Es Devlin

34:04We only needed the stadium because there were the TVs. And of course it's a disaster. Nobody can see the Beatles. Nobody can hear the Beatles. The Beatles are not even really safe. They wouldn't sound really safe. The things are right, the things are mass. And that was the advent of the art form of large scale stadium performance. The stadiums themselves were conceived for combat, for gladiatorial competition, not for congregation. So with each progression of that art form, the set of circumstances have largely remained that one is countering not only the gladiatorial competitive format of the architecture, but the brutality of the logistics of the economics of touring music.

34:59Means that if you really pay attention, the communication you're really receiving when you walk into a stadium is the smell and the atmosphere and the energy of 300 men having just got down from ladders, having just rigged the speakers, the truss, the screens, the medicine to that bad day in 1965 that the Beatles had. And that's what it's been. Slightly better formulations of medicine for that moment and the sphere is the first environment that's been purpose built for what is now a sinesthetic communication of visual and music at once. And that is what in my experience, people are making recording artists are making visual expressions as much as they're making music.

35:56They are thinking in a sinesthetic fashion, which by the way, we've always been sinesthetic creatures. Back in the day, we would have gone into the church or the temple or wherever it was that we were gathering for ritual, whichever culture it was. And there would have been the synthesis of the stained glass window to speaking from the Western tradition, the music, the incense, the architecture, the texts. And you wouldn't have said who's the artist, who was the composer, who wrote the text. You just would have said, oh, this is Sunday and it's my birthright. And it's a maple, not a church or whatever it was.

36:39So I guess what the sphere is trying to do is to present an environment that doesn't have any edges in that the screen is all around you and there are no edges to it. And it is a screen that presents high resolution images that also sings. So the screen is the speaker. And it's something we were talking about for years and thought it wasn't possible. And it's also designed for congregation, not combat. The audience are presented more like epiduris than the Roman Colosseum. And in that unfolding, our series of technologies that are concurrent with the evolution of the art that's made for them. The end LMNT Element Electrolikes Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun?

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39:18How much of the thinking starts with technology? The thinking very rarely starts with the technology to be honest. For example, the pet shop boys I've worked with for a decade and I know those songs like hymns. Like when I was a kid and you sing a hymn every morning. So if I'm just like my husband says that I sing when I'm happy. So if I'm just sing along to myself it's probably all things bright and beautiful. Oh, creatures great, handsome. Just because that was the first one that landed in my brain that we learned to play hard. And to me a song like being boring, which is one of my favorite songs, is just launched like a cat's kiss and like a...

40:02little G like a hymn. So it becomes a question of how to resurface in this time. In what way, as if I'm doing a hamlet this year versus the hamlet I did in 2005 versus the one in 1991, in what way can this constellation of words and sounds resonate in this time? So that's more where I start. Always with the songs as opposed to the personality of the artist. Yeah. That's interesting. I wouldn't guess that. Yeah. Yeah, the songs. The songs, the text. I mean my studio used to laugh at me because however kind of, you know, as we know some lyrics are more like mantra, they're very simple texts. But the very beginning of my practice, I was working with a wonderful singer -songwriter Gary Barlow from an English bank or take that.

40:58And one of the songs was rather simple. It was, I want you back. I want you back. I want you back for good. And I wrote it down and I underlined like I would my English essay, you know, the phrases that I wanted to emphasize because that's my process. And that is what we do when we're working on a play. The director will sit opposite me for three hours. We will read the play together and we'll conjure between us, between their batch of poems and my batch of poems, the text where we meet. And the songs is where we meet. And it's my experience that the most useful thing that's been written or said or shown about what is really happening when an audience gathers.

41:43To listen to music together is a film that was made by Anton Corbin about Depeche Mode. They're tall and it was called a belief spirits of the forest. And Anton Corbin followed seven Depeche Mode fans. And they were on different continents. One was obsessed with Depeche Mode because they'd been in a coma and the only music they remembered when they resurfaced was Depeche Mode. One had separated from his partner and the only way he could see his small children was because they rehearsed in a Depeche Mode covers band. The other one had found their gender orientation and managed to express it through the lyrics of a Depeche Mode song and it went on like that.

42:28And as an audience, you never saw anything about the band, nothing about their rehearsals, nothing you never even really saw them perform. You just were with these particular human beings. Then you traveled with them to the stadium. You were incredibly invested in their investment in the music and the words. And then you watched the show through their eyes. Beautiful. And then you multiplied that by 80 ,000 people. And you thought, what if it's happening in this eight? It's probably happening in everyone. So a bit like the retina thing that the real stage mechanics is not on the stage. It's happening in a dispersed way through 80 ,000, contracting irises.

43:09Actually, the real thing, the real happening is in the meeting of the expectation or the not meeting, the juxtaposition of the anticipation with the moment. That's what's really happening, I think. So therefore the personality to me and the peripheral structures of celebrity that converge around them, frankly the medieval feudal monocle systems that can converge around a celebrated person is the least interesting part. And the part that I try to avoid, ready? In the spectacle ever become so grand that the music gets lost. I mean, I view what I make as musical instruments. I always loved when I was a kid I used to play the violin, clarinet and the piano.

44:05And I remember saying to my teacher once, does a violin have to look this beautiful to sound this beautiful? When I wasn't practicing my violin I was trying to draw it. I thought it was very beautiful. And I guess what I try to make is musical instruments at a big scale that will resonate the music. If they are distracting from the music, then they are like a piano that's been decorated with ornamentation that actually either distracts from the sound or doesn't contribute to the sound or perhaps even Mars the sound. I certainly have done that, but those weren't my proudest moments. Yeah. When do you know if something is successful or not?

44:51Most of what I make is collaborative. The work is born of community. I don't consider any work to be born of me, not my own children even. I am firmly a subscriber to the Calil Gibran spirit of they come not from you, but through you. That's just my experience. I look at my children and go, wow, you're amazing. And the work itself, I think, is really my part in it is to be a conduit to a conductor of when it's just me and my hand and my animal drawings. It's me conducting my time, conductor of my time and the concerns of my time, but might be incredibly personal. It might not feel like 2022 to anyone else, but it was my 2022 or my April the second 2022.

45:40When it's a collaboration and we are leading towards the day of showing the project, you have a sense within the community of those who are helping you realize the thing already of whether it's flowing. You know, there are all the signs when it's not. So you know that you're on a wave that's rising. And really then the moment of the audience converging as part of the constellation of the piece, which in all my work they are, even the writing of the book was written, you know, to be read, obviously, and the small scale artworks still are for an audience in a gallery. By then, my antenna towards the audience, I'm interested.

46:24I'm interested in how it feels to be part of the audience. But by then, I already know if something's happening, the thing has gone off. And usually it's not a binary thing. It's usually the extent to which it's gone up. We sometimes like in it, throwing sandbags off the balloon basket, so it floats. And you know that you've reached a certain height, but next time you probably could chuck a few more off. Too late to do it now, the thing has gone. But you know the ones you would ditch. Normally it's that you didn't quite have the courage to ditch quite enough. Do you ever surprise by an audience's response?

