Voices  Chris Coleman
===

Chris Coleman: [00:00:00] And the ethics you learned were that sometimes you're gonna be asked to make things that fail in order to improve consumer consumption. But this critical engineering manifesto really takes people through the idea of what it might mean to engineer for a better world. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

David Staley: Chris Coleman is Professor of Arts and Director of ACCAD, the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design at the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. His [00:01:00] artwork includes sculptures, animations, creative coding, and interactive installations, all focused on complex systems and how they are used for control.

Professor Coleman's work has been in in exhibitions and festivals in more than 25 countries. After a decade of creating and contributing to open source software tools for the arts, he created the Clinic for Open Source Arts to support other contributors and communities, and I'm pleased to welcome Professor Coleman to voices today.

Chris Coleman: Thank you. It's an honor to be here. 

David Staley: Well, you describe yourself and your website as a critical arts engineer, and I wanna start there. What do you, what do you mean by that? 

Chris Coleman: Yeah, that was a moniker that I kind of developed for myself. I, I, you know, I even own the domain for it because I was so interested.

David Staley: Very prescient. 

Chris Coleman: Yeah. It combines a couple of different things from people whose research I really respect. There's a manifesto called the Critical Engineering Manifesto which is a group of artists who are also very, very technically [00:02:00] savvy, trying to draw up what it means to do engineering with a very critical lens.

I really felt an affiliation with this. I actually studied mechanical engineering for about five years before turning to arts in, in my undergraduate education. And I found out that at the end of mechanical engineering, at least where I went to school, you had one class on ethics,

and the ethics you learned were that. sometimes you're gonna have to, despite the fact that we've been spending years teaching you how to make things work all the time, you're gonna be asked to make things that fail in order to improve consumer consumption. And that was the ethics I had to learn as an engineer.

Needless to say, it left me, unfulfilled. But this critical engineering manifesto really takes people through the idea of what it might mean to engineer for a better world. And then, 

combine that with 

the arts engineering, [00:03:00] which is another term that was coined by Golan Levin, who's over at Carnegie Mellon University,

also an artist, someone who's very technically capable, and he was really thinking about artists who serve as this sort of translator between new technology new kinds of opportunities and help reform the way we interface with those technologies so that artists have access to them. And so, artists, engineers some people might call them technical producers, sometimes they work for other artists,

I do that as well, giving that power to artists who need new ways to express themselves. So, I put it all together. 

David Staley: So when you say critical, what does that mean? What does that mean to you? 

Chris Coleman: Yeah, critical. For me it means this sort of perspective that first and foremost asks really hard questions about what's being put in front of you or the information you've been given.

Part of my graduate education was with [00:04:00] several members of the Critical Art Ensemble which is this artistic group that did a lot of writing as well as sort of creating these very participatory art events who were,

again, thinking, tackling things like biometrics and what would it mean when the government scanned all of our faces and kept all of our fingerprints. And all of those things are coming to pass very quickly, but they were writing about it in the nineties as those technologies came on board. So yeah, this, this sort of

desire to really deeply question how things are formulated and how they're put in front of you. 

David Staley: Hmm. So you said a moment ago that, well, you spent five years in mechanical engineering. A degree, you got a degree in engineering. 

Chris Coleman: No, I, I'm six credits short. 

David Staley: You're, you're six credits short.

So why the shift to art? Was it this moment when you took the ethics course and, and why art? 

Chris Coleman: I realized as I was finishing my mechanical engineering degree that I [00:05:00] wasn't quite like the other mechanical engineers. I had a conversation with somebody who had just graduated and I asked him what he did for a living and he told me that he engineers and re engineers, the hook that goes on the end of the rod that opens and closes Venetian blinds.

I said, oh my goodness, that that future is not for me. That's, that's not what I want to be doing with my life. Mad props to those people who find joy in that. I had realized the classes I was really excelling at were actually these theater prop and set construction classes,

'cause you couldn't actually take art classes without being a major, which was weird. So, I was taking these theater classes for fun and making these crazy props and helping design sets and do lighting, and I was like, oh, this is the class I love going to every day, and maybe I need to rethink where I'm heading.

And I took a year off so, and then went back to school and studied art. [00:06:00] So yeah, I've got a nine year undergraduate degree, but at the end of the day, that path turned out to be really empowering for me. 

