began to become interested in robotics.

6:09And what was the state of artificial intelligence at that time? This was the 80s, early 80s. Right. Some people were talking about it. You know, there were classes on it. But my junior year abroad was in Scotland. And in Edinburgh, they actually had a department of AI. So they had a number of faculty there and they taught a class that I took. And I was fascinated by the different questions that people were asking. Mostly it was in pretty academic research kind of level. But I got that exposure. And when I came back to Penn, I was just walking in the hallway and I stumbled onto a robotics lab. As one does.

6:47I just got lucky. In fact, actually, I will tell you, it said ESP Lab. And it was called the, I thought, oh my gosh, I got to check this out. But it turned out to be called the Experimental Sensory Processing Lab at Penn. But it was doing robots, not ESP. So we actually later changed the name. And I said, let's modify this to the General Robotics and Sensory Processing Lab. And that became the GRASP Lab, which it still is today. You went on to get your PhD where you developed, and so I have to make sure I get this right. If I don't, please correct me. You developed the first algorithm for, quote, feeding polygonal parts, and you proved that the algorithm could be used to orient any part up to rotational symmetry, unquote.

7:36Perfect. Perfect. I am very impressed. Tell me what that means. Okay. All right. So by feeding parts, we mean orienting parts. And the idea was that if you, up till then, you would have to use a camera and you would look at the object and try and reorient it. But there was always uncertainty. And that's one of the fundamental issues in robotics. And so I started exploring this approach where it was just using pure blind motions without any sensing at all. And then I found that if you could squeeze the part with this very abstract parallel jaw gripper in the plane in a sequence of motions, you could always guarantee that the part would end up in a unique final orientation.

8:17And it's a counterintuitive result. And it worked for lots of examples, but the hard part was trying to prove that for all polygons. And I spent two years working on that problem. And then my advisor was like, you can graduate when you finish that. And so I just struggled with this math problem for many years. And then I remember, and I was talking to Tiffany about this recently, was this aha moment when I suddenly saw the answer. And it was a step function. And I had been sitting by the stairs for all this time. And this step function turned out to be the critical ingredient for being able to prove it.

8:58Talk about that aha moment. I'm really intrigued by aha moments and how they manifest sort of through you. They almost, aha moments feel almost mystical. Absolutely, Debbie. I so much remember that moment. I remember that the idea came and I had to write out these equations to sort of formalize it. And as I was writing them out, there was, these were these integrals and they were starting to cancel out. and I was just kind of moving along and all of a sudden they all canceled out and it became that this integral equaled zero. And I remember this like, it was a huge emotional and spiritual kind of moment because I had no idea that would happen.

9:43And it turned out that that confirmed that there was always in existence a step that would allow this process to continue and that would work for any object, any polygon that you could conceive of. It was essentially you're dealing with infinity in some way. And so it's very hard to prove things in general like that. So when that all came together, it definitely felt like some bolt out of something larger than myself. And I always remember it because I really haven't had an experience quite that intense since. I've had aha moments in different ways, but that one in particular where it just mathematically clicked.

10:21I still think about this sometimes, that that is one of my reasons for having a sense of something larger than us. There's something out there that I really believe in. Was this the work that enabled you to get your first patent? I know that you patented a comedically yielding gripper, which was a new robot gripper that complied passively to hold parts securely without sensing. And it sounds like that's what you were talking about just now. Exactly, exactly. That's right. The hardware part of it was a gripper. I figured out that I could put bearings on one of the sliding jaws, and that would allow the friction to go away, to eliminate friction.

11:02So I called it the kinematically yielding gripper, which is my initials, KYG. And I didn't even think of this, but my uncle, I went home for Thanksgiving, and he said, you should file a patent for that. And so I did, and amazingly, it was granted. So that was very fun to actually get it into the patent system. I had known that my grandfather had patents at that point, but I hadn't had one of my own. I was super proud of that. I was thinking about how when you go to amusement parks, there's that amusement that you can participate in where you stand in front of a big sort of glass little room where there's a gripper and you can try to get stuffed animals from the pile.

11:45And I was thinking that never works. So, you know, they should have used your. But then again, I guess that would be a way to sort of lose all the stuffed animals immediately. Well, it's actually I love that that the crane thing you're talking about where it drops the little claw. And actually, I was at a roller skating rink with my our youngest daughter, Bluma. And it turned out that she had a knack for doing that. And she would win. She would get stuff. And I always think, this is great, because I am so interested in that problem, which is how do you pick things up? And I'm so glad you brought that up, because that's a perfect example.

12:19And I should use that for when I'm explaining to people, because people say, well, what do you work on? And I usually reach over and there's a glass or something nearby. And I say, my whole career has been spent trying to pick this up. Like, that's what I do. And we still haven't figured it out. Well, I think Bluma's success at doing it has to be something related to her DNA. I'm just convinced. Now, you also coined the term cloud robotics. So help us understand what that is. And how do you see that evolving over the next decade? Oh, great. Well, thanks for asking. I actually didn't coin the term.

