Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Es Devlin

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Es Devlin is a renowned stage designer and artist known for her innovative work in theater, opera, dance, and concerts. Since 1999, she has created groundbreaking designs for the National Theatre, Royal Opera House, World Expo, and the United Nations. Her work, at the intersection of art, music, and technology, often features large-scale kinetic sculptures integrated with light, film, and AI generated images.  A lifelong reader and drawer, Devlin began developing her practice as a child with sketches and small cardboard models. This foundation paved the way for her creative direction for the 60th Annual Grammy Awards and the Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show. She has created powerful touring sculptures in collaboration with artists such as Adele, Kanye West, Beyonce, and The Weeknd. Recognized for her unique vision, Devlin has been honored as a Royal Designer for Industry in 2018 and the recipient of a Tony Award in 2022 for Best Scenic Design of a Play. Amassing more than thirty years of archival work, her monographic book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, showcases her inspirational art over the course of her career.   ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Lucy https://lucy.co/tetra ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra

Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton. When I began my practice, the reason I chose to try to respond to a primary text, a play, was broadly because I didn't feel confident to write the text myself at that point. I

wanted to read and learn as much as I possibly could. And my instincts took me towards a practice of responding to a primary text, a play with an environment. At the time, this was the mid-90s, and broadly what was on offer in England, where I was practicing, was a prescribed set of options, let's say.

You would either be recreating like a film set and then figuring out how to, because you're not, you don't have the benefit of a camera moving from place to place, how would you go from one perfectly rendered environment to the next? And this became quite acute because in the mid-90s, societally, we were at a point of very low investment in the British film industry or practice. So a lot of wonderful young film

writers were instead writing scripts for small theaters where they knew they could at least get the work spoken. They could get the words out. So they would write 64 scenes and it would go in the car, in the back of the car, in the supermarket, in the bedroom, at the Coliseum, and written as if they had all the full faculty of film. Shoot. So that was brilliant in a way, because there was no way I could do all that stuff on a 2,000 pound budget above a pub in West London.

So it meant I had to find a strategy to get to the essence of situation. And I began to understand that what was important in a scene was not the actual physical environment in which it had been imagined to take place, but the situation, what's the situation? And therefore, what's the essence? Say like, we're sitting here now, what's the essence?

If we could only draw in five minutes very quickly, you would need something to sit on. I would want my bottle of water and boom, the rest would, maybe it'd be a gesture. So I guess I began, not just me, but a group of us, because of that very specific condition and moment, we began to strategize ways of doing something in a less ordinary way, I guess. And because I found the mechanics of the delivery of stage sets to a stage

to be sometimes distracting from the other energies at work between actors and between techs. So I knew that what I wanted to preserve on the stage was the words, the light, the gesture. And if suddenly I heard a clanking, er, er, er, here comes the lift again, or here's a sliding thing, that would take me away from what I felt was really happening, which was an exchange of energy. Is there a point where the setting can be too specific?

I think there is, yeah. I think it's really what are you calling the audience's attention to? What's the focus and where will they go? It depends what you're trying to do. If you were trying to conjure one environment and the gesture of the piece was, for example, about the dismantling step by step of a palace, for example, then the gesture would be wanting to perhaps incorporate every detail so that the action

of the dismantling was therefore forensic and detailed. But I think the reason I ever wanted to make theater was more because I wanted to conduct an exchange of energy with a gathered audience. It became, I didn't know that, but it became clear that what I really cared about was what was happening inside each mind and actually within each physiognomy.

So for example, if you shine a very bright light, as you know, in the eyes of an audience, the stage mechanic migrates and it's no longer a machine moving on a stage. It is each individual iris contracting. And when each individual iris in an audience contracts, then every single member of the audience has a smaller pupil size, naturally,

because they contract in response to a bright light. It means they see a darker black. It means they don a darker black, means they don't see the skullduggery we're up to to try and create the illusion of magic. And this was the basis of most Victorian theater illusion and magic was just that mechanic of reducing the aperture, tightening, contracting the iris to get a deeper black. To surprise people, when you then adjust the aperture, tightening, contracting the iris to get a deeper black to surprise people.

When you then adjust the lighting, someone, a group of 50 dancers or an elephant has gone into place and you destabilize therefore the audience's expectations about how things they think they understand behave. So an audience is already aware with film right now that anything might happen, right? But in a theatre, there's a sense that we're breathing the same air, we're sharing that space, things have a concrete gravity to them,

therefore they will probably behave in the way that I expect them to. If you destabilize that expectation about how those things behave, I think it cracks open in the audience a possibility of acceptance of other things behaving as they don't expect them. And it cracks open the possibility that you might as an audience look at things with your senses sensually, rather than looking through a lens of expectation pre-prepared. I think that's where my interest lies in it all. It's really interesting. I wonder if you do something like shining a light in a way

that all the people in the audience have the same physical reaction. If that creates another group dynamic where the audience members become united in some way beyond just the experience of the eyes, that there may be some psychological bond. I think that's the aim. Whether it succeeds, as in whether anything we do ever succeeds is a matter of yes, in some cases, and no in others. But certainly when it's working.