47:03Yes, yes. Usually when I've become in the process, perhaps two overworked. Like the equivalent of a sketch is when it's become too tight. And in a process, perhaps the chemistry of the collaborators is such that the thing becomes tight. Too close. Yeah. Too close. I kind of at that point don't really know what the work is. And often it's a pleasant surprise that it's not completion. Yeah. Would you start playing violin? I started playing the violin when I was six years old. I played it. I practiced pretty hard. I was really hard working. I wasn't very good. But I was very diligent. And it taught me two things.

47:47I thought, well, it taught me three things. First thing was that objects have voices. That a wooden object that was made from a specific bit of wood, a specific time. When the conditions for that tree were a specific way. And then a person pieced it together in a specific way, with specific glue, with specific conditions. And if I held it against my specific little chest and drew this piece of wood with horse hair on it, having rubbed the resin of another tree on a piece of cat -gut or aluminium, that I could be like a time machine because the language I was given to read were these dots on staves that were marked down by somebody three centuries ago.

48:36And that somehow this wooden object and my little chest of bones and blood could resonate this music through time. And I think I became aware of that. I played in little baroque groups. So I was very aware of time passing through us. And I was aware of what happened when you practice. We do the same thing every day. And you play a scale and it sounds terrible. And you play at the next day, it still sounds terrible. A week later, it still sounds terrible. Then on Thursday afternoon, it sounded a bit better. Friday morning might sound sure again. But Monday, it sounded a lot. And just that rather diligent thing that I learnt from drawing the animals more recently that I could read a lot of beautiful books that would tell me about the continuity of self with the world.

49:26And I could only feel it because I was practicing it. That 10 ,000 hours thing, which of course we all might translate into a hundred thousand hours. Just the doing of it, you know. The other thing I learnt was being part of a sound much bigger than myself in an orchestra. Big orchestras. I was at the back scratching. Second violin. Could you hear yourself in the context of the orchestra now? I could probably hear myself, but I wasn't focusing on my bit really. I was just bored over. I was often lost. I would get lost. You know, you sit in pairs. And it would be who was going to admit first we haven't got a fucking clue.

50:10What Pedro, because our second violin part is literally the offbeat. And we did a bunch of offbeat and never mind wondered. So we might be lost. But you would turn a few pages there. Ah, there's a rest there. The people at the front put their bows down. We must pick the rest bit and you'd catch up. So it was a bit of that. But the sound of the whole thing. And you knew you were part of it. Yeah. And that was enormous to me. And I did it with Wind as well with a clarinet and being part of a big noise made of breath. You know. That was enormous. I'm so glad I did it. Beautiful. Tell me the difference between handmade objects and machine made objects.

50:52You know, in my house, I only want to touch things and live with things that are made by hand. I don't. I live with many things that are made by machine beautifully. But I really care of the day -to -day encounter with the objects of which I know the full etymology. The older I get, the more important this is to me. So there are some wooden bowls in my house. They serve no use except to sit there and be beautiful. They are made by a jazz musician who turned later in life to wood -turning. And they bring me so much joy because I know the bit of tree he used. I know him. I know his story. I've seen him making them.

51:34And I see where they sit now. And I guess my ambition perhaps is to limit the number of things I touch in my day -to -day. The ritual objects that we clean our teeth with and eat from every day to only being those things of which I know the whole journey. That said, equally, I am amazed by the ability of a human and a machine to cooperate. And one of the smells I love most is of an angle grinder. Because the first time a piece that I made in a small miniature cardboard model was produced at scale. In a theatre production in the north of England, in a small regional theatre in Bolton. In 1996. I remember walking into the workshop and the smell.

52:31I have to say it was mainly men making stuff with powertalls, machinery, grinding and cutting of metal. Because that smell is associated for me with this extraordinary privilege of a group of people. Extremely talented makers themselves, combining their wisdom with the wisdom of machines made by otherwise people to make these giant versions of what I had made small. And it's a miracle to me that the things that we come up with in cardboard and on the screen are then through the extraordinary brilliance of many minds, mechanics, engineers, all artists, all poets in their way can then arrive in a gallery or in a stadium.

53:25And I am entirely reliant on the things that have been made by machines. But I guess I tune them. We often talk when we're rehearsing about tuning in a set like we would tune a violin. So it's in the tuning of them, in the timing. And that can be very granular. There's a moment I remember a design that had a big screen that had to come down at a certain time. And the piece was about two worlds, a virtual world and an actual world. And throughout the work, the audience went with it. They were in one world, they were in another, they stayed, they were with it, they applauded at the end, they were with this piece.

54:07We transferred it from a small theatre to a bigger theatre. And it didn't work. The suspension of disbelief failed. And we sat with a rather brilliant director who analysed, he said, you know what? That thing flying in is flying in one and a half seconds slower. And that's enough time for the audience to question, to be uncertain, to doubt. And the suspension of disbelief, spell is broken. So that had to be tuned in. So I guess, yeah, the difference between machine made objects and objects made by hands is, you need to tune the ones in that have been made by machines, I think.

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56:21How much of your work is based on something you learned versus something you intuit? That's such a great question. I'd say everything is based on what I intuit. And the older I get, the more relaxed I get in the practice, because I've done it many times. The more I trust the intuition, that said the intuition would probably be of little use. Had I not practiced and learnt. I think that the learning provides the architecture in which the intuition can be set loose and fly and be free. I think I need the architecture of what I've learnt. Because certainly my intuition is far more accessible to me now than it was.

57:15Because I feel held by the architecture of what I've learnt. In these cases, what you've learned is based on experimentation. So essentially self discovery, whereas what I originally meant in the question was, was it something that someone else taught you? I know. I haven't really been taught. I was taught at school. I was taught languages and things. I was taught things that I taught the violin, which I've probably transferred. But I wasn't an apprentice to anyone really. I was somebody's assistant for about a week. And then I was fortunate enough, privileged enough to be asked to make a piece of work quite quickly.

57:59And I threw absolute youthful hubris. I mean, I'm shocked at the ignorance with which I marched forward. The brazen purposeful ignorance. You didn't know you couldn't do it. No, I knew nothing. And I'm not forward with absolute bait like a giant messy baby. Yes. Making a giant fucking mess and having a time of my life. Do you ever have new insights into old work? Yes.

58:35I instinctively made work again and again. And I still do about boxes, frames, containers, and the boundaries thereof. Without knowing why? I don't know why. It's the work I need to make. And it's the work I would like to exist in the world that doesn't yet exist. So I want to make it. And I guess at the beginning of the practice, I didn't ask many questions. I just said, well, clearly, it must be this. And then as the practice has evolved and the means of collaboration and the refining of a practice of collaboration has matured. And I'm less desperate to spit out something that's probably been growing inside me.