12:56I was using the word internet robots and networked robots, various things like that, because I had done an art project that had, in the early days of the internet, we had connected a garden to the internet. Tele garden. Tele garden. And in my mind, it was an art project, and it was also an engineering proof of concept. And so it was these two things coming together. We wanted to get this to work where anyone in the world could come in over their browser and tend to live in garden. So it was a lot of engineering to get that to work. And also it had to be online for 24 hours a day. So it had little headlights that would come on so that it would work at night when people in Europe were operating it.

13:38But people could plant and water seeds. And so that idea of working over the Internet, I was very excited about that going back to 1994. I wanted to jump in because you were also – what I love about that project is you were playing with the irony of what you kind of can't do online. Like, it was also a critique at the same time as you were proving that this could be done. It was also showing what you can't replicate. And I know, Debbie, you're a big gardener now and all the things you can't replicate with the Internet. So you were also kind of playing with that. Good. No, thanks for bringing that up, Tiffany.

14:14You're right. So there was an irony in my mind about doing this because I thought it's the last thing people want to do over the Internet is garden, right? You'd be surprised. I was wrong. I was wrong. Exactly. People spend huge amounts of time. We estimate 100 ,000 people came in and participated in this garden. And it was fascinating because I was really interested in this intersection of technology and nature and the natural world. And so this was a way of exploring that. But it also, in the research realm, we believe it was the first robot on the internet. So then I led to research and I got funded by the National Science Foundation and developed these various versions of these systems that explored other kinds of activities.

14:57And then more recently, that has really picked up because the idea of networks being essential for robots is being increasingly recognized because now the robot doesn't have to carry all of its computing on board. It can use the internet. And so, for example, right now, everybody's talking about these humanoids, right? Which, by the way, I'm a bit skeptical about the claims that people are making. But I think that the beauty is that the robot is, it can't carry that much weight and it can't carry that much battery power. So what it does is it transmits back to some base station or maybe even a data center somewhere.

15:34And that's where the heavy-duty processing, the AI, basically goes on. And then it resends back the commands for the robot. So that idea of cloud robotics is now being really embraced worldwide. I learned about a new paradox as I was doing my research to prepare for today's show. I believe it's Moravec's paradox. And I'm wondering if you can share what that is and how it relates to robots. Yes. So Moravec, Hans Moravec is still alive. He is a roboticist who wrote a book about 35 years ago where he pointed out that what's easy for robots, like picking something heavy or manipulating heavy things, is very hard for humans.

16:19But what's easy for humans, like clearing a dinner table, is still amazingly hard for robots. And that's the paradox. Why is that? That there's this big disconnect. And it's fascinating. And that's really, I've spent most of my career studying that. In an op-ed you wrote for the Boston Globe, you stated that you've been a skeptic about AI for over 40 years and felt that AI could never be creative, couldn't come up with an interesting work of art, an interesting invention, or a funny joke. But after ChatGPT went online and you used it for a few hours, you wondered if you'd been wrong. So this is like a three-part question.

17:03One, why were you a skeptic for 40 years? What happened when you went online and experimented with ChatGPT? And how are you feeling about it now? Three-part question. Okay. Sorry. No, it's such a good question. Such a good question. Now I know why you're so amazing. All right. So why I've been a skeptic, and I still am in general, about AGI. You know, I feel that there's a lot of hype out there. But I think that in my sense, I had also been very involved with AI and seen the claims and the sort of ebbs and flows about how AI has been treated over the years. And I felt that, you know, there were things that were being claimed that were exaggerated in so many regards.

17:49And then when ChatGPT came out, I remember very distinctly, like I think many people, being surprised by its ability to respond and to actually do something creative where for me it was I would give it two very different things and I would ask it to put them together and come up with a new idea. So I'd give it two papers that I'd written and say, well, how would you combine these into something new? And it was remarkably good at that. It is good at that. And that is creative. I mean, in my mind, when anybody connects two different things, you know, and puts them together, I always find that creative and interesting.

18:28So, yes, I've recanted my claim that AI would never be creative. Now, I still haven't seen a really good joke from AI yet. I'm waiting for that. I think that'll come. In fact, I'll make a prediction here, Debbie, with you in 2025. 2025, I think this is a year we're going to see some kind of real breakthrough in AI creating something. What I mean by that is that I think we're, I summed how it's going to happen, I think as early as this year, but some breakthrough where let's say a real hard mathematical problem will be solved or a new important protein will be discovered, or maybe it's a truly hilarious joke.

19:10But I think we're going to get to something that's very, very significant and say that that was done with AI this year. I think we're ready for that. I've done a lot of experimenting with AI in the last year, both visually as well as with writing. I find that you can do more right now that feels more creative, maybe not original, but creative visually than verbally or with writing. I find that most writing feels very soulless because so many of my students now try to write papers with it or resumes or cover letters or any kind of stuff. You can feel it. You can tell. I can tell instantly. I mean, I've said this before, I'll say it again, because I think you'll enjoy it.