David Staley: So, as I'm hearing you talk, I'm wondering myself, what's the difference? It must be slight.

What's the difference between a mechanical engineer and an artist, especially as you practice both? 

Chris Coleman: Yeah. You know, I think my capacity to really understand space and really want to play with how people experience space and time, I think that's shared across engineering and, art. You know, I talk a lot to people., I don't actually make 2D art, like things that just sit calmly on the surface; all of my work really involves movement and change, or you sort of exist in a space with the work. So, it's a lot of sculptural work., It's a lot of work where the entire room reacts to your presence. I'm really interested in kind of, in a way, engineering these experiences. [00:07:00] So yeah, I think there's a little bit of design in there,

there's a little bit of engineering, and there's a lot of creativity. 

David Staley: Hmm. I had introduced you as someone who was interested in complex systems. Say a little more about, first of all, what are complex systems and what are the kinds of complex systems that you examine? 

Chris Coleman: I mean, in our modern day and age complex systems are everything, and of course nature itself and all the ecosystems, both micro and macro are complex systems. And you know, I think we constantly try to understand the world by simplifying it down to this thing happened, and this is the consequence, but in actuality, you know, I think people might compare this to like the butterfly effect, right?

A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, and now there's a hurricane or a winter storm somewhere in Europe. But the fact of the matter is that like everything is a dependency, everything has cascading events. So [00:08:00] for me, complex systems is just looking at those sort of intended complex systems as well as the unintended ones.

But I think, you know, one of the examples I bring up for my work was, I had a house in Buffalo, New York, and I noticed that in my backyard when you looked over the fence of my backyard, in the same size lot that I had, there were two houses. 

David Staley: Hmm. 

Chris Coleman: And then if you went two streets north, where my house was, and you take two of my neighbors, there was one house. So, within three blocks we had gone from one house equals three houses equals six houses, and somebody a long time ago had sort of drawn up this map of like a meandering street with giant houses and then a block of, you know, medium income houses and low income houses , and they actually codrew with those lines, they drew school districts and I think for me, thinking about somebody drawing a line on a piece of [00:09:00] paper 70 years ago, actually, like permanently defined the sort of interaction and the difference between the people who would live on each street. And you know, the cultural clash that arises from living one block away from, or two blocks away from people who live in a million dollar house versus a $150,000 house.

David Staley: Did this observation, did this insight lead to a, a piece, a work, a an exhibition? 

Chris Coleman: Yeah. I, there's a, an early work that I did, it's actually called _Modern Times_ after the Charlie Chaplin piece, and it was all derived from the PDFs of the terrorism preparedness pamphlets that were prepared by the US government after 9/11.

I don't know if you remember, but they gave us all these pamphlets that were supposed to tell you how to prepare for a chemical attack, a radioactive attack, all of these things, and they were really [00:10:00] intense, but because they were PDFs, all of the graphics were actually, you could pull them out and reuse them,

and because it's US government, it's not copyrighted. So I actually made this piece that instead of being about terrorism, which is what the government really wanted us to be scared about, I made it about the things that we're scared about every day, like, who's moving in next door, and what color are they?

And I wanted to sort of challenge the ways that we think about fear in our every eight day lives and the sort of claims around that and how that's used to manipulate what we do every day. 

David Staley: You were talking about the house you had in Buffalo, and I know that you, you've grown up in both, well, West Virginia, Buffalo,

you were trained at SUNY Buffalo. How have those places and the experiences there shaped your artistic perspective? 

Chris Coleman: Hmm. You know, growing up in West Virginia, when you grow up in a place like that, you don't understand that you're in one of the poorest states, with a lack of opportunity.

That's just [00:11:00] where you are. It wasn't until I went to college that I started to understand where I'd come from. The beauty of it was that every single one of my houses backed up to a forest. 

David Staley: Yeah. 