I have a friend who goes to see a lot of live performance of opera, pop, rock, theatre, and he only has two responses. He never discusses whether something was good or bad. All he ever said is, something happened or nothing's happening. And those really, I think, the most essential criteria is something happening or is nothing happening. most essential criteria is something happening or is nothing happening? And when you are in an audience, the audience as a species is such an intelligent, collectively intelligent

animal, I think, in that you can feel the flinch of disdain, contempt, or approval, ricochet around a group. And that works at any size of group. It works in a particular way when there's 75 of you in a tiny theater. It works in another way when there's 100,000 of you. I think it even works when you are listening to an album actually, or when you're watching a movie, or when you are watching your movie, or when you are watching

your TV, watching the Super Bowl, there's a sense that you are, for these moments, part of a temporary society, part of a rehearsal community. And you can take it or leave it. You might decide to forget everything you felt the minute things ended, like at the end of The Truman Show when that security guard just says, okay, let's move to another channel. You might, or you might accumulate whatever journey that you were taken on, be that the physiological exposure to certain qualities of light and sound and the cerebral exposure to certain expression of ideas. But there's a beautiful phrase, I think it is Jorge Luis Borges who said, I do not think

I exist really. I am the sum total of every book I've ever read, every one I've ever loved, every street I've ever walked down, every horse I've ever rode. And if that be the case, which I think it probably is to a degree, then we do accumulate those rehearsals of being in society, in community. And that's, I think, why I'm addicted to making things in congregation.

I think those are the only data points we have. Each of us has our collected experiences remembered or not. That's our database. And when we compare experiences, we're comparing a new experience through different databases, which is why we have different interpretations of the same input. Exactly. Yeah, I often think of it like an optometrist lens machine. You know, when you sit in the optometrist and they put that giant pair of glasses on you

and they try out the different lenses and sometimes it comes into focus and sometimes it doesn't. And we often say in collaboration that we arrive at the collaboration, each of us. I'm often in close collaboration with other makers, as you are, I'm sure. And we come with the lens of the thing we just made at the top. And there may be multiple others throughout time, but this thing we just made, we see the new thing through the lens of the reason thing.

And there's that process of each beginning to meet each other through this counter exchange of lenses that we were just wearing. And that really affects the next piece of work, I find. Can you tell me the extremes in collaboration from the most open request to the most focused, constricted request? I love that question.

No one's asked me that before. I really like that formulation of a question. I'll give a couple of concrete examples. I was asked to make a work to celebrate Londoners. So I considered that to be quite an open request. But that seemed to me rather dangerous in that it could lead to something rather generalized and perhaps not very interesting, perhaps a waste of quite a lot of resources that were being offered to make it with. So I needed therefore to find a specific response to a very general request. And that's usually my response to a general request is how

do I quickly find a very specific architecture in which to practice in response to this. So I thought about it for a bit and I said, well, can we do a celebration of Londoners who are more than human? And I liked that play with the word that we don't normally consider a Londoner to be anything other than human. So the next step then was to research it. So I contacted the London Wildlife Trust. And I asked them, how many species are there of more than human Londoners, or how many species are there of Londoners? And they said, well, there's 15,000 species of Londoners, of which only one is human.

And they said, and that's obviously not counting the microbiome, then it'd be an additional 10,000 species within the human. So my ambition was to draw them all. Then I realized that I would definitely not be able to draw 15,000, let alone the 10,000, although it is a really interesting project. And in the end, I asked them to give me a list of the 250 most endangered. And I sat down for four months and drew 250 of the most endangered more than human Londoners. And I have to say to you that I have been forever changed by that. Very beautiful. Tell me about what they looked like. Was it black and white drawing? What size were they? I was rather modest in my ambition, having drawn a lot in my student years

and my early practice as a fine artist, very briefly before beginning stage design. But I hadn't drawn with that level of purpose and intensity daily for about 15 years, maybe more. So I used a theatre painter's technique and a scenic artist's technique. I got a small projector and I was travelling quite a lot at the time so I had this tiny projector in my bag and wherever I would fetch up like a room like this, I would set the projector up, find various images of the animal I wanted to draw. There were 60 moths, 35