19:58Nobody under 50 uses the word hence or moreover in their writing. And that's a dead giveaway. And there are certain words that you just know. But there's more than that. I think you're right. There's something, it's like almost ineffable, but it's like, you know, when it has been written by Jesus. I mean, it's interesting. There's a soullessness to it, a coldness that doesn't come through. And even if something that is written from the heart might not be either the most sort of grammatically correct or ingeniously constructed, it still feels more like the person than something that's constructed in AI by a prompt from a person.

20:47Mm-hmm.

21:09I started working as a designer professionally in the 80s and literally started on a drafting table sitting next to a wax machine holding an exacto blade. And I remember late 80s, the very famous designers at that time were all lamenting the introduction of the computer and doing design work and felt that it was going to ruin the business and everybody's going to lose their jobs. And here we are 40 years later, and I'm actually hearing almost verbatim the same arguments just with different technology. Definitely. And I think that's a great point because the key is how you can start to use it. And I should have made it a little more clear when I was saying about my prediction.

21:49I think the prediction won't be that AI will have done this entirely on its own, but it will have been in a partnership with a human that worked, understood, and knew how to use it in the right way. and in terms of imagery you know photoshop right was such a complex new fangled thing that when it came out but it didn't mean the end of design it just enhanced design and now with people learning how to really steer and prompt a system to come up with images and fine-tune them right that is opening up incredibly interesting new doors and new new potential so i think that's right and the The idea is not to run away from it, but look at it as a new instrument almost.

22:33And how can you play it? What can you do? How can it be used? And I don't think it's going to wipe out jobs in the same way people are saying. I really don't. I mean, we can come back to robotics where anything, I really believe any manual labor is safe. We're very far from being able to reproduce motor skills and what tradespeople can do. But I will also say that I'm fascinated by more recently this – the breakthrough that happened two years ago with ChatGPT was based on a new model of attention. And can we talk about that for a second? Please. Okay. So the technical result, there was a famous paper that was a big breakthrough called Attention is All You Need.

23:16And that is a little confusing as a title. But what it meant was if you basically train not just the system on a sequence of words, but you actually had the system learn which previous words to pay attention to, that turned out to be a big breakthrough. And that's called the transformer network. And that's what enabled ChatGPT and also in some way is very much a part of the new vision recognition systems. So that is really interesting and subtle. It's that what was critical was knowing what to pay attention to. And I think that's so true. I've been thinking about this in robotics is that when we move around, our eyes are constantly moving, as you know, with our phobia, right?

24:01So we're always paying attention to these fine little details. And if you watch those eye tracking videos, our eyes are moving in this kind of – it's very hard to figure out what's going on. But I think that there's a huge amount of nuance in that. And we haven't figured that out yet in the physical world. So when I go to reach for a pen or pick up a glass, there's things that I'm paying attention to, both visually and tactile with my fingers, that are very important. And they're constantly changing what I pay attention to. And it's very fast and very subtle and subconscious. And that idea of where is our attention being focused is extremely profound.

24:39And I think it's really the key to making progress. I have just two more questions that I want to ask you, and then I want to talk a little bit more about what you're doing creatively with your artwork. But what is one sort of ethical issue in AI and robotics that you think is the most critical for us to be paying attention to? Hmm. There's so many issues that are coming up. I think that the idea of robots essentially running amok is maybe a little bit, I don't know if you could say it's an ethical issue, but I think that to my mind, most roboticists I know have no worry about this. because robots are just not that sophisticated.

25:28You know, the idea that they're going to take over is a very deeply rooted fear that goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks. But it's sort of a distraction, I think, from what's really interesting. But there's a lot of people who are doomsayers. But people in the research field generally think of that as kind of a very far-fetched kind of concern. I think that the only real mainstream robot that's been introduced to culture are the little robot vacuum cleaners. And they don't always work well. And I think the only people they're scaring are cats and dogs, not people. The only things they're scaring are small furry animals.

26:13Right. Well, there's actually a new one that just came out this week from CES in Las Vegas. And I was showing it to Tiffany last night. It's Roomba, basically, but it has a little door that opens on the top, and this little arm comes out. And then it can reach over and pick up a sock that you might have left on the floor. And then it drives over and puts it into a laundry bin. And it's so fun to watch. You can find it online. It reminds me of the Addams Family. Remember the thing? Yeah. Yes. It would come out of the head. I always loved that. And it looks like that. Oh, my God. It's terrifying.

26:49Well, it's funny that you're saying that because Ken just did this amazing performance with this other roboticist who's also a dancer and it has a nine-foot arm. I mean, I'm thinking about you showing me that small robotic arm and then at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, he had this dancer, was dancing with a nine-foot robotic arm and it's beautiful and kind of mesmerizing and haunting and loving and all these things you don't expect with robots, which I think is the brilliance of Ken's work is here he's spending all this time at the lab in this very kind of technical way and then to take that same kind of robot and have people reimagine what it could be in this other way.