Chris Coleman: So we spent every day playing in the forest, playing in the creek getting muddy, setting little fires, like all the things that young boys probably are really good at, building dams,

yeah. All the things. But it, it taught me a real appreciation for nature and I think thinking deeply about the natural world and our role with it has affected my work long term. You know, and then the other places I've lived have just been a part of me understanding the bigger pictures about socioeconomic situations, understanding what different people go through as they

grow up in, you know, in different kinds of places. You know, we learn a little bit everywhere we go, and I just came to here, to Ohio now [00:12:00] from Denver, in way, made a giant loop around the northern half of the country. And, you know, Denver has its own situations with thinking about water and thinking about roughness of those mountains and versus the sort of deep ancient mountains of West Virginia. It's been so interesting to sort of like... it's just what life's about right, is finding these stunning contrasts and the joy of the subtlety. We try and weave it all together as it's all one thing, but it, it really is a lot of different places with a lot of different people.

David Staley: Can you think of a work that was specifically about West Virginia or about, the forest and nature and building dams as you say? 

Chris Coleman: A lot of my undergraduate work in sculpture actually dealt with a lot of these natural themes. It's something that hasn't come back as strong, but I did recently finish a series of works. I, I would tell you the title, but it's actually a [00:13:00] geolocation,

it's like, it's a set of coordinates, numbers. It's a set of coordinates in space. But I think it also ties to some of my curiosity from what growing up in West Virginia where we actually encountered a number of ancient mines in the forest where we were growing up, which is this new set of works,

I actually 3D scanned with a drone a section of the San Luis Valley in Colorado. And it was just a, a random hillside, you wouldn't know it from anywhere else, and from that random 3D Hillside scan, I subdivided it into 12 subsections, and I actually took that 3D data and turned it into a kind of, extruded slice,

so it's a kind of cross section, and gave it depth, and each of the layers of depth, I actually used that original 3D scan, and reconstituted again and again and again so [00:14:00] that we have all of these strata in my artwork, many kinds of strata. Some, some suggesting like minerals, some suggesting riches, some suggesting, you know, mud. And all of it comes from that surface data. And this all came from watching some of these television shows like _A Curse of Oak Island_ where Americans deeply want to believe that there's, you know ancient unearthed treasure here.

There's like a deep desire to have history in America, in white America. 

David Staley: Mm-hmm. 

Chris Coleman: That you go to Europe and you realize like you're in a building from before America was founded, and you come back to America and you're like, oh, surely, surely we must too have such things.

And there's also a whole TV show about this, about people finding random stuff in their yard and being like, oh, this was left by the Chinese, you know, in 1200. Or, you know, like, again, there's these like weird projected desires and so, yeah, this [00:15:00] artwork is a little bit about the sort of falseness of how we see what's under the ground and the potential there, and the many, many attempts we have to sort of try and vision it and extract it.

And I think there's something, there's something about The deep underground that it's still a place of mystery maybe that, you know, we just don't have in, in other ways. The forest isn't as much of a mystery anymore, but maybe underground there's still mysteries for us. 

David Staley: You had earlier said that most all of your work is 3D,

you don't, you don't really do 2D or, or flat surfaces, and I know you incorporate a lot of 3D scanning in your work. How do you think 3D scanning reshapes traditional ideas about representation? 

Chris Coleman: Yeah. You know, I use 3D scanning almost as a negative, I suppose. 

David Staley: A negative? 

Chris Coleman: Yeah. Because I, don't believe in it as a very useful

representation for [00:16:00] any continued purpose. I, you know, when I talk about 3D scanning, I talk about the fact that when you take a 3D scan, it actually takes time. So, in some ways it's almost like taking a old timey photograph where you have to get everybody to stand still for five minutes. So there's this weird essence where you're capturing time simultaneously with the 3D scan.

And then, I'm also quite interested in, in the fact that everything you scan is just, it's actually an in infinitesimally thin polygon. At the end of the day, there's nothing inside. It's a, it's a shell that doesn't even have a second side. This is computer graphics nerdery here, but if you look at the backside of a 3D scan, you'll see nothing because those polygons only have one face and it only faces outwards.

So it's like, not only is it infinitesimally thin, it only has one side to it, and it just exists as a series of coordinates and collab and, and those [00:17:00] coordinates are then connected to other. Points in space. So I love that this is like so many layers of failure and yet, and yet people will be like, oh, if only we scanned that building before it was torn down, we'd be able to save it.

And it's a ridiculous notion. And so you know, and, and look, having a 3D scan. Is interesting and, you know, it can be interesting for reference, I think it's interesting for learning on a certain sense, but it's, it's nothing like the object or the, the physical presence, the weight, the, the way that it interacts with the world around it.