bats, 52 birds, a lot of plants, fungi, some snakes, some lizards, some mammals, some frogs, butterflies. It was endless. And I projected them on the wall, stuck a piece of paper, not too big. I would say what we would call a three size or a two size some of them, which is about a foot and a half wide. And I would, with a series of different weighted pencils and a lot of sharpening, very humbly, very precisely,

really wanting to learn the details, drawing so that I could learn the ways of these creatures. I could learn my community of Londoners. So I traced over the outline and then I would turn the projection off and look at the photograph on my laptop and copy it. And by the end of this process, there was a big deadline where I had to get the last ones done rather quickly. And I did them about 18 hours a day. And I was quite sleep deprived, which meant I got into a rather contemplative state of focus and flow, which was very useful. And I began therefore to really feel a continuity

between the veins on the back of my hand and the veins on the bat's wing that I was drawing and the scales on the back of my hand and the scales on the lizard's body and the shape of the knuckle bones and the shape of the bones of the bird's wing on the articulation. And very late on one of the very last nights of working on these drawings, I realized I had very much missed a deadline for producing a poster for a gallery. And they said, you really have to send it by eight o'clock in the morning.

It was two in the morning. Put my hand down on the paper, drew around it like you'd kit drawing around a hand, cut it out and stuck animals on it to express this feeling of continuity. And this little drawing, I think, is about the most important thing I've made. The rest of the drawings, though, were enlarged, cut out, printed onto painted wood, and we formed a cathedral of them opposite St. Paul's Cathedral outside the Tate Modern

at this congruence of ancient ecclesiastical power of the cathedral, industrial, former industrial power of the power station, now cultural power of Tate Modern, and of course the river, the planetary archery, which is the reason why either of the others are there in between. And each night at the time of Evensong, choirs, the Bulgarian Choir of London, the African Choir of London, and a choir called the Sixteen, which is a very celebrated, beautiful choir singing sort of temporal diaspora of ancient music, bird and various other sacred talus pieces of music. And each night 2,000 people gathered. And we had the voices of the animals.

I was reading poetry relating to the animals. So it took the form of a kind of even song. And the purpose really was to take a piece of advice that was given to me by a man called Matthew Burroughs at the London Wildlife Centre and he said, when I asked him how can I be of any use in the conservation of these 250 endangered Londoners, he said, well we can deal with planning and conservation practices, but what we want artists to do is to make and conserve a habitat for the more than human species within the human imagination. Because if we don't have rooms in the palace of human minds for the more than human, then there's little hope of them being able to survive

in the planet, which is so overlaid with human imagination. So the stated aim of the work, and I think it did achieve this to a degree, was to impress upon the audience the names of the animals, so that they would have a name for them as they encountered them, room for them in the palace of their mind really. That was a response to a rather broad invitation. To answer the second point, a rather constraining invitation, I guess the plays are the most constraining in a way, in that some of them will very specifically, the gesture of the piece may turn on a very specific action that can only

happen with certain objects. And I'll give you an example that's surprising in a way, Don Giovanni, right? You think that Don Giovanni, the opera, is about existential questions of what is hell, what happens after you die. But the way it's written, actually, the action of it is a farce. And it's all about people singing very specific texts about not being able to see each other in the dark and surprising each other at doorways. So I have failed signally in my first attempt to do Don Giovanni, to design it, because I designed the gesture of the ideas, the enlightenment concerns, and failed to offer an environment

in which the opera could actually even get off the ground. Mercifully, that didn't get performed. It became clear it didn't work, and we revised and set it. We overlaid a hotel. So we actually perversely provided a very specific environment for this huge existential composition because the audience therefore had something very specific to anchor themselves to, to allow their minds to take on these much more abstract considerations. these much more abstract considerations. healing and ceremonial rites and rituals for centuries. More recently it has been shown to increase alertness, improve focus, elevate mood, enhance cognition, heighten reward sensation

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and modulate the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. Experience the power of this natural nootropic by visiting lucy.co.c-o-slash-tetra and discover next level smoke-free nicotine. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. That's interesting, the idea of grounding some large idea in something graspable. It's one of the descriptions, I think, that was given, I think it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when he was describing suspension of disbelief. And it's an area and a phrase I'm really interested in. When did humans first suspend their disbelief?