27:32And I believe that performance was with Katie Kwan for a dance homage to physical labor, which is this engagement between a dancer and a robot. And I think it can be found on your website because I know I watched the highlights and it was really, really beautiful. So I want to talk more about your art. You can you've collaborated with various artists over the course of your career with Gil Gershony on Are We There Yet? with Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Villegas with Katie Kwan, as I just mentioned, and with your partner in life, Tiffany Schlain, who is here with us as well. You work together on numerous documentaries, including the Emmy-nominated series, The Future Starts Here, and the documentary, The Tribe.

28:18Your latest collaboration is part of the Getty's Art Initiative, Art and Science Collide. And your exhibit is titled Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology, Trees, Time, and Technology. And it is currently on view at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Congratulations. It is a tour de force. It is really, really beautiful in utterly unexpected and really grand ways. But before we talk specifically about the art, I do have one very important non-art-related question I wanted to ask you. You met in 1997. You married in 1998. So was it like wild love at first sight? Tell us about your first meeting.

29:08Tell us about that aha moment. Oh, fun. Okay. That was an aha moment. You're right. That was definitely an aha moment. The big aha moment. I'll start off just to set the stage because I was teaching at USC in LA at the time. And I had been working with research as we were talking about and also doing this art project. And several friends had given me the same book, which was called Art and Physics. It had just come out and it was by Leonard Schlain. And I read that book and I thought, wow, this is fascinating. This man has written – he's not an artist, he's not a physicist, but he's a surgeon and he's writing about these topics in such insight.

29:48And so I thought I'd love to meet him someday. So that was in the early 90s. And then I moved to Berkeley and the day I got tenure – or two days after, I was invited to a lecture by Leonard Schlein. And so I went to that lecture. Wait, I have to kind of jump in on my side because my father was this incredible speaker and I had 10 of my best friends with me going to hear him speak at this art gallery on art and physics. And the way that my father tells this story is that this very handsome man comes up to him and says, Dr. Schlain, I'm a huge fan of your work and had the copy of art and physics.

30:30I'm a new professor at UC Berkeley and my name is Ken Goldberg. And the way that my father tells it, he's like, loves my word, check. Professor, smart, check. Goldberg, Jewish, check. And he's like, have you met my daughter, Tiffany? And we did fall in love right at first sight. Like right at that moment, my father introduced us, very shtetl-like. I mean, there's another person who will also take credit, which he really should, David Peskovitz, who was in this moment as well. But at our wedding, my father said, I wrote art and physics to bring you two together. It was so incredible, actually, to get an email from this wonderful curator like three years ago saying, you know, the Getty Pacific Standard Time theme is art and science collide.

31:22And I couldn't think of a better two people to do an exhibit around it. And it's so like the fact that the theme is art and science collide. And that was really us meeting was this art and physics colliding talk. So it's felt like a very auspicious part of our whole journey that we have been doing this art show together. And it was a very immediate experience when we met that has – I'm so grateful. Yeah, we knew. I knew she was the one. I think your dad said it was like Velcro. Because we were just like that night. And you can imagine our first date was with my dad and 10 of my best friends. We went out for drinks after the book talk.

32:01And the way my dad describes it is like you two were like an inch away from each other's face the whole night. Oh, that's such a wonderful. I love romance. I love romantic stories. Well, I believe this current collaboration, this current collaborative body of work came out of the initial artwork that Tiffany has been exploring in the last few years. In 2022, Tiffany, you exhibited a solo art show titled Human Nature, which also included your feminist history, dendrochronology piece, Dendrofeminology, a feminist history tree ring. So for our listeners, can you describe what dendrochronology is and how that evolved into your piece, Dendrofeminology?

32:48Yeah, so basically, when you look at a tree ring slice, every ring equals a year. So years of drought, the rings are really close together. And if there's been a lot of rain, they're further apart. So what else have trees witnessed? And, you know, the feminist history tree ring was is imagining a completely different narrative than what you normally see in a national park. And then that just started my whole journey of imagining all the different narratives. I have one on the evolution of perspective and technology, and I did my own self-portrait. And I was on this journey working with a lot of tree rings and light boxes and photography.

33:25So it's been this really exciting journey for me. And I was working on it, and we got this email from this wonderful curator, Salma Holo. And Ken at the time, do you want to say what you – it was just kind of auspicious that you were working on something related to trees at the time different. But do you want to mention? Sure. I was doing a project with Google and MIT researchers on trying to develop new data science techniques for classifying trees from images from above. And it was because there's this challenge of urban landscapes and trying to do tree census and see how trees are changing over time in cities.