59:28And I have more space to say to the other, please may I look through your eyes. But I am always looking for the overlaps in the lines of inquiry. And often the place where we overlap is these gestures that I was trying to make early on. From the time that you have an original idea until the final execution, how often does the final work look like the original idea? Now nearly always. That's amazing. And partly because the process now is that I delegate practically everything between. I find it's much safer. I try to hold on to the first gesture. And... Is it always start with the drawing for you?

1:00:19Yes. Drawing. Do you put words on it or no? Sometimes, yeah. What would be an example of the words that you would put? I might have a lyric in my mind that's particularly surfacing in my imagination. And I might want to express that lyric as a gesture, and I might write galloping. And next to it draw something that doesn't look like a good gallop. But in my mind, I want it to gallop, for example. Or I might write floating house. Because my drawing is probably pretty quick and it might not be clear that it's floating. So it might be, you know, a further explanation. But when I've arrived at that gesture, there are million decisions that need to be made to preserve the gesture and to not dilute the gesture.

1:01:11So I have to be involved in all those decisions, but I have to be protected from diluting it myself. I understand. Or from compromising it or from evolving it sometimes. It's a technique I've only been confident enough to use, I guess, over time. It's like I will actually protect myself a bit. And the colleagues around me, some of them know me quite well, and they're quite articulate. And they say, you have these moments of collision with the work. You collide with it in the first response to the reading of it, and then you purposefully protect yourself for a while. And then you recalite with it when the materiality of it becomes present.

1:01:48And sometimes, you know, I pay attention to each decision along the way. And sometimes they have to be compromises due to things like gravity or budgets. Is there ever a time where something happens along the way and you realize, oh, this new iteration is actually better than the original? Often, that happens. But normally it's like doing something in Japanese that was going to be done in English, but the word is still the same. So it's a translation. The gesture is the same. And it's like, oh shit, it's never going to work in English. Let's do it in French. And the words are always to further clarify the drawing.

1:02:30Would that be accurate? Yes, I think so. And yeah, because the drawing sometimes can't reach the poetry I want from a lyric or something, or just from words that have come to my head. But when a new idea takes over, that becomes obsession then. And if it's a new idea, it's because the old idea has run its time. And it absolutely going to be this. When you find out what it can really be, and it can't be that, it then leaves the building. It's gone now. And it often has already become just a husk like a snake skin. And there's a new snake. So no one really grieves the old idea. So that often happens.

1:03:15Equally, sometimes, the old idea goes up on a shelf of unrealized projects. And it's to hand. We have a kind of alphabet of half finished or unfinished ideas in the studio that we have to hand. So sometimes there's an invitation. It's like, well, that one. I want to pick up where that one never went. There's some ideas I've been trying to do forever. Tell me about your relationship to poetry. For me, the best way of describing a poem was given by Jeanette Winterson, who was an extraordinary writer. And we were at a seminar on poetry, and a very young student, rather shyly, split up her hand in a big call, and said, I'm a bit embarrassed asking this question, but do you mind telling me what is a poem?

1:04:10And Jeanette Winterson answered really beautifully without any contempt for the question. And said, a poem is something that even if your house burns down, and you lose every single one of your possessions, if you've learnt that poem by heart, you'll still have it. And for me, it's a container of language at its most essential, and at its most vibrant. And I started really engaging with poetry when I was about 14 years old, probably, at the end of my schooling, and the vibrancy with which ideas could be held in this unexploded bomb of her constellation of words. Kept me sufficiently fascinated that I decided to study poetry for three years at university.

1:05:07I went and did a degree in English literature, the beginning of which involved learning every word that had been written in Anglo -Saxon. And it's not very difficult because there are only 3 ,000 words. Many of them are in Beowulf, one of the first poems, there's some other poems, and you can learn every word. And that, to me, was a great beginning to drawing the map of finding meaning because it meant that I could start to trace back in any sentence where the words had come from. And the study of Shakespeare, because he was working at a time where language was divided between the Germanic rooted words which were largely used by the people of the peasantry with less money, with less resources, fewer resources, and the dignitaries, the royals, who would be using French or Latinate derived words.

1:06:08So a study of Shakespeare and the way we were taught it was really a lesson in English. Which is absolutely a container of two opposing forces in every bloody sentence. So you're always coming up against words that had their origins in rather elevated thoughts and words that were rooted in the land. And that's been a great help to me. So try and find meaning to constantly go, where does that word come from and how did it get here and therefore where is it headed to? So word like entertainment. It's constantly glued to the word industry, entertainment industry, or mass entertainment or light entertainment.

1:06:55There's all sorts of adjectives that seem to have gravitated towards entertainment now. But when you unpick it and it comes from a combination of Entre, which means a man in French and Teneer, which means to hold. It means to hold a man, to hold together. It's a very beautiful thought. So sometimes when I am able to dig back into the etymology of words, I feel more able to try and, in my own use of them, at least, in my small way, rehabilitate them if I can. So, yeah, poetry is of the utmost importance to my practice and carefulness, care about what words I choose.

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1:09:00How has your study of literature impacted your work? In the first instance, being able to get to the essence of what the communication really is, what's actually happening, what's the communication, is that one? In each piece of work, is this work worth doing? And obviously 70 % of the time is not. Or if I am doing it for reasons that are not due to the worthiness of the text, why am I doing it? And just clarity on that, why am I doing this work? That's been a great benefit. I'm able to read the code, I guess. And then beyond that, I guess, in music, to me being able to ascertain when the lyrics are another percussive instrument, which they sometimes are, or when the real communication is the poetry, and how can that be drawn through the visual?

1:09:56How can I help the audience access the poetry that they might not have lent towards? Do words ever work their way into your work? Yes. There's a body of work I started making in 2016. And it was made in response to a rather general invitation, which was make a piece of art for a party. And I said, I don't really understand. And I said, well, it's a party, it's a gala party. I said, what do you mean, so people pay to come? I said, yes, I said, okay, well, that seems like an art, juxtaposition of invitation to a party, and invitation to donate money. This seems a little uncomfortable. And, oh, no, invitation is to pay because it's a gala because this will pay for the museum to be free of charge the rest of the year.

1:10:43This is a very dignified way to raise money. Okay, good. So how could I respond to this? Coincidentally, a student who had written to me earlier that week saying, dear, as Devlin, please would you donate a word to my project? And of course, the word donate had already detonated a whole sort of sequence of responses. What will I donate? What will I be asked to donate? You know, barely conscious, but I know that this was going off in my mind. And then a word is a great relief because I'm being asked to donate a word. And this is interesting. This is unusual. So I asked the student, I said, can I maybe borrow this idea?