And why? Why did they engage in an act of agreeing to pretend that they weren't there at a theater? Agreeing to pretend that the actor that just died died. Why did we ever agree to this? And in what way from an evolutionary biology perspective was it in service of our evolution? And when Coleridge describes the suspension of disbelief, he really gives this example and says you need to give the audience something concrete, tangible, trustable, believable to more themselves to in order to allow an aperture for the ingress

of ideas that they're perhaps not ready for. And this also perhaps is applicable to the idea of magic, how magic works. And in fact there's a story you may remember from Merlin Sheldrake's book, Entangled Life, that he tells about an author who's been a huge influence on my practice called David Abram. And David Abram is a sleight of hand magician, as well as a geophilosopher. And the story goes that David Abram was doing coin and card tricks at a restaurant in Massachusetts. And the owner of the restaurant was rather embarrassed after a few nights and said, listen, David, I really don't want to upset you, but there's been five different complaints about you from diners.

And I don't want to, you know, speak out of turn, but they wonder if you've been spiking their drinks with something. Because one of them said when they left the restaurant, the sky was the most intense blue. And the other one said when they left the restaurant, the sky was the most intense blue. And the other one said when they left the restaurant, the cracks in the pavement were kind of dancing. And David Abram said, well, when you destabilize people's expectations about how coins and

cards behave, then you destabilize their expectations about how blue the sky is or how interesting the cracks in the pavement are. And then instead of looking through the lens of what they are expecting to see, which is what we do by all accounts according to the neuroscientists 85% of the time, we're not really looking, we're just seeing what we expect to see. Instead of looking through that lens, you look sensuously with your actual senses and guess what? The sky really is way bluer than you expected it to be. And I think that explanation of magic, when I read that I thought, oh now I understand why I've been fiddling around with flashing lights and bits of plastic trees and sellotape to create illusion in the theatre.

Maybe that's why. In the story of Drawing Your Hand, it was a four-month project. You're at the end of four months. You've been working on it diligently over the four months. And then in the last moment, exhausted, you draw your hand, you put some animals on it and you ship it. Talk to me about the spontaneous nature of that act versus the four months of planned activity. All the most important gestures I've made have been made at that moment when I was sufficiently in a flow state

to say, fuck it, I'll just do it. And the overriding of the cerebral cortex, the front brain, the purposeful accountant planning brain was complete because I was out of time. This one was on holiday, this front part of the brain. The limbic system had to be hot wired to the hand. So it wasn't an intellectual idea. It was, oh shit, I've got to get this done by tomorrow. But it was also, I'm tired, it's late, but I have an instinct to put my hand on this paper and to draw around it

and cut around it. It was an instinct. Yeah, and I had no plan. When I was cutting the paper, the thinking about what I was going to do next was happening in the scissors. The scissors and where the inside of my fingers met the metal of the scissors

and where the scissors met the paper, that was where the scissors met the paper, that was where the thought was happening. And I can remember it now because that thought is lodged in those actions. That's where the thought resides in the actions. There wasn't a separation between thought and action. The action was the thinking. So had you not decided to cut it out, the final piece would have had to have been something different. Yeah. The cutting out, then without thinking, grabbing from around me some prints of the animals that I'd been trying out sizes off of something else. Going, oh shit, I've got these, these are to hand.

And so I will cut these out, plonk them on, and in a state of very peaceful tiredness, I was placing things and composing them. A lot of the thoughts about the continuity of veins with veins and scales with scales had been going on consciously. And I guess they were to hand the way that the paper was to hand. And it was that congruence of a lot of things being to hand.

And I guess that's how one wants to set up a practice is to ensure that things will be to hand. When you have an image and you add words, how does it change? The relationship between words and image and music actually has been at the core of everything I do really in that I have never I think found one of those three to be sufficient on its own. So even when I was a kid at school writing essays, the phrases I was drawn to were the ones that were like opposing polar magnets, that the two words next to each other were constantly in vibration.

So something like a memory palace to me is a phrase I could taste in my mouth forever. Because how can a memory be a palace? How can a palace be made of memory? And that doing and throwing and unpacking of a pair of words is a vibration, I guess, for me. So that will always then lead me to an image, an unstable one, because how can I draw a memory? How can I draw a palace? How can they both be? And that vibration of instability between two words will often call to me to find it sound. So in that very specific example we were just describing of the hand conjoined with animals, I needed to give that piece a title. There was an invitation to title it. And I titled it as an invitation to myself. I wrote around it, redraw the edges of yourself. So the work became an invitation to me to reconsider the porosity of my hand, to reconsider where I ended, and

the biosphere begins. And so it was an invitation to yourself. Yeah. It's very interesting. An invitation. And I think this use of the second person, I was discussing it with a brilliant curator last week and writer called Echo Eshen, who has just written a book pretty much entirely in the second person. He addresses you to his characters, historic characters. It's unusual, and it's an unusual thing to read. Olafur Eliasson often does the same in his titles.