34:08And it's very costly because it usually gets done by hand and people walk around street to street with these clipboards. But we wanted to see if we could do it. And it's actually from the air, but it turns out to be very tricky because the resolution of the images are not necessarily good enough. So we were developing these new techniques. And so it was a nice match for what Tiffany was doing. And I was obviously watching how her work was evolving. and we got this call from Selma Holo, who is this wonderful, inspiring, legendary curator out of LA. And I had worked with her years before at USC and she had put together a exhibit.

34:49I followed both of our work, yeah. Yeah, and she had been in touch with us. So she came to our wedding, in fact, right? I think she was there, yeah. And she basically had this idea in her head that we would work together and do this for the Getty and put it together with the Skirball Museum, which also has a strong Jewish background. So all these ingredients were really, it felt like they just meshed really naturally. It felt, yeah, because when she came to us to do this proposal for an exhibit, and I should say that we have done stuff before. We've co-written movies and we've done specific art installations, but this was by far the most complex.

35:32opportunity, which we were excited about, because we could co-write the tree rings that I had been working on, and we've co-written scripts, so that felt very natural. We have a lot of AI components. There's 10 artworks on the show. They all touch upon AI in some ways. And then there's just a couple very specific. We did a, just like the feminist history tree ring, we did a dendro-Judeology, a Jewish history timeline, and then we have the tree of knowledge, which is I want to talk to you about that one in a lot more detail. But in Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology, this show that we're talking about at the Skirball, you reimagine both old and new ways of understanding trees through several lenses, time, technology, culture, politics.

36:17And you do this through tree ring sculptures. And the timelines address the histories, as you mentioned, of knowledge itself, California trees, science, Judaism. How did you go about determining the narrative arc of the topics in each of the sculptures? Yeah, I mean, it was interesting because sometimes we had an idea and then we would find a tree that would be a great canvas for that idea. And sometimes we found a tree and it completely changed our idea. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, Ken and I love talking to each other and it was like such a fun subject to kind of mull over and think about on our walks and talks and on our Shabbat mornings when we're like without screens and just like wide ranging conversations or a drive.

37:09So it was really, I would say, sometimes the actual material would speak to us. And really, in one particular piece, which is one of our favorite pieces in the show, which is the giant redwood salvage wood that's like seven feet. And it's all about the history of mathematical equations. That originally was going to be a different subject. But that's my favorite, by the way. Thank you. The edges on it were actually when we went to that, we go to different salvage wood places and this, we wanted a really big tree. But when it came, when we saw it, it actually had these sharp edges on it. And at first we were disappointed because normally all the tree rings, you see their natural edge.

37:52I'm like, oh my gosh. But then we kind of had an aha moment that, you know, Ken can speak about, too, where it realized it actually looked quite mathematical in some way. And it kind of made us change the subject on that tree ring. And I love the way you sort of work with it as opposed to around it. Yeah. And that was a really exciting one. I learned so much about the science of tree ring dating in my research and read that it was discovered by A.E. Douglas in the early 1900s. How, beyond the year of drought or a lot of rain, how can trees help us visualize time? Oh, my gosh. Well, I do a newsletter, Breakfast at Tiffany's.

38:38I just sent one out today where I think it was exciting to me. And I did an image in it, which I wish I could show your listeners. But everybody should sign up for Tiffany's newsletter. Well, but it's because I suddenly thinking about the tree rings made me think of this ever-expanding tree of humanity. And we're only on for 80 rings. And if you look at those redwoods. If we're lucky. If we're lucky. If we're lucky. We're only on for 80. And some of those trees, I mean, the oldest tree in the world is over 5 ,000 years old. But some of the old growth redwoods are several thousand years. and it puts things into perspective of like, we're just in this moment and you don't know what's going to happen.

39:21You're not going to be here that long. You better live the life you want to live. And it always puts things into perspective for me. So in my show in New York at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, I did one where you never saw the edge, if we're speaking of edges, and it just felt like it was forever going. And it says, you are here, you will be here, went a little further, and then you will not be here. And then there's a whole bunch of tree rings ahead of you. Like, I think I think it's very humbling and I think it's good, especially in these times we're living right now, is to just not forget that this is a very long story we're a part of.

39:50We are in a hard moment now and we have to keep pushing for what we want to have happen. But there is – we are – I love that about nature where it – Well, there are silent witnesses in some way to what is occurring in the world. And so they've become very interesting ways of tracking time individually. And so sometimes in neighborhoods, if you're lucky to live in the same house over time, you would see a tree and watch it grow. So one of the parts of the exhibit that we were very excited about is this idea that you can create your own tribute to a tree that you see in your own environment. And we like this idea that it can be very personal, that there's a memory, and then there's something, maybe it's in the periphery because you walk past it all the time, but you kind of know it's there.

40:44But if you take a moment to look at it, really study it, it becomes really interesting to see its changes over time. Yeah, it's really interesting to go through those renditions, so to speak, or those individual pieces of art on the website, because they're so heartfelt. It's the only way to come up to describe them. Well, and that we should say, I mean, that's an example of, I mentioned there's a lot of AI in the show. That's an example of like direct use of AI where Ken and his students ingested all this LA history. And so you can, once you go see the exhibit, it's open until March 2nd, you can leave with like a tape measure and go and your favorite tree in front of your house or apartment, wherever, and give us a couple reflections and the measurement of it.