1:11:21So the guests came to the party and they were each invited to donate a word. And the idea was that a poem would be generated. And the poem would be the work made of words. And underneath the words would be everybody's face. The words would be projected on each person's face. It was called poem portraits. And, mercifully, somebody in the team knew somebody who was back then in 2016 using large language learning models. So it was a very basic one, like a predictive text really trained on a corpus of 20 million words of Victorian poetry, which were out of copyright. And it instantly wrote a two -line poem.

1:12:04And by the way, it's still going on. If you Google it, you could add to it now. There's poems been written for eight years. It's called poem portraits. And that then evolved into a series of works, one at the V &A, which was a collective carol, to which everyone added a word. One on Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square, Britain went through a time of rather divisive vote, which led to Britain leaving the European Union. And I wanted to ask the lions in Trafalgar Square that sit at the foot of Nelson's column. I wanted to ask them what they thought. I considered them to be 150 -year -old objects, which have absorbed thecomings and goings of celebrations and protests.

1:12:49So I invited the audience to each feed the lion a word. And then the algorithm did its magic, and a collective poem was projected. This was all using pretty much simple predictive text kind of algorithm. And in 2019, we made the UK per billion at the World Expo, which was a 60 -foot -high building, maybe a bit more than that, on which the entire facade was made out of small blocks of text. And the building received words of 25 million people who visited the expo, and it wrote a new poem. This time was using, because it had been invented by then, an early version of chat, GPT -2. And it wrote a poem on its facade every 90 seconds.

1:13:39It would have done it every one second, but we couldn't read it. So we had to slow it down. So that was an object made of words, made of text. And it was criticized somewhat by some people who said the poetry wasn't very good. To which I said, well, give it a break, because at least it is trying, and it's the only building that's writing poetry. And sometimes, actually, although often relatively abstract, the value of the text was not that it made sense in itself, which it didn't always, but that it invited us to subscribe meaning to it, like a fortune cookie, or like a chart that you read. What are you finding in that?

1:14:24So I have sometimes used text really directly in work, and there should be the most examples. Tell me about some of the most memorable live performance experiences you can remember over the course of your life, and what the element was that made it special for you. This fear definitely counts as one. The final song in that was set to a cathedral of Nevada species. So at once, you were in a situation that devoid of any edge. You were edgeless, which I think is quite important. I think we might look back from the future at this time and go, wow, they look... Did everything through these frames? Having tried the Apple Vision Pro and the sphere, I feel like the possibility of boredom is in our artifacts, these perhaps, upon us.

1:15:23So at once you were singing a hymn with or without you, that has become a contemporary hymn, I would say, and you were traveling on mass throughout the whole of the sphere performance. We made a point of not using what we call the Z -Dimension, treating the audience as if they were sitting on a vessel and traveling through space. It's a very impactful tool in that space, and we made a point of not ever using it till this moment. And this was the first moment where you recognised that you were sort of on a epidurous, shaped boat, travelling through the water together to enter this cathedral of the species that would be here, where we not here.

1:16:08So really a peony of the skin. So that felt one of the most powerful. So would that, would you say, it was the content or the technology that gave you that feeling of this is special? It was a precise convergence of song, lyric, delivery of music by those performers. At that moment in their lives, with this audience in its moment of awe, with this particular technology, in its first outing, on its first night, with the deep research that we had done for four months prior of these animals, and the care with which many people had crafted them to be able to express them, the convergence, the constellation of all those things in one, three and a half minute.

1:17:08Then it got even better because when you stepped outside, those same animals were on the outside of that sphere, and visible from a helicopter. Actually, the other really memorable experience that comes to mind straight away was one that I had nothing to do with the making of. I went to see a performance, a Florence in the machine, and she had asked everyone very, not in a demanding way, but she had asked everyone at the O2 to please put their phones away. And the visual expression was very simple. It was just an image of her. So we could see her detail. It was nothing more than that, as far as I could recall.

1:17:45But she invited everybody to hold hands. And we had been taken to this extremity of love for her. We were eating out of the palm of her hand to the extent that we absolutely were going to take our complete strange and neighbor's hands. And the remainder of the show was a mass dance. She then went on to tell me about a phenomenon called Corio Mania, where a community reached a point of instincts or intention or absolute compulsion to dance that they couldn't resist. And she kind of induced that in us. And I would say that was really nothing to do. And yes, the technology delivered her in large magnified face.

1:18:37And the sound was delivered, but beyond that, it was purely in her choices and her ability to take us to a place where we were felt safe and held in order to follow her instruction. Very beautiful. Do ideas from theater translate well into film? I'll give you an example, a concrete example of my experience of this, which is limited. I made a piece of work with Sam Mendes, a director, called the Lehman Trilogy, which was a three -hour exploration of the rise and fall of Western capitalism, seen through the eyes of the three Lehman brothers. Starting from their arrival from Bebaria in the 19th century, right through to the phone call that ended the Lehman Brothers Bank with the financial crash of 2008.

1:19:35And to tell such a story, Sam gave me, it was the first time we collaborated and he wrote down a set of presets for me on a board, which I still have in my studio. And he said, number one, make concrete the shape of history. Number two, the audience will understand it in their head because they can feel it in their gut. The presets went on. And the response was to make a musical instrument, which was an constantly revolving glass box with three rooms in it. All descriptive of the Lehman Brothers offices of 2008, but all sufficiently essentially sketched that they could equally describe a storeroom in the very first cotton shop in Alabama where the Lehman Brothers began their life in America.

1:20:31And Sam directed that in the rehearsal room with a composer at the piano who then became part of the show. And he underscored it while the actors were rehearsing. So what might take place in a film as a secondary procedure once the scenes and the rushes are in place, composer might score as you know to those rushes or to the first card or whatever it is. In this case, the scoring was being done live under the rehearsal. And Sam was choreographing this box, the revolving of the box, the stopping starting, the velocity, the position like a dancer, like a fourth actor. And he came out of that process.

1:21:18And he had been mentioning to me that sometimes when we weren't rehearsing, he was busy on a film I asked him. He said, oh, it was this story of my grandfather told me about the First World War. And it was of course 1917. And my understanding from what he's told me, I was had nothing to do with that film myself, was that he took that dynamic of directing the revolving box into the first week of filming, which had been pre -prepared and planned. And by the end of the first week, he took a pause of filming because he realized he was missing that through composed dynamic. And he then changed his attitude and started filming 1917, almost from a kind of first person shooter perspective in a video game with a constant motion of camera in one orientation.

1:22:10And he has described that that came about as a translation from the dynamic of the movement of the stage mechanic from the lemon trilogy straight into the movement of the camera. And I'm finding now, oddly, having not really gotten too much involved in film throughout the 30 years of my practice, I'm now involved in several films. And I wonder if it's because the ubiquity of the moving image in our lives almost makes it so ubiquitous that it's barely habitable for an art form. It flows through our hands film and it flows along the sidewalks on the banners and posters around us and billboards that I believe some of the filmmakers are looking to anchor the work in a more concrete construct.

1:23:03And some filmmakers seem to be interested in rooting the architecture in a framework a little bit more. I might be wrong. It might just be chance.