They're often called your lighthouse, or your yellow something, whatever they're called, but it's often your. And my response to those is he's addressing both himself and the viewer equally. It's a way of avoiding saying we when you're not sure if you really are we with the person who's looking at it.

So it's quite interesting. We are always we. Yes. We're always we. Yeah, do you know what I mean? Yes. So it's when you're uncertain. Yeah, I use we a lot.

So then when I'd added the title to answer your question more fully, there's then a vibration between that title that I imprinted at the end, the titles always come really late to me, really late. And often the title I use throughout the preparation of a work changes at the last minute. It can be quite problematic when you're working with collaborators who have become attuned to that title, particularly if they're paying for the work and they've written lots of documents with that title on.

But I now have learned to say this is a working title and it probably will change about five days before we open. It's with the onset of sharing the work that an awareness of how the work should be named comes. And I cannot start to feel that proximity of sharing until I'm in that temporal place. So yes, that after adding language to a visual image in that case, the two now exist. That piece exists with its title and that title

came out of a specific moment but now they are irrevocably hinged together in a dialogue. There's something nice about that. There's something nice about the title being built into the piece. Gives it a different power. I mean, some artists, think about Damien Hirst. His titles are so resplendent. For example, and this was a big influence on me

as I was learning my ways. I very briefly assisted his studio, but also his work and the work of the young British artists, as they were called, was very much in the sphere of my days at art school. And I remember there was a piece, I believe it was two hairdryers holding up a single ping pong ball. And it is the most beautiful gesture. And the title is something like, I want to be everywhere all at once, now and forever, one to one.

And it's one of those titles like the shark, the impossibility of death in the mind of someone living. The title and its relationship to the work, the relationship between the text and the image, are everything. Yeah. Is there usually a new technology involved in the theatrical display?

I would love to talk about something quite specific in response to that question. The Sphere is a new technology. It's a new venue of 18,000 people in Las Vegas. And it is a response to a problem and a design challenge that I think began in 1965. And I think that challenge was itself set by the onset of a different new technology. I think what happened was the Beatles were four extraordinary young men in Liverpool who found a way in their music to catalyze their particular batch of pain and joy into the poetry of their music. That itself was extraordinary, but that happened to coincide with the advent of television

in many people's homes throughout America, and therefore an intimacy and a proximity to these four young men's metastasized pain into poetry by a whole generation of young women and other people. But let's talk about the young women for a minute who are, for the first time through this bulging convex lens of their 1965 TV sets across the whole continent of America, intimately accessing these men. So when they buy a ticket in 1965 to Shea Stadium, they naturally think they're buying a ticket to that.

They think that because they've accessed it through this TV, they are buying a ticket to go and be even closer than they were through that glass piece. And of course, when they turn up at Shea Stadium, the art form hasn't been invented yet because this is the first time it's been required. There has never been a requirement. We 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. The audience aren't really safe. The things are right. The things are a mess. 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. Means 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, right?

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 synesthetic communication of visual and music at once. And that is what, in my experience, people are making, 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.

They are thinking in a synesthetic fashion, which by the way, we've always been synesthetic 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, or this is Friday and it's my birthright, and it's a maypole, not a church, or whatever it was. So I guess what this 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 Epidaurus than the Roman Coliseum. And in that unfolding are a series of technologies that are concurrent with the evolution of the art that's made for them. Element Electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add Element Electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better and sleep deeper. Improve your cognitive function.

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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 used to 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 singing along to myself, it's probably all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, just because that was the first one that landed in my brain

that we learned off by heart. And to me, a song like Being Boring, which is one of my favourite songs, is just lodged like a catechism, like a liturgy, 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 have guessed 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 mantras, they're very simple texts. But at the very beginning of my practice, I was working with a wonderful singer-songwriter, Gary Barlow from an English band called Take That. And 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 to listen to music together, is a film that was made by Anton Corbin about Depeche Mode, their tour. And it was called, I believe, 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 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. And 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. You thought, well, 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. Actually, 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 monarchal systems that can converge around a celebrated person is the least interesting part, and the part that I try to avoid, really. and the part that I try to avoid, really. Can 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.

And 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 because 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? Most 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 Khalil 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 or 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 that might be incredibly personal. Might not feel like 2022 to anyone else, but it was my 2022 or my April the 2nd, 2022. When 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. 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 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.

I'm interested in how it feels to be part of the audience. But by then I already know. I already know if the thing is, 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 liken it to 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. It's too late to do it now, the thing is gone. But you know the ones you would ditch.

Normally it's that you didn't quite have the courage to ditch quite enough. Are you ever surprised by an audience's response? Yes, yes. Usually when I've become in the process perhaps too 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 and I kind of... Too close.