41:30And then we will give back to this beautiful idealized version visually, as well as a hundred word tribute. And they're really, they're really wonderful. That's an example, like Ken, you were saying, of a collaboration of a human and AI to make something really beautiful. And to the point you raised earlier, Debbie, is that we spent all summer, really even longer, on trying to figure out the right prompt to give to, in this case, GPT, so that it would generate images that were interesting. Because if you don't do that, you just say, give me a tree image, it'll give you a very cartoony image. and we wanted to really push it to be thoughtful.

42:11So we give it prompts, like we talk about the F-stop and things like that, which trigger it to start to think more photorealistically. Yeah, they have soul. Thank you. Some practical questions. You've talked about all of the trees that you used being of salvaged wood. How did you get the pieces of the trees that you used? How do you find something like that? Well, a lot of time at Salvage Lumber Yards. And now I have all sorts of new friends that like when trees fall or in storms or sometimes in fires that they will get the trees. And I actually I ordered one. There's one that we fell in love with.

42:53That's kind of a it's called the artwork is called If We Lose Ourselves. And Ken and I looked at it as like a history of all the ways we recorded ideas in history. And it goes from oral tradition all the way to ChatGPT and to the Golden Record and just like all the different ways we've tried to transmit ideas. And this wood is this incredible wood I saw online and I ordered it from Portland and it came and it was just as gorgeous as I was hoping it would be. As a filmmaker, I do collage, a lot of like finding archival. And it's like you're finding an archival piece of wood that you're reinterpreting.

43:30And it's very exciting to find wood. I always joke that Tiffany had never met a piece of rested metal that she didn't like. I love salvage things. I love vintage salvage and like reinterpreting images and artwork and wood. The ultimate combinatorial creativity. Well, we should say, you mentioned the Tree of Knowledge, and I would say that was really important because that anchored the whole project. And we started there. We said we wanted something that would—the Tree of Knowledge was so interesting from its biblical roots to its whole connection to Western culture in general. And I always loved the idea that it was this forbidden fruit and required Adam and Eve to basically subvert the rules, to break the rules.

44:15and then it opened up the whole world of knowledge. There's all kinds of fascination about that. And so we wanted something that would resonate on that level and we spent some time. And then Tiffany found this gigantic piece of the stump. Eucalyptus. Of eucalyptus. And it was normally, just to give you a sense, like all the other tree rings I had been doing in my art were slices and they would kind of hang on the museum or gallery wall as a slice, as a sculpture. and we saw this piece and it was like oh my gosh we need the whole piece and we even I mean we had a budget we we scrapped a whole section of the show so we could have that piece it was felt so powerful as an object and all the different parts you walk in it's like gnarled and to me that's like ideas like kind of fighting with each other before they become the elegance of a question of the tree of knowledge.

45:13And we spent, and actually all the other timelines are kind of timelines reimagining what the tree has seen and playing with time. But this one, we decided to do questions. So Ken and I spent like a good year thinking, like, what are all the big questions of humanity, which was such a wonderful... It includes 160 questions. And you organize them into six categories, mind, humanity, society, sciences, beliefs, and philosophy. Some of the questions include, why do I exist? Can we create fire? And as they fan outward, the questions evolve to prescient questions of our time, you know, including, I mean, not that those aren't, but how will we live in a changing climate?

45:56I have a couple of really silly practical questions. Tiffany, the artwork features text and symbols and numbers that you burn into, you literally burn into the salvage tree slices. And you mentioned it before, I believe it's called pyrography, which literally means writing with fire. How did you discover this art form? And how long did it take you to master? I mean, I'm somebody that's really paying attention to typography. And this is pretty sophisticated for somebody that's only been doing this for a couple of years. Yes. Okay. So on the feminist history tree ring, I had a pyrographer, like a train, you know, somebody that had done it like a calligrapher, but with fire and a pen.

46:44And I did the dots. I did what I could. I was so nervous of messing up on this piece of wood. And then as I was getting more and more into it, I'm like, I want to learn this. I am going to learn this like the 10 ,000 hours. And I worked with this amazing pieographer, Aconsha. And by the end for this show, there were some trainings where I did absolutely everything. And then some abstract expressions, the mathematical one, the really fine equations she did. But I was determined. I'm like, this is what I am loving creating. I am going to learn how to do this. But it's very intense. I mean, it takes a long time.