1:23:16Tell me about stillness versus motion. I really love to make musical instruments on a stage when an art gallery that are kinetic. I enjoy in a still architecture in a room that doesn't move that is clearly rooted to the ground. I enjoy the stirring of the atoms within the room like a fandus by the movement of an object in a room. And I think because we are creatures that have become accustomed to film as a primary storytelling medium, we are exposed to very regularly, we are accustomed to a moving camera nearly all the time. My children find it impossible to watch the earliest films that were migrated from plays because of the static camera shot.

1:24:12They become restless because we are so used to the camera move. So I find I will actually engender a greater stillness and composure in it. A more extended focus of attention from a group, a temporary society, a community of audience, if I provide the movement when an object is moving, the audience I think feel more capable of finding a stillness. So I enjoy that. Things happen in what I make, they are nearly always a sequence of things. They are very ready one thing, like an album isn't one thing, like a song isn't one thing. And it's often to arrive at the absolute stillness, the moment when there's nothing happening except one light, one person in a microphone, or one phrase in the darkness in one of the installations I make, we arrive at that because we were churning.

1:25:09Because we moved and we were churning and circling and revolving before, then we can actually be still. So the stillness can work as a contrast? I think that's often how I experience music as well, that we arrive at this place of absolute transcendent silence or stillness or sustaining of a note or a gesture, because of the velocity that we've just, you know, been moved by. There's something I like about the discomfort that comes from the stillness. Waiting for something to happen, that tension, it's not pleasant, but it's engaging. And it makes me lean forward and wonder if something's wrong.

1:26:00And I think that that's powerful. I agree and I think the setting of terms of engagement is something I think about a lot in the work. I try to set the terms of engagement with some clarity at the beginning, so an audience feels safe, feels held. Because as an audience member myself, I often walk into any situation, even if it's switching an album on, ready to judge, ready to criticize, ready to comment all those unhelpful things, and to disarm that possible reaction. I have found that some clarity around, this is your seat, sit down, this is how it's going to begin, this is clear, and a settling of the audience into a terms of engagement.

1:26:51This is your role, this is my role, this is what's happening. So they feel secure, they feel safe, if they've come with somebody, they don't feel anxious, they don't feel like they need to apologise, or say, oh, sorry, I brought you, we might leave at the interval kind of thing, so you set that up, calm, safe. Then knowing your audience, knowing what might make them feel comfortable, you allow that for a bit. And then, once you think they are with you, then anything can happen. And my experience as an audience will trust you, actually it's another thing that I learnt working with Sam Mendes, and he was given the quote by someone else, his name I can't remember, but it goes like this, the audience will go to hell and back with you, as long as it says, head on the bus.

1:27:44So within the first few minutes, the sequence, the first few minutes, hell on the bus, then really, then you're free. To take the audience, obviously, you're going to take them somewhere they don't know, and they're not going to trust, because otherwise, why would you make the work? You have to take them somewhere they've not been before. In what ways have you or your work been misunderstood? I think the genres in which I work are misunderstood to be under from each other when I consider them to be continuous. I sat down at an art gallery gathering the other day, very nice lady next to me, very erudite, brilliant.

1:28:25Couldn't quite work out what I did, and after a while, she said, I see your sonographer that likes to call himself an artist. It struck me that those siloed ways of looking at practices as necessarily other and separate from one another are still all pervasive. And I just don't feel that way. So I consider that the main misunderstanding is that to me, even one of my close friends once said to me when I said I'm drawing these animals at all, are you making some proper art? I was like, please stand with me when a hundred thousand hearts are opened with one note and one light and an image in a stadium.

1:29:20And tell me that you mind what that's called if this is how we are feeling and this is how we feel when we leave. So I think the labeling the nomenclature of that's misunderstanding, I think. The individual works themselves are less misunderstood, actually. Generally when people turn up, even if they're someone who thought that they were never going to like an opera because they usually listen to pop music or thought they weren't going to like the pop concert because they normally go to the theatre or thought that a fashion show wasn't for them because they normally like painting or thought that an art installation wasn't for them because they've only just bought an album and they don't really know much about what I do.

1:30:01Actually the surprise is the understanding that comes. The work can reach a lot of people. On that note, would you say you have any peers? I do feel that a recognition of the sinusesia and the sinusetic is evolving, not least through our musician colleagues who want to make a visual world and they always have really. But the visual and the musical being fused and combined in one gesture is I think happening amongst many of our peers. So I feel surrounded by it. Beautiful. I would say what we have in common is we both make things, maybe unusual things that are true to us and for some reason people have accepted them.

1:30:55I think that's right. I think being able to bring one's own very personal batch of poems to those whose batch of poems are entirely different. And to be able to find a strategy and an alchemy aura, an enzyme that catalyzes those two very distinct experiences into a common shared line of inquiry and then to pursue that humbly together, both not knowing. And to preserve that sense of not knowing if it will work. Whatever anyone is saying about, oh no, you're so in, so it's got to work. And well, it might not. It might not. The only reason that I'm of any value to you is because I go into this not knowing if it will work.

1:31:47And yet I will use my best hunches to make sure your investment is protected. But if you want what I bring, there will always be a possibility that this might be good or bad. Tell me about your reading habits.

1:32:07Varacious, urgent, and one of the most important things I do really is to read. I read multiple books at a time. I associate what I'm reading with each other. So if I have a pile of four books, I will read a chapter of one, a few pages of another, and they combine as that period of reading. I do not read enough fiction at the moment. I think that's something that's happening amongst many of my colleagues. I need to get lost in more fiction. But I read a lot of nonfiction. And I'm mainly making up for a great lacuna in my education in that like many of us, I was segregated into the arts department at an early age.

1:32:48So much of what I read is popular science to catch up. And it gives me enormous joy or pleasure. I would recommend everyone to read David Abram, the spout of the sensuous Joe Animesi, World as Love, World as Self, a 97 -year -old. Thinker, philosopher, teacher, practitioner, who fuses systems theory with Buddhist thought in a really accessible way. Many other books I could recommend for hours that have changed my life and continue to. Do you have a spiritual practice? I practice yoga and I would say I don't do it enough. I get into a habit where I will do it every day. And that would be my my access to a force larger than myself through movement actually when I'm swimming as well.

1:33:48I find it quite hard to turn off this calculator person in the front of my brain in the cerebral cortex. And I find it easier if I'm in a flow of movement. Swimming in yoga, the breath is attached to the movement. So maybe that person thing they do with it. Yeah, I think so. I think when the entire consciousness is present just in the rhythm of the breath. Yeah, I don't have very good words for my spiritual practices, but what I do know is I am in awe of the geometry at the heart of each leaf and each piece of rock, each cloud. I'd say I access the great force bigger than myself through recognition and wonder at the maths and geometry, at the heart of everything.