Yeah. ...become too close. I kind of, 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 complete shit. When did 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. 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 at 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 catgut 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. And 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. You do the same thing every day. And you play a scale and it sounds terrible. And you play it the next day, it still sounds terrible. A week later, it's still sounding terrible.

Then on Thursday afternoon, it sounded a bit better. Friday mornings might sound sure again, but Monday it's sounding a lot. And just that rather diligent thing that I learned 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, but I could only feel it because I was practicing it.

That 10,000 hours thing, which of course we all might translate into 100,000 hours, just the doing of it, you know? The other thing I learned was being part of a sound much bigger than myself in an orchestra, big orchestras. I was out the back scratching, second violin. Did 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 bowled 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 what page you're on because our second violin part is literally the offbeat and we did a bunch of offbeats and our mind wandered. So we might be lost but you would turn a few pages there, oh there's a rest, the people at the front put their bows down, we must be at 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,

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. You 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 bolts 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 woodturning. 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 and 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, I have to say it was mainly men making stuff with power tools, machinery, grinding and the 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 other wise 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.

And 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 stayed, they were with it, they applauded at the end, they were with this piece. We 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 and 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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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 learned. 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 learned. Because certainly my intuition is far more accessible to me now than it was. Because I feel held by the architecture of what I've learned.

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? No. 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. And I, through 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. Yeah. That's the beauty of it. And I marched forward with absolute bait, like a giant, messy baby. Making a giant fucking mess and having a time of my life. Do you ever have new insights into old work? Yes. I 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. And 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 earlier. 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. It's amazing. And partly because the process now is that I delegate practically everything in between. I find it's much safer. I try to hold on to the first gesture and... Does it always start with the drawing for you? Yes. 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 it could 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 a million decisions that need to be made to preserve the gesture and to not dilute the gesture. So I have to be involved in all those decisions, but I have to be protected from diluting it myself. Understood. 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,

because 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 recollide with it when the materiality of it becomes present. And sometimes, you know, I pay attention to each decision along the way, and sometimes there 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. 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, but 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. Would 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's 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 snakeskin. And there's a new snake. So no one really grieves the old idea. So that often happens. Equally sometimes the old idea goes up on a shelf of unrealized projects and is 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, what 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, put up her hand in a big hall and said, I'm a bit embarrassed asking this question, but do you mind telling me what is a poem? And 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 learned 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 a constellation of words kept me sufficiently fascinated that I decided to study poetry for three years at university. I 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. So 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 to 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. There's all sorts of adjectives that seem to gravitate towards entertainment now.

But when you unpick it and it comes from a combination of entre, which means among in French, and tenir, which means to hold. It means to hold among, 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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Snack bars come in chocolate. Coconut white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacadamias.com. How 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 there one? In each piece of work, is this work worth doing? And obviously, 70% of the time it's 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 of 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? How 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, well, I don't really understand. And they said, well, it's a party, it's a gala party. I said, what do you mean, so people pay to come?

Said, yes. I said, okay, well mean, so people pay to come? I said yes. I said, okay, well that seems like an odd juxtaposition of invitation to a party and invitation to donate money. This seems a little uncomfortable. And no, invitation is to pay because it's a gala, because this will pay for the museum to be free of charge for the rest of the year. This is very dignified way to raise money. Okay, good. So how could I respond to this? Coincidentally, a student had written to me earlier that week saying, dear Es 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? So 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. And by the way, it's still going on. If you Google it, you could add to it now. It's been, this poem has 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 the comings and goings of celebrations and protests. So 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 a pretty much simple predictive text kind of algorithm. Then in 2019, we made the UK Pavilion 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.

It 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 that 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 ascribe meaning to it, like a fortune cookie, you know, or like a chart that you read. What are you finding in that? So I have sometimes used text really directly in work, and those would be the foremost 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. The Sphere 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 was 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 did everything through these frames. Having tried the Apple Vision Pro and the Sphere,

I feel like the possibility of borderlessness in our artifacts is perhaps upon us. So once you were singing a hymn, with or without you, that has become a contemporary hymn I would say, and you were traveling en masse, 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 recognize that you were sort of on a epidurus shaped boat, traveling through the water together to enter this cathedral of the species that would be here, were we not here. So really a peening of the skin. So that felt one of the most powerful. So with that, would you say it was the

content or the technology that gave you that feeling of this is special? 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 Then 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 straightaway was one that I had nothing to do with the making of I Went to see a performance

