CHARLIE BENNETT: Hey, everybody. It's Charlie here. Thanks for subscribing to "Lost in the Stacks." This is a podcast feed extra. Our episode 592 called "What's on the Price Gilbert Windows?" was broadcast on February 16th, 2024. Now, the interview in that episode was excerpted from a live interview that I did in the library on January 18th, 2024, with Tristan Al-Haddad and Gerry Chen. As I said in the episode, we had to cut a lot to be able to fit anything into the episode, so here is the full recording, except for a couple of things like soundcheck and a period of time when we were talking really personally instead of for the interview. We had a long, rambling conversation. I really enjoyed it. I hope you like it too. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: This is not a live broadcast, so there's no real start, and there's no real end. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Excellent. CHARLIE BENNETT: Will you introduce yourself to the audience in whatever way you like? Because what I would do is, say, so you're like a full-on Yellow Jacket. You've been here multiple times and all that. But you might have a different idea of yourself right now. So, introduce yourself to the audience. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah, I guess I'll start with the name. So my name is Tristan Al-Haddad, and as Charlie said, I've been at Georgia Tech off and on since 1996, either as a student multiple times and for an elongated duration as a student-- nine and a half years to get six years' worth of degree, and then as a faculty member for 15, 16 years in School of Architecture, College of Design now. My practice is kind of a polycreative practice-- somewhere between art, architecture, science, research, invention, et cetera, et cetera. CHARLIE BENNETT: Is polycreative your term? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Polycreative is my term. I used polycreativity to create the term polycreative. CHARLIE BENNETT: Nice. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: And the practice is called Formations Studio. I'm here as the artist-in-residence at the library and have been now, I don't know, for almost two years. It seems like I'm-- not officially, but we kind of started this process two years ago. And it's been a long and really productive process. Before that, I actually was commissioned by Georgia Tech to do an installation at the top of Crosland Tower called Crosland Chroma that we can talk about a little bit. But, yeah, so that's a little bit about me. I'm going to hand it over to Gerry. GERRY CHEN: Yeah, hi. I'm Gerry. I'm a PhD student in robotics at Georgia Tech. I really enjoy robots. I just grew up always loving this math-STEM-robots kind of stuff. You know, hoping that someday-- it's kind of dark-- but hoping that someday robots are going to take over the world. But-- (LAUGHING) But for now, there's many things that humans are much better at, and that's why in my research, I'm really excited that I was able to be funded for my research-- thank you very much-- for humans and robots collaborating together to create artwork. CHARLIE BENNETT: Very nice. Thanks so much for being here, and I really appreciate you all being willing to be interviewed in front of a bunch of people. So the first thing I want to ask is, Tristan, you the know the library about as well as I do. You were here in the '90s, the blessed '90s. What do you think of all the changes since you started school and have watched the library as a student and as a faculty member? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah. So like I said, I came to the Georgia Tech campus in 1996 as a freshman, and this library was very different-- very, very, very different. There were books. There were lots of books. And, of course, there are books in the library now, but there were lots and lots of books in the library. Crosland Tower was just stacks. And we talked about "lost in the stacks"-- you could really get lost in Crosland in the stacks, and I-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Used to. It was wonderful. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: If you were in Crosland Tower, you were like literally lost in a labyrinth of books. And it was quite fantastic. You know, as libraries do, as libraries have, this library has transformed tremendously from that time until now. And, you know, at that time it was still sort of a sacred library. It was quiet. Everybody was studying, and you weren't allowed-- we weren't really supposed to talk, or you'd have to go outside. You certainly didn't take phone calls in the library. But now, the library is a completely different construct, and we could have a whole show talking about the library as a typology. You probably have, right? CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: So, talking about the Library as a construct, as a typology, and how it's transformed-- now the library is really about, for me, you know-- the library is really about creativity, collaboration, conversation, and I think that's interesting for this project because literally we are transforming the library into a studio. You know, right now we are actively making large-scale artwork, which is technologically enabled, in the library, and that's pretty exciting. I don't-- certainly, I would not have imagined that in the '90s. But we've still-- we've still maintained the core architectural-- you know, I'm also an architect, so the core architectural identity, yeah, absolutely from Heffernan's original building. CHARLIE BENNETT: Does the library feel more like the studio of your undergrad days than it used to? Because I used to move through the studios in the architecture building, and that kind of collective collaboration-- the working alone together and having sort of the immediacy of interactions-- that's what the library feels a lot more like to me now. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah. At first I didn't understand your question. Now I do. You're saying the energy that an architectural design studio would have had in the '90s, or let's say pre-computer-- does the library feel that way now? It does, and it doesn't. On the one hand it does because people are working together-- big tables. There's a lot of conversation. There's a lot of collaboration. On the other hand, and this is something now I'm going to critique architectural education a little bit, you know, of today. A lot has been lost in the architectural studio that you see that kind of loss here. In that, the computer has changed somehow the way in which we have physical conversations. And while something certainly has been gained through that, and Gerry can speak to the technology part, I think something has also been lost. So yes and no. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. I do feel like the organic nature of the architecture studio was really important. The idea of actually the tactile feeling of tracing from trash onto vellum, seeing the eraser crumbs, taping down your workspace, like that transformed the way that you thought about the work, I thought. And it's really interesting to me now to hear you talk about the library this way because architecture studio is kind of what the library used to look like-- very quiet, everyone's staring at something that's just theirs. And now the library is more-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: It's flipped. It's kind of flipped. Yeah, I think the other piece too-- let's use the word design, art, architecture-- they're all sort of interchangeable in this context I think it's also about accidents and, you know, sort of accidental conversations, accidental discoveries-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Serendipity. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: A lot of those-- serendipity. That's exactly the word. Yeah. That's exactly right. And I think that gets a little bit lost these days. The other piece to that, and now-- sorry. We're going off on a tangent. But-- CHARLIE BENNETT: We have so much time, and these people are here for it. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Excellent. So maybe this isn't a tangent. This is exactly what we're talking about. So during COVID when everybody went back-- you know, this was already happening because all the work was getting sort of sucked into the computer, right? So you didn't have to be at your desk. You didn't have to be in the studio. You didn't have to be making models. You could be at home, working on your laptop, right? And then when COVID hit, everybody had to go home and was working on the laptop. And so there has been-- and maybe I don't know if we're going to take some questions at the end, but maybe there's some people in the audience that might want to chime in here. I think that there's a certain amount of energy that's been lost by being together in the architectural studio. And in some ways, maybe that's been regained here. I mean, there's a lot of energy in the library, which is exciting. CHARLIE BENNETT: We're cutting this bit out and putting it up. I'm going to transcribe it [INAUDIBLE]. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Go for it. Go for it. Well, we've got a robot that can paint it for you, so-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, I like that. All right. Gerry, I am deeply distrustful of this robots taking over the world thing. But I still would like your opinion. You are coming from a very different sort of pedagogical background or research concern. What's your experience of the library? Like, what do you use this for? How do you feel in this space? GERRY CHEN: Yeah, to be honest, most of my work, I don't do in the library. But when I come to the library, It is for the energy, and it's also just for a place where there's a lot of shared resources. You know, for example, the poster printer-- the poster printing is something that-- where else am I going to be able to do this? So I think for me, you know, the library is less of a place to necessarily work and collaborate, but more a place to-- you know, a community center where we can share things, both resources but also ideas and conversations. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, there's-- the idea of the library as almost a production studio. You come here to do work. You always used to talk about the end result of your research used to be a publication-- a book or an article in a journal. And so the library was full of those. And so you'd come here to refer to the past work so you could make the new work. And that new work would end up here. But now, what people do is so much more than books, so much more than text even. And the library has kind of become that platform, become that canvas, for all kinds of work, which is a kind of ham-handed segue to your residency. You said something before we started recording like you felt like the residency was something very particular that pleased you more than other residencies might. Can you explain that? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Well, I don't-- I wouldn't say more than other residencies. But what I said was-- and this is true to my work in general. That my work is almost 100% site specific. It has to be responding to some sort of context, whether that's a physical context, the historical context, the cultural context, et cetera. So what I said was taking on this residency, the question was how and why do you do a residency at Georgia Tech in the library. It's got to be specific to that. And so that's this question of art and technology and the conversation between the two. I mean, that's something that I've been working on in my practice and also when I was teaching here for a long time. But this is a real opportunity to challenge, you know, art and technology to challenge each other and to make something new. And so that was really important to me to be engaged with. And I already knew Gerry because of his work with the digital fabrication lab. But to be engaged with students and faculty to test and push research such that we can make something totally new, and that was really important. And the end product, honestly, hopefully it's going to be really beautiful. Actually, it's going to be really beautiful. No question, right? But in some ways, the end product of a residency is much less important than the process of a residency. You don't necessarily know where you're going to end up when you go into a residency. Whereas if I have a professional commission, it's much more linear, and there are sort of thresholds and approvals. And if you get to the end and it's not what you all agreed on, that's OK then when you're doing a residency. So this is much more about experimentation. CHARLIE BENNETT: And so the artwork that's on the terrace of the library-- that was a commission? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Correct. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. What were the guardrails on that project? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: The literal guardrails-- so the project is called Crosland Chroma. Crosland is the tower-- Crosland Tower. Chroma, which I'll explain in a second. But let me tell the backstory to that. So the way I described the piece is that it's the lovechild of public art and public safety. So the library-- CHARLIE BENNETT: People are about to find out about something they didn't know about. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Oh really? Well, they're going to find out. Such is life. So there were some safety concerns after the library was-- the renovations to the library. And they had this incredible double terraces on the seventh floor-- spectacular views of Midtown, Downtown, spectacular sunsets, right? So students were loving it up there. But there was a safety concern in terms of students being able to get to the edge, or put themselves in unsafe positions. CHARLIE BENNETT: Because people really liked the view, and so they would sit-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: On the edge. CHARLIE BENNETT: On the edge and hang their feet over it. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Literally. Literally. So there was a safety concern there. And then I think the dean, along with other leadership at the institute, said, OK, if we've got this safety issue, let's not just think about it in terms of safety. Let's think about how do we merge a need with a desire. And so that's why I describe it as a lovechild of public art and public safety. So the piece is called Crosland Chroma, and it's 182 dichroic polycarbonate-- sorry for all the verbiage-- dichroic polycarbonate fins. Polycarbonate dichroic. Not sure if it works that way. So basically a kind of multi-chromatic film which takes light and breaks it into component colors. Right? That's the simple version. But it does it based on the angle of incidence. And so the fins start in one direction and twist 90 degrees as they go up and are then tensioned to create a kind of barrier so that people can't get to the edge. So that's kind of satisfying the public-safety component. The conceptual component and the artistic component is dealing with the idea of knowledge. So historically in the Western tradition-- probably in most traditions-- light, white light, sort of pure-- not pure, but fully constituted light, having all of the spectral components-- represents a body of knowledge, a diverse body of knowledge. And then each of the sort of components, or each of the colors, represents the diverse body of knowledge. So the idea is that you can take sunlight, which is fully constituted knowledge, and break that into all of its constituent parts. And really, that's what the library does, right? That's what the library is. The library is a universe to itself. Right? Diversity is about diversity of thought that all comes together to create this sort of whole that's greater than the sum of the parts. And that's-- this is almost like the opposite of library. It's the opposite-- if the library is all of the constituent parts coming together to make the universal knowledge, what Crosland Chroma does, it takes white light and breaks it into the constituent parts. So it's like playing the library backwards. CHARLIE BENNETT: Did you have that metaphor in your mind before you got to the project? Like, is that kind of how you thought of things and thought of the library? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: That is-- do you mean for the residency or for Chroma? CHARLIE BENNETT: Particular for Chroma. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Oh, for sure. Certainly. CHARLIE BENNETT: That was in your head, kind of floating around, and then you found a place for it. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Nothing is ever linear like that in my experience, you know. And this project that we'll talk about here is also not linear. It's elliptical. These things are very much elliptical. I'm going to talk about elliptical. I'm going to talk about elliptical thought in a little bit, which has both a positive and negative connotation. Yeah, but nothing is that linear. For me too, materiality is really important so because I make my own work more autographic than allographic. An architect is allographic. An architect makes a drawing, which is a notational system. Hands it to someone else. They build it. There are 1,000 people involved, and so there's a distance between the idea, the representation, and the material artifact. For me, that space is collapsed. And so I'm always working directly, you know-- I build my own work, make my own work, fabricate it-- always with many collaborators. CHARLIE BENNETT: Is that a pleasing tension for you? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Pleasing and exhausting. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah. It is. It's actually-- up to this point, I mean, who knows what the future will hold. But up to this point, that tension is, in fact, the fundamental tension. Because I'm not really that interested in ideas that are devoid of the material world, and I'm not really interested in material things that don't have ideas. CHARLIE BENNETT: The thing that I'm really interested in with Chroma in particular is thinking about creativity and thinking about practicality. And the idea that you approach a site-- you said your work is always site specific, which is kind of a funny thing to hear an architect say because, right? Isn't it always? Except, it's not always. So you see the site, and it kind of draws ideas to it as you're trying to figure out what you're going to do. And I want to contrast that with maybe the do whatever you want kind of canvas that the residency might have been. Is that a good contrast, or are they all part of one thing? Take that apart for me. Give me a grade on that particular thesis. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: No, your supposition is fine. But for me, that's not the case because-- it could have been the case, right? But for me, whether we're specifically talking about the windows, the glass as a site, which I think we are and there's some specificity to that, there are other types of specificity. So the library is specific. So one of the other things that was sort of a core idea of this residency was how to take a text and how to read that text and translate it into some sort of artwork onto the library. So how do you literally dematerialize the library and make transparent or illuminate the knowledge which is held within the library. So it's very Gothic in that way, right? Or you can think of the other classic example would be Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve in Paris, which has all of the names of the authors inscribed into the facade of the building, right? That same sort of idea. So to me, that's very site specific, incredibly site specific. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. Beyond the idea of this is a piece of art that's in a place. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Correct. CHARLIE BENNETT: Something much more. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Correct. CHARLIE BENNETT: All right. Well, let's move on to the windows then. We're going to let all the listeners sort of see this for themselves eventually, but we do have to describe a little bit what's going on. We've got these huge windows on the north side of the library broken into squares that are offset. So it's like columns of squares that are offset, going across-- how many? You know. How many feet is that across? GERRY CHEN: I think it's about 200. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I don't know. GERRY CHEN: I think it's like 100. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I should know the exact number-- there are 13 bays. GERRY CHEN: 13 bays. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: We're working more with bays than feet. GERRY CHEN: And it's seven feet plus six feet, so there's 13. So 13 times 13-- 169. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah, there you go. I think I said 180, right? CHARLIE BENNETT: So we'll cut all that out. So it's like 170 feet of glass. And you-- did you know that that's where you wanted to go with this artwork right away, or did you have to kind of move through the build and track down your canvas? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: So I'm going to give a short answer to that, and then I'm going to ask Gerry to talk about his work. So, really the idea, the intent, originally was not to work on the north facade, the glass facade. The original intent, which we proposed and were denied, was to take the brick of Crosland Tower, either on the west side or the east side-- the east side would have been fantastic because it would have been visible from all of the towers in Midtown-- and to have-- to basically create a palimpsest of the robot drawing for six months nonstop, and just drawing over itself and over itself and over itself and over itself. CHARLIE BENNETT: I can't imagine why that was denied. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: You know, we got that close. I found the anti-graffiti that would have allowed us to clean it and everything. We tested it, but no. It was denied. But the point there is that it started from that idea and then had to translate for practical reasons. But that also started from Gerry's original work, and I'd ask Gerry to kind of describe the background of his work and what motivates him, if that's OK. GERRY CHEN: Yeah. I'd love to. So my PhD research is focused on this graffiti spray painting robot. And one of the really interesting things about this is that like any robot or machine or person, this particular robot platform is good at certain things, and it's also weak at certain other things. So one of the things that it's really good at is scaling to really big sizes. So I use this cable-based robot, which unlike a typical robot arm, which is a bunch of rigid metal links and really heavy motors, instead you have just strings. And you have motors on the other side of these strings that wind up these strings or let out the strings. But by tugging on these strings, you can then tie these strings to the spray paint can in the center, and then and then pull the spray paint can around. And the nice thing about this is that if you want to make something that's 10 times as big, you just buy 10 times the string-- 10 times as much string. It's pretty easy and pretty cheap. So this is one of the reasons that graffiti is an excellent application for this type of robot. Of course, the weakness is that it's not very stiff. So if there's wind, you know, it's going to flop around a little bit. And these are all engineering challenges that we have to deal with. CHARLIE BENNETT: Did you always expect a robot to-- this robot to be against a wall and kind of held tautly and paint-- GERRY CHEN: Yeah, because-- yeah, because we kind of designed the robot together with the application of spray painting on a wall. That is how we designed it. But there's very similar robots out there. All around the world people make similar robots that can move in three-dimensional space for warehouses or other applications-- construction, space exploration, lots of applications. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: One that's obvious so the listeners maybe can situate it, if you-- I don't know if you're going to hate me for saying this-- but if you think about the cameras that fly around over sporting events, that's sort of a similar. Yeah, I think it's the most universally understood. Sorry. GERRY CHEN: Yeah, no. It's much appreciated. Much easier to explain that way. It's like a skycam. Yeah. So this robot is like a skycam, except rather than moving around horizontally, you flip it on its side, and then it paints on a wall. CHARLIE BENNETT: How many iterations of this robot have you been through since you kind of started the idea? GERRY CHEN: Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say because it is kind of a continual development process, where every single day I walk into lab, and I see some issue. And I try to come up with some technical solution to that issue. And sometimes the answer is a technical solution, but sometimes the answer is also embracing the qualities of that particular robot and embracing the qualities of the art that comes out when you create that robot. So one example in the library is because it does have these wobbles, a lot of the lines, especially in certain areas in certain locations, it is more wobbly than others. And there's some artistic value, I think, to revealing what actually was the artist that created this-- having the transparency of what created that. CHARLIE BENNETT: When you say wobble, you mean like the strings cannot be completely tight at all times. There's going to be, like, some slack and some over-tightening. GERRY CHEN: Yeah, exactly. Because the strings are not like a rigid steel thing, as one example, they can stretch a little bit. So when they stretch, they wobble a little bit. But also, the more severe thing is that strings can only provide a force in one direction, but they cannot provide any fork or any force in any other direction. OK, maybe a little bit too technical. But that means-- imagine if you tie-- if you have a crane, and you push the weight on the crane. The string can't do anything. It can only hold it up. CHARLIE BENNETT: --aspect to it. GERRY CHEN: Yeah, yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: Well, for people who are listening, Gerry just sort of waved that away, like I just didn't know what I was talking about. GERRY CHEN: No, no, no, no. That's correct. That's correct. CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm just going to dumb it down for everybody. How did you all connect? Did you see the robot, Tristan, and then say, oh, I need that. Or had you all worked before? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah, so towards the end of-- actually, maybe I was no longer teaching. I can't remember. But Gerry-- when I was a faculty member at Georgia Tech, I spent a lot of time in the digital fabrication lab at Marietta Street. And I still spend time over there, working with the students and other colleagues and whatnot. We do other research projects. Gerry was using the lab to test-- I guess probably not your original, but probably the first-large scale, really functioning graffiti robot at the lab. And so I saw that. I was really interested in what he was doing there. I thought it was great. He's a great guy. That matters when it comes to working with people. So it was sort of always in the back of my mind, and then when this residency came to fruition, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. And then again, thinking about this idea of how would I dematerialize the library with a six-month, continuous live drawing. It was kind of a perfect match, though we didn't get to do exactly the thing. But the idea was there. And so I started talking to Gerry. Beyond the technical stuff Gerry's been talking about, I think this may be the topic we can dig into a little bit. He's been talking about what computers do, what robots do, what machines do, what do humans do, and where do you find the intersection between what each entity element does within a system. That's a question that I've been interested in for a long time. So myself and some colleagues around 2010, we're doing projects and working on papers around this idea of the dam paradigm. So the dam was digitally augmented making. So the question-- and it's almost obvious now, 15 years later-- but the question then was how do we collaborate and create with machines, with intelligence, and then the whole thing goes AI, which can-- that's a whole other thing. But how do we collaborate with machines in such a way that humans are allowed to do what they do really well, and machines are allowed to do what they do really well. And together, you get something bigger than either one by itself. And so that's what we're sort of calling the dam paradigm. I was already interested in that, and then seeing that Gerry was doing that. He was doing some other things with-- we tried to understand how artists-- the kinematics of how artists move-- graffiti artists and arcing of arms and all of that. And that came back into this project, I thought this is a perfect opportunity. CHARLIE BENNETT: So your original idea was on the outside of the library in huge scale, and then that was-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: 80 feet tall by 40 feet wide brick wall. CHARLIE BENNETT: Layer after layer. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Layer after layer, like just build it up. It would be like three inches thick. [INTERPOSING VOICES] CHARLIE BENNETT: --six months. It would be amazing. You think we can just, like, rig that up and do it? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I think at night we can for sure. What do they say? Ask forgiveness, not permission? CHARLIE BENNETT: Don't listen to what they say. It will be like-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Terrible advice. CHARLIE BENNETT: It's like stealing the "T". We'll just go and do it. So how did that then translate into the window on the inside? I'm really interested in the-- if there's an epiphany moment of this is where we're going to do it, and this is how we're going to change the idea. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Well, there was just the practical-- the practicality of being told no. That's number one. And then-- so then the next question was, OK, well, what is the site in the building, or what is a context within the building, where this can work from a practical perspective. It can't be a permanent thing, so glass makes a lot of sense. And then the north facade of the building has an incredible view from both inside and outside as you're kind of coming up the hill. So there's a duality of inside-outside-- CHARLIE BENNETT: You get to see your past as you're working on. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I get to look at the architecture building and have some trauma. But, so there's this really nice duality. Also, if the original idea was to dematerialize the text and transform the text-- they are text-to-image, right? So that idea. Then working on glass made a lot of sense. Also this idea of the Gothic-- stained glass, all of that. There's a reference there. All of these are, I would say, soft connections, not sort of epiphany moments, but soft connections. And there was one other one. Did I say day-to-night? There's really a spectacular day-to-night transformation. That did impact the composition in terms of the choice of colors-- the white and black. Basically, there's a reversal. CHARLIE BENNETT: Is it offset from the sunset, or is it-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: No, simply that during the day, so in the final composition, which for me is an aesthetic diagram more than a mural frankly-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Hold on to that thought. We're going to get back to that. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: OK. So we have three colors. One is pure black. One is pure white, and then we have this beautiful magenta kind of in the middle. So during the day, the black with the blue background has this really strong graphic effect, but the white sort of dissolves. Vice versa. If you're outside looking in, the black dissolves, the white comes forward because you have the darker interior. And at night that reverses. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. Is that just like a thrill when you can find multiple viewpoints? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Oh for sure. I mean, for me personally, I'll say that my work is generally difficult to photograph because it's really about how it changes, either through your movement, its movement, or the change of lighting conditions. So, yeah, it's very thrilling. I mean, any work that has the capacity to transform itself and its experience, that's sort of the holy grail for me. CHARLIE BENNETT: What text are you going to dematerialize? OK. I'm going to read that now. Galileo-- "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems." I know all those words, but it's not coming together for me. What's in the book? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: OK, so everyone should read it, or read some of it at least. It's a little-- CHARLIE BENNETT: That's a call to action. We can't put that on the air. You're going to have to say something else. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: OK. So I think that it is a good idea if one were to read it. CHARLIE BENNETT: Passive construction-- that's all we need. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: OK. Lost my train of thought. So here's the high level. High level-- well, let me tell you a little bit about the structure because it's important. So basically, it's a dialogue. It's structured as a dialogue. It's almost like a play. And it's structured as four days-- day one, two, three, four. And each day is kind of a different argument. And there are three characters. There are two protagonists and one antagonist-- Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio. Simplicio-- obviously, he's the antagonist. And the basic premise is to make an argument, to make a rhetorical argument, for the Copernican model of the universe, as compared to the Ptolemaic. OK, what does all that mean? It's-- we collectively in the West used to believe that the sun and the entire universe rotated around us, the Earth. Very egocentric, right? I mean, obviously. But that's not what happens, and that's the Ptolemaic model. So Galileo was arguing for the Copernican model of that we are actually rotating around the sun, and that the universe is much more complex than we had generally believed, even though that's not true because there were ancient Greek astronomers who had this same model. This was quite well known. This comes back to the piece, which we can talk about a little bit more, which is called polycentric truths. How do we construct arguments? How do we build worlds? And that's really what the essence-- the sort of question of what the piece is about-- is how do we build worlds-- world-making. I'll talk about Nelson Goodmam, because there's a really great quote-- or sort of description of Nelson Goodman in his work that mapped perfectly to this. I went back and started looking at Goodman, thinking about this conversation that we were going to have. And I found something that I didn't know was there, but it's perfect. I don't want to-- I don't want to jump into it yet. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: So that's sort of-- did I get it right? We really only looked at day one and translated day one because you've got to limit yourself. CHARLIE BENNETT: And translated meaning got it so that it could be represented in some way? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yes. So that it could be-- CHARLIE BENNETT: By the movement of the-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Alchemically transformed. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, well-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: That was for you. CHARLIE BENNETT: I'll give you this one. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I know. I know. I just had this debate with someone-- CHARLIE BENNETT: He was like, crystals, man, come on. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Well, I-- we might have to invite our friend here to have a conversation about that. But no, so that it could be transformed. And the way that I sort of described it is that it could be dematerialized and rematerialized as code. And that code could then be rematerialized as image or symbol. CHARLIE BENNETT: So the dematerialize is talking about the translation, like it's no longer the text that we can see and read. It's something else that can then be expressed through a different tool. Is that-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: That's correct. And you asked about diagrams. So I've got the book, just for the listeners. So you can see that whenever I read almost anything, including novels, I have to draw in the margins. I'm one of them. If I can't translate it-- CHARLIE BENNETT: There's people all over this page. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: If I can't translate it into something that's non-text based, It doesn't ever really stick. CHARLIE BENNETT: So let me just describe this real quick. OK? A bunch of underlying text, a bunch of interlocking circles with dots or ones in them. Mixed motion is at the bottom, and that's very important. And then this tangent, elliptical motion, and sort of a gear, kind of sun looking thing. OK. I'm interested. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: Explain yourself. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: That's it. That's all I got. That's all I got. No, but that's the translation. So that's the first-order translation from text idea into some other format, some other symbology that makes sense to me. CHARLIE BENNETT: Is that-- does it feel like a language that's your own, or does it feel like one that you've used professionally or artistically elsewhere? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: It's not a language that I invented. It's certainly a shared language of symbols. But I don't know if they're necessarily symbols because they're not hard-coded to a meaning. They're drawings. They're really drawings. CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm imagining Ezra Pound's translations of Chinese poetry. His kind of approach-- he didn't read Chinese, and he translated like a book of Chinese poetry. So you can imagine how that turned out. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah. I don't know. Tell us. CHARLIE BENNETT: It was mostly Ezra Pound poetry. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Oh. (LAUGHING) CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. Inspired by ideograms that meant something to him, but could not possibly mean what they meant to someone who could actually read the ideogram. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Did they have any accuracy, or was it totally made up? CHARLIE BENNETT: I don't speak Chinese or read it, so I can't verify this for sure. But my understanding is that Ezra Pound had no knowledge. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: But Chinese, if I understand it correctly, is very pictogram. Like, the characters are kind of pictograms. CHARLIE BENNETT: He might have been able to say, oh, there's a triangle. But I don't think he could take any real meaning from the text. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Got it. CHARLIE BENNETT: He was also a horrible racist and an awful person. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I don't know what to think. CHARLIE BENNETT: It's really just conceptual. We shouldn't actually enjoy anything about Ezra Pound except the idea before he had it. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Got it. CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm cutting all this out. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah, please do. (LAUGHING) I know the name Ezra Pound, but I've never read him. CHARLIE BENNETT: All right, so getting back to-- you translate it first, like images and annotations and sort of a series of symbols, or just symbols that seem to reflect it? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Well, right now this doesn't mean anything. This is just me trying to understand. This is, to use the architectural analogy, this is like a Carlo Scarpa sort of drawing in the margins, figuring things out, right? So this is not about composition. This is about-- this is about understanding and translating something into non-text format. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK. And how does that become, and this is for both of you-- oh. Go ahead. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I just want to say one other thing on that relative to the residency. So we did-- we had several events, and one of which was a workshop where-- I don't know. Catherine, how many? 16? 20 people? Maybe between 15 and 20 people-- students mostly, some faculty. We all read together, and then we did a workshop where everybody was drawing their interpretation. And what we wanted to do-- we didn't get there-- and again, this is a residency, so you have high ambitions, and you don't get to all of them. We wanted to be able to live draw-- or they were doing live drawings. We recorded those, and we wanted to be able to take the robot and reproject their live drawings onto the windows for a series of weeks or months. And then we would clean those and have the final sort of composition. We've had lots of technical challenges-- or let's say, technical breakthroughs actually-- so we didn't get to do that. But that was sort of-- CHARLIE BENNETT: You tried a lot of things that don't work, so you don't have to try them again? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: That's exactly right. That's what Edison said, right? CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. 1001 ways not to make a light. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Exactly. CHARLIE BENNETT: So how-- OK. Well, that completely throws me off because I had a different line of questioning. So the actual motions of the drawing was compelling to you, recording how people held and moved their drawing implement. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I'm going to defer to Gerry because I think a lot of his research is actually around this idea of how to capture how a human makes a drawing and to translate-- CHARLIE BENNETT: That phrase keeps appearing in the text about this human-style painting or human-style drawing. GERRY CHEN: Yeah. That's exactly right. So I think that there's a lot of interesting aspects about specifically the way that humans move that's different than the way that robots move. So you always have to do this translation step. For example, when a graffiti artist is spray painting, just the kinematics of the way that their arm works are different than the kinematics of the way that my robot or any robot, for that matter, works. So there's always this translation step that has to be done, and this is a really core part of my thesis, which is how do you translate these human motions into graffiti spray painting motions. And there's also-- I think there's three aspects that I can talk about. The first is when we record human graffiti artists actually spray painting graffiti, they're moving with motions that are reasonably-- that are reasonable. You know, the spray paint-- you can't move it too fast, because then it won't-- the paint won't-- it'll be too thin of paint. But you also can't move it too slow, or else it'll drip. And humans, when they're actually painting, they have a very good idea of this. So then when we translate it to the robot, we have to do very minimal things to make it work well. But if you have someone, for example, painting on a piece of paper or painting on an iPad or something like that, suddenly all that dynamics intuition is lost. And then when you translate it to the robot, it's going to-- it really looks like trash. So you really have to do a lot of fixing to make it work well. And then finally, this third stage working with Tristan, you know, Tristan has created already. So he has taken the text and translated it into this architectural design software. But then also-- but then, I don't understand this architectural design software, and the robot doesn't understand this architectural design software. So we have to have another translation to go translate into code that both I can understand and translate that code into code that the robot can understand. And every time-- each one of those steps-- there's always interesting subtleties about the particular features of each representation and what care you have to take in order to-- well, yeah-- in order to translate between any two representations. CHARLIE BENNETT: So success is getting the graffiti painting robot to have the same kind of flow and confidence that a graffiti artist has. GERRY CHEN: As best as we can. But also, there are qualities about the robot that are slightly different than the way that a human would paint. And I think that those add to the artwork as well. So, you know, obviously I am trying to-- I am trying to emulate human artists. But also, there's always going to be unique qualities about both of them that I think still add value. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah. And I want to add to that. So I think Gerry and I have a little bit of productive tension in this question. Translating-- a lot of what we've been working on-- so I should say that we ran two mechanical engineering capstone projects to develop the wet dip, because we're no longer using spray paint, right? And that was a technical constraint of being inside, of having the depth of the mullion, all sorts of things. But also, for me conceptually, I wanted to get all of the imperfections-- the drips, the dips, the starts, the stops-- that would be unique to the robot rather than to a human. CHARLIE BENNETT: Sort of its personality? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Its personality. Its-- maybe its insecurities-- whatever it is that would be quite different than if I-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Did you say the robot is insecure? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: --were making-- you got to ask Gerry. I mean, if they're going to take over the world, they're going to have some anxiety about-- CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm going to regret starting this interview. [LAUGHTER] TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah, so we went to a wet-dip method, where now-- and this is where people should really come, like, soon. When does this air? CHARLIE BENNETT: It'll be February 16th that we broadcast. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: OK. February 16th, so-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Go back and start again, like talking to the listener, don't tell them to do anything. Just tell them what they can do. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Got it. So what would be really interesting for the listener would be if they were to see the robot actually working. And it's kind of cute-- like, it's kind of fun. It's kind of cute, but it's also cool. It's also interesting. So-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Like WALL-E cute? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: No, it doesn't have to be WALL-E cute. I mean, it's got its own cuteness, you know. it doesn't have to be referential. But it does have a personality. It does have a human personality. CHARLIE BENNETT: Did you give it a name? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: We've had lots of names. But coming back, and actually-- so we've had lots of students working on this. We did two mechanical engineering capstones to develop a small robotic arm that was capable of taking a brush, an actual brush, dipping it in wet paint on one side of the cable robot, and then turning around and going and pushing against the glass with six inches of depth-- CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm nervous just hearing the description of it. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: It was-- it's been very challenging, but very rewarding as well. GERRY CHEN: Yeah, I feel like every day I walk in, I always think to myself, I can't believe I actually have permission to do this. CHARLIE BENNETT: So if we find the answer to the organizing question, what is on the Price Gilbert windows, it's experiments in how to get this thing to paint well. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: For me, there are two organizing questions. One is that in terms of process and experimentation. The other is this narrative of world making and what I'm calling polycentric truth, which is not new but is becoming more and more important in a world where we are living in our echo chambers, right? Everybody is in their own little echo chamber and not necessarily talking to each other. That's going to become even more important with artificial intelligence and all of the kind of stuff that's going to be produced. So on the one hand, it's a reflection and translation of the text. On the other hand, it's a reflection and maybe a projection of society in terms of what the kind of conceptual content of the piece is. But then from a process, a research experimentation perspective-- it's all those other things. CHARLIE BENNETT: And we're going to come in for a landing here. So I know you don't want to describe the end result like, oh, it'll be a square. It'll be-- I mean, it won't. But what will people see? What's the process that people will see when this artistic project starts-- does its thing and then stops? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: OK, if I can, I'm going to ask Gerry to describe it starting and proceeding. And then, I think we're coming in for a landing? CHARLIE BENNETT: Yep. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I'm going to end it with a quote from Nelson Goodman. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. I love it. I'm going to start playing-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Actually, it's not a quote. It's a description of his work. Sorry. CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh well this is [INAUDIBLE]. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Yeah, I know. I know. GERRY CHEN: OK. I guess starting from blank windows, we have to set up our robot, so mount it to the building itself because we are using the building itself as part of the robot-- incorporating the building as part of the robot. From there, there's a lot of calibration processes that we have to do-- you know, both calibrating to exactly the dimensions of the building, but also calibrating the particulars of the robot. And then from there, we can actually start painting. And then so we'll paint about 19 feet worth of-- we'll paint about 19 feet worth of glass, and then we'll pull down the robot, move to the next feet, and then continue painting from there. And then slowly, slowly, piece by piece, then we can finish the entire bank of windows. CHARLIE BENNETT: Do you have an expected time for that to take? Or a hoped-for time? GERRY CHEN: Hopefully, two to three weeks, but we'll see. CHARLIE BENNETT: Inshallah-- that's our favorite term these days. Inshallah. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I would just add a little bit of description there. So the cable robot has limits in terms of what it can reach. So basically, we have to move the entire infrastructure each bay of the facade. So there will be seven bays that we're actually painting on. We're not painting in the flanking mezzanine areas for a variety of reasons. So then I want to talk about world making. Nelson Goodman is a very famous philosopher, languages of the arts-- sorry. Sorry. So anyway, since we have limited time-- so he talks about irrealism and world making. And you can go-- the listeners can go-- they can go-- not that they should. They can go and check it out. But so, this is from plato,stanford.edu. So this is just to explain his theory of irrealism. And this again is about world making and how do we make versions based on content. So, see what I want to start. OK. "Two lines of argument can be separated in Goodman's writings. First, Goodman argues that there are conflicting statements that cannot be accommodated in a single world version. Some truths conflict. If that is the case, we need many worlds if any, to accommodate the conflicting versions and bring them in union with the standard correspondence account of truth. That is, that the truth of a statement is its beginning in correspondence with a world. "The second line of argument seems to be that we need no worlds at all if we need many. If we need a world for each version, why postulate the worlds over and above the versions? Let us first have a closer look at the first line of reasoning. The Earth stands still, revolves around the sun, and runs many other courses as well at the same time. Yet nothing moves while it rests. "As Goodman concedes, the natural response to this is that the sentences S1, the Earth is at rest, S2, the Earth moves, should be understood as elliptical, or S1-prime, the Earth is at rest according to the geocentric system, S2-prime, the Earth moves according to the heliocentric system. "However, according to Goodman, this would be wrongheaded. Consider the following two historiographical sentences. The Kings of Sparta had two votes, and the Kings of Sparta had only one vote." OK. I'm going to stop there, because I really-- I know we're limited on time, and this goes on a little bit longer than I remembered. But I really wanted to just sort of use that example because I think it's wonderful, and it maps to Galileo, and it maps to what we're talking about in terms of world making. And he used that exact logical construct. CHARLIE BENNETT: Do you remember the Derek Jarman film about Wittgenstein? TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: No. CHARLIE BENNETT: So at one point, we're watching Wittgenstein sort of lose his mind in a very rational way, and they're talking about how the Earth does not stay still with the sun going around it. It actually is the opposite. He says, yes, but what would it look like if it was-- TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: If it did. CHARLIE BENNETT: --still. And it's like, ah, the evidence of the senses is the same for the falsity and for the truth. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Absolutely. CHARLIE BENNETT: And I'm feeling, man, this is like a flashback to black turtlenecks and clove cigarettes. 1998. We have to finish, and you all have been very generous with your time. So I just want to ask a question to both of you-- one sentence answer. How does it feel to paint all over the library's windows? Gerry? GERRY CHEN: It's such a unique and special opportunity for me to be able to see my research go into something that is out there in the real world. It's a really unique opportunity that I think very, very few people get to have, so I feel very special. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: I've sort of been painting on Georgia Tech campus for about 30 years, so it feels pretty natural. CHARLIE BENNETT: Can have a big hand for my guests? Thank you, guys. That was awesome. TRISTAN AL-HADDAD: Thanks for having us.