1:34:39The lungs, the trees, the connection. I think about those things quite a lot. I read about them, I think about them and that's probably where in my spiritual practice lies actually. Do you always know the meaning of the thing you're making? No. No. If I do, it probably means I've made it before. And it probably means it's an iteration, which is often what I do and often through iteration comes the next thing. But it probably means it's not a revelation, it's more of an iteration, which is fine. If I already have a sense of what it means, if I really don't know what I'm feeling actually quite anxious about it and worried about what it will be, that's when I get a little free self, God, I might, this might be another new thing.

1:35:27But I have to go through that fear and uncertainty that it might. I don't know what it is. And it's hard when you make things publicly, when you know there is an opening day to reconcile that with allowing yourself to go to a place where you are really quite scared of what you're making, maybe nothing at all, or maybe relevant or inappropriate or wrong. You know, but if you don't go through that, you are only, I say only, it's great to iterate on, on practice. That's practice. But to really go to a different train of inquiry, I find I have to go through a great deal of doubt. Let's talk about scale.

1:36:10How does the scene work play in different scale? I have a lot to say about scale. When I was six years old, my parents moved to a house near the sea in a small town called Rai. My daughter is now called Rai after that town. And next to our house was a scale model of the little town. And it was a rather cute town with a lot of history. And every Saturday night, there was a Sonne Lumiere where each house in the little model would illuminate and tell a story, a story of its history. Was this model outdoors? It was indoors and you bought a ticket and you went to see it. It was a tourist attraction.

1:36:59And because my parents had just moved out of the suburbs of London, the suburban place where we had grown up, their friends came to visit every Saturday to come be by the sea. And therefore every Saturday, we took the friends who hadn't seen the show to the show. So Sunday morning was church. And Saturday afternoon was this other church for me. It was similar in my mind because I was six. It was another kind of liturgy, which was a town telling its stories. And because I was six, and I've now recognised this in my own children, I was able to hold in suspension to opposing thoughts at the same time.

1:37:43One was that I was little and I was in my house, that I was in there. If I looked closely enough through the window, I would see little me in the little model house. And the other was that I was me and I was giant. And the whole town was therefore understandable to me. I could understand the system of the town because I was bigger than it and I could put down on it. And I think the reason why many people love scale models is because they love that constellation of two feelings, of at once being reminded of being miniature themselves, being surrounded by things bigger than them. And the wonder of that and the innocence of that and all the other associations of that.

1:38:28But also the ability to feel more in control and to see the system from within the trees, to see the map of it. So I think that's why I was interested in scale. And honestly, the path I took to work in theatre was not because I knew when I was 20 years old, when I took the course in stage design, rather than printmaking photography, which was literally two doors. I was poised. I had places on two courses, could have gone either way. I was really interested in layered images, I had a place at the art school I was at to carry on, become a fine artist specialising in that. Another door said stage design.

1:39:11I didn't really go to the theatre much. I wasn't like really into theatre, but I went to visit the course because people kept telling me it was a good idea. And when I walked in, it was full of scale models. And opera playing, lots of books, lots of people discussing text. And it was an all night studio, which was important to me. And it was kind of feral. It was ten people clearly obsessed. You know, it was a sort of pot noodle situation, somewhat smelly, I think of probably a dead mouse. It was that feral where people were just so in the flow of what they were doing that what other concerns had eroded.

1:39:50But I think it was scale. I don't really know what I want to do at this point, but I really would like to make these scale models of theatres. And that's the practice when you begin. You are making things at scale. So therein lies, I guess, the interest in scale. And we talk now quite a lot in the large scale music projects of intimacy at a grand scale. How do you translate that experience that the girls of 9265 had with their TV to the scale of the stadium environment or even a huge dispersed TV audience of a Super Bowl half -time show? And I think learning from the Anton Corbin film, the real event is happening in microcosm in miniature still.

1:40:45It's not just the model that was miniature. It's still happening in miniature in each person's mind if it's working. So don't be deterred by the scale of the gathering. Allow that to magnify what's really happening, which is the minute you should have each person's mind. At a small scale, the book is the smallest thing I've ever made. And to me, I worked on it for seven years. And it is like the absolute opposite of what I normally do, which is to make something small in my studio with my studio colleagues that then get centrafugally expanded like an expanding universe to more and more engineers, makers, welders, carpenters, sound engineers.

1:41:41Cosm supervisors, seamstresses. This was the inverse, a centrapeetal motion of gathering every strand that had been left, every trace that's been left not only dispersed through place around this planet, but dispersed through time. And trying to garner and gather and thread them back together into this necklace of beats that would suck itself up and become an unexploded book that when you open it would re -surface. And everything in it is essentially shrunk down to fit in the book. Yeah. And actually shrunk back in time to the first marks in every project. The focus in the first half of the book is just on the first gesture of pen and ink.

1:42:28It's only when you get to the end that you see photographs of the large scale. And actually, that's another answer to your question that the first part of the book doesn't distinguish in scale. The scale of my sketch is the same. The scale of my hand is the same. The scale of my experience is the same. The scale of my encounter with the musician or the director or the research is the same. So there's no different there, but the delivery mechanism has to respond. And that's due to a whole and ecosystem of economics, logistics, gravity, societal systems that I want to work with in. And I want to be as various as I can be in my time, in the time that I'm living.

1:43:23The means of reaching people are very various. And a bit like a fractal, the more times I reach a fork in the road, the more times I take both choices and then take both again. And when I learnt from an extraordinary book by James Glike, called Chaos, which was written in 1987, but I read it in around 2003, that this bifurcating geometry, fractal geometry, is the way that anything that wants to exchange gases or exchange anything is formed. And it is perfectly logical if you know anything about biology, that if you are a tree and your means of operation is gas exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen, or if you are a lung and your job is to re exchange that carbon dioxide for oxygen, then you will necessarily want to be as efficient as that job as possible.

1:44:24So you will want to maximize your surface area, so that the greatest possible expanse of your pores and stoma and stomato will be exposed to the air. But I think as a human being, we want to maximize our exposure to our time. Are there any small works that don't survive the transition to scale? What does everything work at scale? Some things were better in the model. Some things are very pure in the model, very beautiful objects. In fact, the book has an exhibition in New York where a lot of this about 50 of the models and there as objects, they are rather pure and quite beautiful, perfectly formed.

1:45:19The objects that I am able to translate at scale may be far more rough -hune, may be far more made of the materials that are able to be dismantled and put into a truck and arrive at the next city 48 hours later. So they may be far cruder, however, the life that is brought to them by the musicians who bring life to them and in live in them and the audience that move with them brings so much more energy to the gesture that actually the lack of perfection and purity is perfectly fine.

1:46:07Do you still make small models? I do. I do a lot of drawing now. Since I drew the animals, my determination is to create an architecture of my year that will force me to spend a lot of time in a separate studio from my design practice. I was advised by an artist I greatly admire, called William Kentridge, who came to visit me, said, this is all great, but you need a room of your own at this point. And as we speak on number 39 of 50 portraits of Londoners from the refugee community and I am drawing them as strangers. So they arrive in my studio one at a time and they sit and I do not know anything about them.