Florence and machine and she had asked everyone very not in a demanding way to do with the making of. I went to see a performance, it was 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 details, nothing more than that as far as I could recall. But 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 stranger neighbors' hands. And the remainder of the show was a mass dance. She then went on to tell me about a phenomenon called choreomania, where a community reached a point of instinct 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 enlarged magnified face and 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 instructions. Very beautiful. Do ideas from theatre 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 Berberia in the 19th century, right through to the phone call that ended the Lehman Brothers Bank with the financial crash of 2008. And 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 precepts went on. And the response was to make a musical instrument which was a 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. And 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, the composer might score, as you know, to those rushes and or to the first cut 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. And 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 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 had nothing to do with that film myself, was that he took that dynamic of directing a 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 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. And he has described that that came about as a translation from the dynamic of the movement of the stage mechanic from the Lehman 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 perhaps and 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. What may fall within the sphere of tetragrammaton?

Counterculture Tetragrammaton Sacred Geometry Tetragrammaton. Counterculture? Tetragrammaton. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammaton. The Avant-Garde? Tetragrammaton. Generative art? Tetragrammaton. The Tarot? Tetragrammaton. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammaton. Biodynamics? Tetragrammaton. Graphic design? Tetragrammaton.

Mythology and magic? Tetragrammaton. Obscure film? Tetragramatin. Beach culture. Tetragramatin. Esoteric lectures. Tetragramatin. Off the grid living. Tetragramatin.

Alt. Spirituality. Tetragramatin. The canon of fine objects. Tetragramatin. Muscle cars. Tetragramatin. Ancient wisdom for a new age.

Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. TETRAGRAMMATIN Ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath, and 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 fan does, 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. If you look, my children find it impossible to watch the earliest films that were migrated from plays because of the static camera shot. the earliest films that were migrated from plays because of the static camera shot. They become restless because we are so used to the camera move. So I find I will actually engender a greater stillness and composure and a more extended focus of attention

from a group, a temporary society, 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're very rarely 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 silliness, 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, because 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 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. And 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, 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. This 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 apologize 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 hell on the bus. So within the first few minutes, the sequence of first few minutes, put hell on the bus, then really, then you're free to take the audience. Obviously you're gonna take them somewhere they don't know and they're not gonna 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. Couldn't quite work out what I did and after a while she said, oh, I see you're a sonographer

that likes to call himself an artist. And it struck me that those siloed ways of looking at practices as necessarily other and separate from one another are still pervasive. And I just don't feel that way. So I consider that's the main misunderstanding is that to me, even one of my close friends once said to me when I said,

oh, I'm drawing these animals, she said, oh, are you making some proper art? I was like, please stand with me when 100, thousand hearts are opened with one note and one light and an image in a stadium and 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 gonna like an opera, because they usually listen to pop music, or thought they weren't gonna like a pop concert because they normally go to the theater, or thought they weren't going to like a pop concert because they normally go to the theater, 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. Actually, 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 synesthesia

and the synesthetic 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 peers.

Beautiful. I would say what we have in common is we both make things, maybe unusual things, that are true to us, and and for some reason people have accepted them. I 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 are entirely different. And to be able to find a strategy and an alchemy or 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 and so, it's got to work. And I thought, it might not. It might not. And the only reason that I'm of any value to you is because I go into this not knowing if it will work. And 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. Voracious, 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. So much of what I read is popular science to catch up and it gives me enormous joy, awe and pleasure. I would recommend everyone to read David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, Joanna Macy, World as Lover, 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 access to a force larger than myself, through movement actually, when I'm swimming as well.

I 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. Both swimming and yoga, the breath is attached to the movement, so maybe that has something to 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, the 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 and 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, this might be another, a new thing, but 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 that what you're making may be nothing at all, or may be irrelevant, 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 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. How does the same 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 Rye. My daughter's now called Rye 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 Sonnet Lumière 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.

And 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 recognized this in my own children, I was able to hold in suspension two opposing thoughts at the same time. One 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 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 look 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, but also the ability to feel more in control and to see the system from within the trees, you know, 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 theater 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. It 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. I didn't really go to the theater much. I wasn't like really into theater.