47:21I love it. It's very meditative. I can't think of anything else. Like there can be no music playing. The phone is off. I am for hours focusing. I used to think like my father, when he was in surgery, he would tell me he's like so focused. But then your mind does get into a wonderful state also. Yeah. And also smells good. The smell is amazing. Doesn't seem very forgiving. I mean, what happens if you make a mistake? mistake um you know here's the thing uh first of all i have made a mistake on a piece and the feminist history tree was like headed to the national mall and we had a print of it that was going to be in the de young museum and a reporter wrote a story about it and then and i i said i'm like oh they misspelled i'm not even gonna tell you what they miss they misspelled someone and i you should you should say i think oh my god okay okay okay so i i thought oh the article's great but they misspelled Gloria Steinem's name.

48:16Oh, my God. And then it was one of those, talk about an aha moment in reverse. I'm reading the article, and then I walk in my studio, and I'm looking at the sculpture that's just about to be shipped to the frigging National Mall to be on display. And sure enough, it was a mistake. It was on the tree ring. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm human. I'm not a robot. No, that's how I talked myself down. No, but then, okay, so wait, I have to tell you part of this, because then Tiffany was like, oh my God, I have to arrange. We don't have time. I have to arrange someone to come in and sand that off and we have to redo this and this whole elaborate thing.

48:50And I said, no, just leave it. It's actually part of the piece. So just like in coin collecting, how special those coins that are misprinted are. I always love that. And I was like, that's great. And so don't change it. And Ken did say that in my gallerist, Nancy Hoffman, who's amazing. I was going to go to the DeYoung and get that. I just got in a frame, break the glass, reprint it, redo it. And she was like, Tiffany, do not. No one's going to notice. And she confirmed what Ken said. It makes it more valuable and interesting and human. You're human. But I did fix the one that went to the National Mall.

49:28I could not as I could. But anyways. I'm sure Gloria will appreciate it, but I don't think she's there. It's all corrected on the sculpture. But just I also want to mention how the time – the process of designing this, you know, since you're a designer extraordinaire, you know, one of the things is that they – when we were thinking about the space, we spent a lot of time with the designer down there and the gallerist, the whole – And both curators, Selma and Vicky and – yeah, definitely. Yeah. And so what was processed was what would fit in that space. And I'm so glad you actually got to be there.

50:03I really appreciate it. Because we had to really adapt and we didn't want it to be too full, but also make it full enough. and then even the trees there was one story i quickly want to mention is that for the abstract expression the one we were talking about with it's all mathematical equations that when we were we had to fit so many and by the way there was a huge debate about which to go in and which not to and the mathematicians all disagree about what's what should be on the what are the most important equations as you can imagine and so we were putting it all together together, we were laying it out.

50:39And we found that because you had so much material there, that the lines were intersecting and sort of creating a traffic jam at the center. And we were trying to figure out, it didn't look right. And we were trying to figure out ways to do it. And at one point, I thought, wait, man, what if we arrange the points in like a question mark? And then we were trying that. And then I thought, wait a second, that looks like something i've seen before and then another aha moment was that's the the golden spiral and that fibonacci and we were like oh because it's all about math and history of math that that were solved this problem and that happened at like midnight and we were working with this wonderful designer nicole anzati really struggling with how to fit it all and the reason why there was a real when there was a real deadline with the show and it was like midnight when there was that aha moment.

51:30And I should say, we've talked so much about aha moments that those listeners in LA, there's going to be a big festival of the trees at the exhibition of whole day events at the Skirball. And the one panel that we're going to be taking part of is called Aha Moments in Art and Science, because there's so many beautiful similarities of aha moments in art and science, where something you've figured out changes the framework of how you see everything or how you do something. And that whole, you were saying mystical, you mentioned earlier, it's almost like a wholly mystical moment when you have an aha moment.

52:06So we're going to try to, and the theme for the Getty Show is Art and Science Collide, and there's that similar aha moment. So that's going to be one of the panels on February 2nd for Festival of the Trees. Absolutely wonderful. Wonderful. Another kind of nerdy, practical question. Some of the text goes all the way out to the edges of the tree ring, and some don't. Was that intentional? Was it done to sort of leave room for the future? Or talk about the sort of layout of the typography. Yeah, and all of the tree rings, we definitely want you to think about the future. I mean, we're taking great liberties and I've taken great liberties with these tree sculptures.

52:49They're not literal. Like, we're going back millions of years on some of them or thousands of years and some of these trees are at most are 400 years. But I think, again, this idea that trees are such an interesting way to think about time and to kind of contextualize where we are in this moment. So on each of the subjects, it's like, let's go into the deep past, let's go into the present, and let's imagine what will the future – we have a whole tree ring on the history of California only told through trees. So any fact on there is directly related to a tree fact in California. And there's a big space on, like, what is going to happen in the future.

53:25And I think Ken and I both, in both of our work throughout our careers, asking questions is such a theme of imagining what something will be. And I think that that's what that space on each of the tree rings. Except for the tree of knowledge, we wanted those questions on the edge to be like, they're on the edge of knowing. It's like that kind of grasping. And on the side of the tree of knowledge, I love the way the shape of it, whereas one side is very gnarled. The face of it looks like a brain or like a hand asking a question. I don't know. It just, it feels so evocative to what the subject is.