1:46:54And for 45 minutes we listen to music and with chalk and charcoal, I engage only with what I meet with no other information about the person and I make a drawing. And then I pause the drawing and we talk for 20 minutes and they tell me their story and then I continue the drawing. And I am encountering again on this mission to work with the porosity at the edge of myself, where do I end? Where does the other begin? I think I need to expose those architectures of otherness that I practice daily so that I can start to try to soften them, these structures of separation, these architectures of otherness.

1:47:38So really what I am drawing in the first sitting is not only what I see but really through the lens of my own bias, my own batch of badges posters, stickers and t -shirts that I've accumulated. And then when the person tells me their story and I am at least able to see what was there before and I'm learning so much. And really the artifact is the drawing is a trace of the time I spent in this encounter but the real artifact is artifact as with the animal drawings is the change in me. And hopefully if I can resonate any of that through conversation to any other... Are you filming this? I'm filming it.

1:48:24I've filmed my hand during it. And the conversation or no? The conversation I'm only recording. I just want the voice, the audio. So the final work will gather a congregation of 50 Londoners and their voices. How much of the drawings change after the conversation? They change. They really do change. In ways that are not possible at all for me to describe what's going on in my mind but the c -gillians of little signals that I'm picking up when the person is talking. Firstly, I'm watching their face animated rather than still so I'm merely in pieces of information are coming into my mind. And of course I'm reading so many different things into each detail of them that I haven't had overlaid.

1:49:13And absolutely, me oriented. I was drawing as much as self -portrait. I believe that every time I'm making one of these I am trying to blister through a self -portrait. It's always a self -portrait as well. And just trying to recognize the extent of that. Tell me the difference between a performance that takes place indoors versus outdoors. When we make something outdoors and a specific example of this is one of my favourite places to work which is on Lake Constance in Breggens in Western Austria. There is an opera festival there. And you make 25 metre high, 100 -foot high sculpture that exists there for two years.

1:50:02And for two months in each of those two years an opera is performed on the public sculpture. And the rest of the time it's a tourist attraction and people take boat rides around it and the whole small village town convenes around this gesture. It's like a totem for that year. I love it because it came about of necessity during the Second World War. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and opera chorus were evacuated, lived in this remote part, Western Austria. When the war ended before they returned the opera loving commissioner of the town said, please will you sing and play for us before you leave.

1:50:45They said, well we would but there's no opera house. It's got bond and a young woman, set designer, said, will give you two boats, one for the choir, one for the orchestra. And so this great opera festival on the water came about from necessity. And when you watch an opera there what you're really watching is the setting of the sun. And the pouring forth of first the swallows dipping into the water at dusk then the bats then the humming of animals, the odd parts of the boat, sometimes the fish jump out of the water. And in the background Carmen is happening and we have done a big set and other stuff is happening.

1:51:27And I do kind of think that when it's working in a quite exposed some of the stadium are relatively enclosed. But when you're in quite an open one. Even if we weren't playing with these extraordinary contemporary hymns that I am privileged enough to work with, even if they weren't even being sung. The fact that we've gathered 80 ,000 people together under the visible or not visible but certainly feelable setting sun. To me that's an event. So that's outdoors, indoors. Depending on the scale and the purpose for which that building was built the strategy needs to change. So a sporting arena is probably the least conducive place to Conflict.

1:52:14As I mentioned earlier, those spaces were designed for competition and conflict but also they are full of molecules and atoms. And for something to really feel like it's happening, the atoms enclosed within that space I think need to be stirred up like the atoms in a boiling pot of water. The molecules, if they aren't moving, if they seem to just hang there before you in between you and the music they are actually a barrier. They're like a bunch of people not dancing in front of you. So somehow you need to consider that as your material as well, that volume of air. And a strategy I use quite a lot is to compress it as if you're putting a lid on a saucepan to try and help it boil the water.

1:53:03So for example the Olivia Theatre in London, which is a relatively open space. Often when I work there I will try and put a lid in it, suspend some kind of sculpture. And that's just over the stage but over the audience. When I can, when I can and the same actually we've had some success in arenas when it's been possible. There was an example with the Able Tess Faye, the weekend. We made a giant paper airplane that was a hundred foot long that provided a compression ceiling over the entire crowd. And then was able to lift up and fold in space above their heads. But was a constant compressor and runny set of the molecules of space.

1:53:46And you have to take that on in those spaces. Otherwise you do something over there. And the whole audience has to conspire in an active, quite strenuous, remembering to forget there's all this dead space between them and something happening. And we do spend quite a lot of time strenuously unseeing and unhearing stuff. But it's better if you don't force that upon your audience. Tell me about something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.

1:54:24I believe in so many things that I didn't, pretty much the whole of my belief system has evolved I would say. But perhaps that yet the continuity of myself with everything else. So when you were young you thought of yourself as more separate and now you feel more connected. Yeah, I get to think it went through the following stages. When I was a kid I was very enclosed in myself as kids are. When I was coming into adulthood I was more and more curious about the other and learning about the other as the other over there. As I became more mature I became more porous I would say. And I read more about that continuity and porosity just from a technical standpoint.

1:55:17But I guess it was something I read and found very fascinating. But when I wasn't reading it I would go back to being me again that beautiful phrase that tick that hand says sometimes the wave. Remember that she's part of an ocean sometimes she just goes back to being the low wave again. But I do think the drawing practice, the drawing of other and trying to consciously strive for a sensation of continuity with other has rather rapidly in the past four or five years I would say. Now encourage me to try to practice porosity and actually the drawing of the animals and then of now the drawing of the people of London.

1:56:04Something I might have read and thought was a beautiful piece of poetry I now really feel which is that each animal I drew, each species I drew and each person I'm drawing I genuinely apprehend them as or receive them as a microcosm of the entire universe. And that might in the past have been something I might have thought wow that sounds great I'd love to feel that. It feels great to read but I actually feel it now and just this incredibly privileged encounter that I'm having with a person for 45 minutes that I don't know that I'm able to map with my pen and pencil and charcoal and chalk like a land.

1:56:50Each person and because that's been in quick succession sometimes I'm doing for in a day 39 people they each present themselves to me like a microcosm of the whole cosmos singing itself. How are the people selected? I'm working with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and they have a base in the UK and they work with their community particularly with people who are at a point of readiness and comfort in telling this. So each person comes as a co -author of the work and their words and each person is holding an empty gift box and they are telling me what they would like me to draw in that box.

1:57:36Tell me about breaking rules. Well the least interesting work that I've done has come at points in my practice where I knew the rules. Every time I got to a point because my practice has encountered has encompassed various media, stages I'm for theatre, for opera, music, fashion, now writing and making. Large -scale installation artworks and smaller scale painted TV artworks and drawings. At each point when I felt comfortable I didn't even know I knew the rules but I had somehow absorbed them and learnt them. The work became less interesting. Actually when I was piecing together what work would go in the book and what work wouldn't, half of it didn't and most of that half was stuff that was made knowing quite a lot about how to do it.