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 an all-night studio, which was important to me. And it was kind of feral. It was 10 people clearly obsessed. It was a sort of pot noodle situation, somewhat smelling, 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 all other concerns had eroded. But I think it was scale. It was, 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 1965 had with their TV to the scale of a stadium environment

or even a huge, dispersed TV audience of a Super Bowl halftime show. And I think learning from the Anton Corbin film, the real event is happening in microcosm, in miniature still. It'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 minutiae of 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 gets centrifugally expanded like an expanding universe to more and more engineers, makers, welders, carpenters, sound engineers, costume supervisors, seamstresses. This was the inverse of centripetal 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 beads that would suck itself up and become an unexploded book suck itself up and become an unexploded book that when you open it would resurface. And everything in it is essentially shrunk down to fit in the book. Yeah, and actually shrunk back in time to the first markers in every project. The focus in the first half of the book

is just on the first gesture of pen and ink. It's only when you get to the end 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 ecosystem of economics, logistics, gravity, societal systems that I want to work within. And I want to be as various as I can be in my time, in the time that I'm living. The 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 Glyke called Chaos, which was written in 1987, but but I read it in around 2003, that this bifurcating geometry, called 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 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 at that job as possible. So you will want to maximise your surface area so that the greatest possible expanse of your pores and stoma and stomata 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? Or 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, there's about 50 of the models and they're, as objects, they're rather pure and quite beautiful, perfectly formed.

The objects that I'm able to translate at scale may be far more rough hewn, 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's brought to them by the musicians who bring life to them and enliven 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. Do you still make small models? I do. I do a lot of drawing now. Do 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. He came to visit and he said, this is all great but you need a room of your own at this point. And I am, as we speak, on number 39 of 50 portraits of Londoners from the refugee community and I'm 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. And 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 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. So really what I'm 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 of us. Are you filming this? I'm filming it.

Oh, good. I film my hand. Good. Drawing it, and that's. 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 do 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 is going on in my mind, but the kagillions of little signals that I'm picking up when the person is talking. Firstly, I'm watching their face animated rather than still, so a million 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 have had overlaid

an absolute, you know, me oriented. I was drawing as much a 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 Breggins, 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. And 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? They said, well, we would, but there's no opera house.

It's got bombed. And a young woman, set designer, said, we'll 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 passerby on a 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. And I do kind of think that when it's working in a quite exposed, some of the stadia now are relatively enclosed, but when you're in quite an open one, even if we weren't playing all 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 congregate.

As 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. So for example, the Olivier Theatre in London, which is a relatively open space, often when I work there I will try and put a lid 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 not 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 Abel Tesfé, the Weekend, we made a giant paper giant paper airplane that was 100 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 releaser of the molecules of space. And 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 un seeing and on hearing 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. I 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 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. But 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

Tic Nat Han says, sometimes the wave remembers that she's part of an ocean, sometimes she just goes back to being the little 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 encouraged me to try to practice porosity. And actually the drawing of the animals and then of now the drawing of the people of London, something 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

singing itself. 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. Each person, and because it's been in quick succession, sometimes I'm doing four 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 their stories. 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. Tell 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 encompassed various media, stage design 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 learned 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. And 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. Like I don't know how to do portraits. That's why I'm doing it. Tell me about creating intimacy and creating distance in theatrical works. Yes, 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 really listening to it. I make very little that doesn't make a sound. So intimacy through attention, focus,

intimacy through contrast of movement and stillness 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. And 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 Carlo Rivelli wrote 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, Seurat was making pointillist paintings out of tiny dots just before the time that the particle nature of light was recognized. The instinct of Braque and Picasso to work with Cubist multi-perspective paintings, anticipating the multi-placed 360 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, terms of engagement are clear, sit and watch a film, it's short, four minutes long, just watch it. And 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'll 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, a piece I'm talking about, in Miami, Forest 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. Then 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 and you see the whole system, you get some distance. So often there's a sequence of, like in a film, a close up, then a wide shot. And the two work because you are 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 has 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, trying to get each word correct. Quite 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've 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 over-tightness or over-care. Less perfect. Yeah, perfection is nothing really that I'm, I'm very satisfied with imperfection. In fact, I became very used to imperfection very early on in collaboration.

Whose perfection would it be anyway? But 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 and it smacks

of mortality. And now the one that I kind of struggled with and the struggle is alive is far more what I want to keep. Tell me about light and dark. Every morning I wake up. I've set a little system where 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. And I spend that 20 minutes that is free from the day, and my body is attuned 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 of work I'm up. And they are to me my morning communication with our nearest star. And I view my room as a kind of camera aperture to that star. And when I travel, this practice began as an anchoring device because I was traveling probably too much. And I said, okay, I don't know where I am when I wake up. That odd feeling. I don't know where the loo 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 know I'm just going to leave that little chink 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. I don't need to know what country I'm in, where the door is. I just need to know this line of light 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 chiaroscuro method of carving light out from the dark, when we do a technical rehearsal in a theater or a stadium or even an art gallery, we begin with turning 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 learned that different chemistries exist. A tungsten light that's incandescent 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 learned 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 colored 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. When 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 light precisely

aligns with the corner of my wall, it lands in the corner. It's like Raiders of the Lost Ark. You remember that moment? But that's almost like a Manhattan Henge 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. But 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. Thank you.