Again, back to those complex systems. Yeah, a scan is a kind of, yeah. Our attempts to constantly digitize everything is a constant form of failure. And maybe that's okay, but. 

David Staley: I've never heard it described exactly like that. And that's, really very, very, very interesting to hear you say that [00:18:00] your work spans, oh, sculptures, animations, coding, interactive installations.

How do these different mediums inform each other in your practice?

Chris Coleman: Well, so I think my work as an artist is a lot less about medium, is what I would postulate, 

David Staley: Post medium, is this...? 

Chris Coleman: I come from a school of art making that believes that you know as Marshall McLuhan would say, the the medium is the message which is to say that when I'm coming up with an idea or a concept that needs to be expressed part

of my journey towards figuring out how to turn an idea into a work of art is to understand which medium might best carry that message. And while I have skills in certain areas I'm also always open to banding, you know, opportunities into other mediums. You know, [00:19:00] as you suggest, there is a little bit of a failure where it's hard for me to imagine work that doesn't exist in space or move in some way.

So it does end up, you know, I'm simul a purist in that like, no, no, I have to find the right medium. But also deeply aware that as an artist I have my own sort of. Internal frameworks and expectations for how to carry out an idea. But yeah, so for me, you know, in some ways all of those different mediums are just things that I've become skilled at.

But also, I dance as time progresses. I'm constantly dancing into new spaces to find new ways to express new ideas. 

David Staley: Hmm. Digital arts, interactive environments can be transient, can be fragile in a world that's facing rapid technological obsolescence: what does lasting mean to you both artistically and culturally?

Chris Coleman: I [00:20:00] think, i'm gonna get in trouble with my digital art preservationist for this, but I long ago accepted that because I make work that is so highly digital that it is inherently ephemeral. 

David Staley: Me too. Yep. 

Chris Coleman: I, I, it's, that is a choice. Yeah. 

Speaker: And, and I'm okay with it. 

Chris Coleman: I'm okay with it too. And you know, I keep saying to people, like, if I wanted this to last for hundreds of years, I would've carved it in stone.

That, that is the solution. And again, I, I deeply respect people who do that preservation work, and, and I'm glad that it's work that's been preserved. But yeah, I, it's, I, there's so much stuff being made now, all the time, nonstop. I think it's worth accepting that you can be part of the conversation and maybe parts of that conversation get [00:21:00] lost and that's okay.

We don't need to keep everything, I mean, most of human history is gone. 

David Staley: Yeah. Well, dance performance, even though it's captured, there's still something. It's not the original performance. 

Chris Coleman: Right. Hm. Yeah. Yeah. We can turn all the dancers into a series of points of data, which we do here at ACCAD. 

David Staley: We do, yes.

We're very good at 

Chris Coleman: it. 

Yeah. ACCAD is, is,

it's like that's their specialty. And it doesn't matter how great the fidelity of the data is, it still doesn't capture the nature of the bodies moving in that space at that moment. And it, it never will. And that's okay. 

I had introduced you by saying that your work has been shown in over 25 countries, across six continents.

Have you noticed different cultural responses to your work? 

Yeah, my partner, Laleh Meron and I, she's also a Professor here at the OSU in the art department, we worked together on a project called Wi-Fi, which was a [00:22:00] really beautiful project, spun up in around 2011 which was an attempt to reclaim the notion of wifi

which has two eyes in it. And thinking about that in a singular way to Wi-Fi and thinking about how our networks may be needed to be more about the ways that we're connected and the ways that we're inter interdependent, that we're a complex system online that our digital body has. Just as much, if not more value to us in this modern age, which is an interesting query and continues to be an interesting query.

And we took that work all over the world. Dubai we put that up in South America. It was really beautiful. We had a conversation in Argentina where we were showing this work and. Social media really hadn't quite arrived in Rosario, Argentina, where we were and. The people of Argentina, having so [00:23:00] recently dealt with dictatorships, had massive questions about the incoming push for social media and where that would allow government control, where that will allow government oversight.

And they were so cautious about social media in ways that we just, Americans blew right through. I'm not everybody. Look, there's somebody, some people in America were warning us the whole time, but it was really amazing to have those conversations versus when we showed it in Washington DC versus when we showed it in Dubai.