1:58:33And really those works only improved when I then was invited to do something I didn't know how to do. I like what David Bowie said about doing your best work when your feet can't quite reach the bottom of the pool when you're just out of your depth. And I am actually constructing my practice now to take myself out of my depth. I don't know how to do portraits. That's why I'm doing. Tell me about creating intimacy and creating distance in theatrical works.

1:59:13Yes, intimacy at scale. Often by focus. Some of the strategies I've outlined of compression of space, focus of attention. A lot to do with sound. A lot of what we see as you know, it was a film director once said to me, you think you're watching a film but you're already listening to it. I make very little that doesn't make a sound. So intimacy through attention focus, intimacy through contrast of movement and stoners as we've touched on. Intimacy through recognition that my prime material in some cases is the audience's anticipation and that my main job is to not get in the way of it, not fuck it up.

2:00:07And distance. Distance is very helpful. I would say in terms of trying to help an audience or a group of people or anyone perceive a system. I'm very interested in understanding systems. The systems by which our body functions, how my lungs work, how the trees work, how the trees and the lungs are interrelated in their workings. The theoretical physicist, Carla Revelli, very interestingly on this. And he suggested that artists see patterns and scientists see patterns. And often artists perceive patterns before the scientists. For example, Surah was making point -to -list paintings out of tiny dots just before the time that the particle nature of light was recognized.

2:01:00The instinct of Brake and Picasso to work with Cubist multi -perspective paintings, anticipating the multi -placed 306 degree camera setup by some many years. But the instinct that there was more perspective than one and that an image couldn't really be representative of its time if it was only seen from one perspective. So offering a system requires back to that thing of scale being able to show the map. And I'm interested in through the sequence of a work in my own installation work I often begin with a film in terms of engagement, a clear sit and watch a film, it's short, four minutes long, just watch it.

2:01:48And then a rupture to that set terms of engagement by saying actually now the film is going to split apart, a door will open in the film or there will be a hole in the film. And now the terms of engagement will change. And you'll be invited now to walk through the hole in the film into an environment. And in that environment you are having I guess a continuation of that relatively intimate encounter with my voice, the meditation on lungs and trees in this case, peace I'm talking about, Miami, for us of us. Then when you're in this maze, your encounter is somewhat more with yourself and the others of the community that you've just become watching that film.

2:02:30Then you're invited to travel up to a top layer of this work and look down on the whole thing and look in a mirrored reflection of the whole thing, you see the whole system, you get some distance. So often there's a sequence of like in a film close up, then a wide shot. And the two work because you were offering both in sequence. So I think yeah, you need to offer the intimacy and the distance to allow the perception of oneself as a wave and as the ocean really. How is your process changed since you first started? It's changed the way my handwriting has changed. If I look at my handwriting, it was careful, precise, carefully formed, italic, you know, try to get each word correct.

2:03:25Quite beautiful actually, I like my old handwriting, but now I can barely read it. It's a gesture. My process is far looser, I strive for looseness. More abstract, would you say? I'd say more abstract, really. The gesture I am content when I allowed the gesture to be a trace of a train of thought. If I can see life, I'm very intolerant of anything that feels more abundant or dead because of overwork or overtightness or over care. Less perfect. Perfection is nothing really that I am very satisfied with imperfection. In fact, I became very used to imperfection very early on. In collaboration, whose perfection would it be anyway?

2:04:15But yeah, if it feels in any way constricted, lacking in life, then I repel it really. I do. I mean, one or two of the portraits I've done, I knew I was so interested in the person, but I was so wanting to please and to try and do a good lightness that the drawing became tight. And I look at it in its smacks of mortality. And now, the one that I kind of struggled with and the struggle is a life, it's far more what I want to keep. Tell me about light and dark. Every morning, I wake up. I've said a little sister more, I will wake up 20 minutes before I have to wake up. I try and do that automatically, but often I'm doing it with an alarm.

2:05:02And I spend that 20 minutes that is free from the day. And my body is a student to know that those 20 minutes are free from any architecture of the day. And I meditate on the lines of light that land on my wall. And at my house, there are two of them, and they travel across depending on what time I've woken up. And they are to me my morning communication with our nearest star. And I view my rumors a kind of camera aperture to that star. And when I travel, this practice began as an anchoring device because I was traveling for really too much. And I said, okay, I don't know where I am when I wake up that odd thing.

2:05:51I don't know where the Lou is. I don't know where the door is. I don't know which end of the bed it is because I'm traveling too much. But my strategy for this is to close the curtains and hotel rooms generally do have good blackout curtains, unlike my room at home. And just when I go to bed, just now I'm just going to leave that little chin and see what happens. It's like planting a seed before you go to bed and wondering what would have grown by the morning. And waking up, having forgotten all that. In that kind of uneasy sense of where am I? Oh, there's the line. I don't need to know anything else yet.

2:06:29I don't need to know what country I am in, where the door is. I just need to know this line of life for the next 20 minutes. And that is an important practice. And I guess I work a lot of the time in a sort of QR -SKURA method of carving light up from the dark. When we do a technical rehearsal in a theatre or a stadium or even a dark gallery, we begin returning the lights off. And often the rooms do not have natural light. They are there for us to create a sequence of lighting situations in a compressed amount of time. And we administer light like a medicine. And we have learnt that different chemistry exists.

2:07:17A tungsten light that think hand -design will make you feel one way. An LED light will make you feel another way. Of course, the sunlight in every different part of this great planet will make you feel different. And we administer that. We paint with it. We administer it like medicine. We frame it. And I learnt about that, I guess, at church when I was a kid, the stained glass windows that told stories through light. Like the earliest movies, I guess, just coloured light. Obstacles to light that tell a story landing. So it's at the core of pretty much everything I do. The choreography of light.

2:07:54When you wake up in the morning to the beam of light, can you usually tell what time it is just from looking at the light? In my house, yeah. Because I know if it's over in that corner, there's a really good moment. I mean, different times of the year when a line of like precisely aligns with the corner of my wall. It lands in the corner. It's like Raiders of the Lost Ark. I remember that moment. But that's almost like a Manhattan Hedge situation. Like, I don't even know exactly what day I should take note, actually. I should do a diary of that. In fact, you've just given me the idea. I will now do a better diary.

2:08:30But actually, the fact that I don't know, yeah, there's no real science to it. I get what I get when I wake up. And sometimes there's a tree that moves in between the sun and the window. So the line becomes fractured and breaks apart. Or the cloud comes over. And it just diminishes and goes into a soft thing and then comes back to a hard thing. I've made a few films of it as well. It's a great consolation.

2:09:29I'm going to do a few more videos.