54:03One of my favorite and the most surprising piece in the show is a video homage to Ed Ruscha's A Rebuilding on the Sunset Strip. And you created this image using images of trees or you created, I'm sorry, you created this film using images of trees along four major Los Angeles thoroughfares from Google Maps and Google Earth. You then feed this into an AI to create a film that you've titled Speculation Like Nature Abhors a Vacuum. Talk about the title. That is such a great title. So I'm so glad you asked that. So I'll just back up a little bit because this is where the connection with the project with Google and MIT came together.

54:54Because one of the things that was frustrating me was that the way that we had been listing the data or portraying the images of the city data was just painfully ugly visually. It was just using the wrong set of colors, and it was just very hard to look at. And this is actually a problem with a lot of my engineering colleagues and myself. They're just not tuned to the visual nuance of really good design. And by the way, when it's done well in science, it really makes a difference, and it really helps science advance when it can be done right. But in this case, I said we're dealing with these beautiful subject of trees, right?

55:35And they're so beautiful inherently, but why are we portraying them with this very crude and clunky kind of graphics? So I wanted to try and push that, and that was actually very much a motivation when we started working on this was, could we take this opportunity to take that same data and make it into something lush and kind of engaging? And so that was the idea that we would do the same sort of timeline, but then take these trees and animate them. so they would move ever so slightly and have this visceral richness to them. So the trees, we were looking at streets already, and we were looking at these trees, and then we started realizing that there was a huge disparity between the different streets and neighborhoods and this shade inequity, which is a huge issue, and especially in a city like L.A., where you have so much sun and you have these, some neighborhoods are incredibly lush and like Hollywood.

56:34And then you have South Central where there's, you know, it's very rare to find trees. And so we wanted to juxtapose those. But at the same time, as we started thinking about that, we also remembered Ed Ruscha. And we had seen that actually in New York. MoMA had a big exhibition on Ed Ruscha and retrospective. And so his Streets of L.A. where the video pans down the street of L.A. So then it all again clicked. And we started thinking, okay, we can do that same pace of moving along the street, but now from the top and use those streets and the variations between them to sort of suggest in a subtle way these disparities.

57:17And going back to the title, I think actually the title of this piece is a great illustration of how we work together because we love titles. We love words. And both of us like have a lot of fun thinking of titles and in our writing and various things. And this one we could not figure out the title for. And it was like getting very close. And we, you know, one of us is upstairs, one of us is downstairs, but what about that title? And you were like, it's a constant one conversation that's happening over a year. And then it was like weeks before we We really had a deadline that was wall text that had to be made for the museum.

57:52And I remember going, Ken, nature abhors a vacuum. I've always loved that idea. And then Ken was like, yes, but then he built on it. And then tell Debbie what, like from that. Well, it was, you know, nature abhors a vacuum is such a great phrase. And you use that in science a lot. It comes back from Aristotle. When I looked it up, because I was trying to think of where did that actually come from, that Baruch Spinoza comes up. And Baruch Spinoza has a variation where he says speculation, like nature, abhors a vacuum. And he's making a comment about science and technology and culture, really, because he's saying, you know, if there's any vacuum, somebody's going to start speculating about it, right?

58:41And it's such a genius twist on that idea. But we were so delighted. But that, like, wrestling, trying to figure it out, and then, like, having this wonderful exchange, and then it got to this place. We were so excited by the title. And I think also, you know, and it was interesting because Tiffany started with the idea of the vacuum and the different tree disparities, the shade disparities, that there was a vacuum and some is filled and some isn't. But then when we saw it connect to Spinoza, because he's this legendary Jewish philosopher, and we were in a Jewish environment, then again, that was another aha moment.

59:18Yeah, it's really wonderful and ingenious on lots of different levels. So my last question for you, how are you feeling about the future? Are you feeling optimistic? Are you feeling cautious? Tell us how you're experiencing what might be coming. Well, I can say I'm very optimistic. I really do feel this. I've always been somewhat of an optimist, incurable optimist, but I know that there's so many difficult things happening in the world and suffering. And so I don't want to minimize that in any way. But I also feel really positive about where we are and that there's an enormous amount of potential for change that is going to open up new possibilities.

1:00:06Technology, I see, the entire field is changing in really interesting ways. I don't think it's going to be nearly as fast as people think, but it's evolving. I see students being smarter than ever and using these tools in new ways. And I really feel very, very excited and hopeful about where we are. Tiffany Schlain, Ken Goldberg, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Thank you, Debbie. Thank you so much, Debbie. Such a pleasure. Thank you. Tiffany and Ken's interactive, multisensory installation, Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology, Trees, Time, and Technology, is on display at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

1:00:56You can also see more of their work at letitripple.org. I'd like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. we can make a difference, or we can do both. I'm Debbie Melman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

1:01:14As of January 16th, the Skirball Cultural Center is closed due to the fires in LA. So please check their website before planning a visit. Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.