And we were at a women's college and thinking about the logistics of, of these young women who. Have to have their parents permission to have themselves photographed. The piece automatically captures photographs of people and adds them to the wifi, the Wi-Fi network. All these kind of logistics and complications of different people,

you know, it was the beauty of the work. The artwork asked [00:24:00] people to think deeply about their social interactions online, and you could see that everybody in different parts of the world were at a different stage of thinking that through and thinking about it in different critical ways. 

David Staley: Hmm. I introduced you as a director of ACCAD, the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design.

For those listening, don't know what ACCAD is, what is ACCAD? 

Chris Coleman: Yes, I was in really excited to come here to OSU to join ACCAD as the director What's really magical about it as a research center besides the fact that it's been around forever, it's really one of the oldest research centers of its kind in the United States .

David Staley: Eighties, I wanna say.

Chris Coleman: Yeah. Yes. I mean the, the work started in the seventies, I think it was formalized, yes. In the late eighties. You know, and of course it's early work dealing with computer graphics and thinking about the artistry of computer graphics was really quite important in the field. You know, for me, I look at it as this sort of really special hub where [00:25:00] all of the arts and design come together in one place.

They really think about collaboration and what it means when you put a musician and somebody from theater and somebody from dance and you know, a visual artist who's playing with new technology, technological tools. When you put all these people together, what's possible? And we don't have enough places where that kind of collaboration can happen.

So it was really exciting to. To see a center and help ACCAD really focus on that core notion of, yeah, coming together to make something bigger and better together. You know, technology is a core of kind of lens that we use for that. It's not entirely necessary, it's just the nature of the center, but, yeah, I, I really love the fact that we all get to know [00:26:00] each other's practices a little bit more deeply, and there's such a great sense of collaboration at the center. 

David Staley: How do you balance administrative responsibilities with your own creative practice? 

Chris Coleman: No. 

David Staley: Or do you? 

Chris Coleman: Yeah. The nature of the university?

Yeah, not well, I think I accepted that part of my transition to a full professor several years ago meant that part of my research practice would be about empowering other people and creating new communities and really leveraging the immense privilege of working at a university like this into opportunities for other people.

I think you see that with the clinic for open source arts. The other organization that I started and really part of the reason I got this job was me, doing the hard work of bringing lots of people together starting conversations across [00:27:00] communities and building new networks of people who are going to need each other into the future.

You know, it's, I think at a very deep level. I believe that human society is about us working together, and so any way that I can help facilitate us coming together to make new things happen. I see that as a win and that may not be a creative practice, but it's certainly research. It's certainly something that requires.

I'm not simply just like putting on events, you know, it, it, it requires a, a deep understanding of many different people and what they need and how we can work together. 

David Staley: Hmm. Since we've mentioned it a couple of times, what, what is the Clinic for Open Source Arts? 

Chris Coleman: Yeah. The clinic was an idea of other people would call this a research center.

I wanted to excuse the pun de-center the, the [00:28:00] notion because I wasn't interested in being the source of expertise. But instead the idea of the clinic was to use both. Framings of a clinic. You may know that one term for a clinic is of course a health clinic. 

David Staley: Right. 

Chris Coleman: What does it mean to make open source tools for artists healthy?

That's a mouthful. Let's say open source, of course, Is a kind of software community where people build things together online and collectively. So that's what open source software is. Open source software for the arts are particular pieces of software and even hardware where people are working together to make things for artists and creative outcomes specifically.

So it's a certain subset of open source and. When it comes to creating a clinic, it was like, how do I make sure that these tools that millions of artists around the world are using, especially in countries where you can't afford an Adobe subscription. [00:29:00] You're making these free and open source tools.

You're making them collaboratively around the world. You're working with somebody in India and somebody in Pakistan, and somebody in Nairobi, right? Like you're coming together to make these tools. How do you sort of support those communities and make sure that those tools continue to exist? You can only imagine that if you are using an amazing tool and that it's only supported by one person.

That one person, let's say they have a kid and they can't do this anymore, they can't support the software anymore. All of a sudden, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of artists find that the thing that they make, their artwork is gone because there's no corporation there, right? So. my clinic in part is about the sustainability or the health of these tools for artists.

And the other part of the clinic is that a clinic on the academic sense is a gathering of people coming together to have a deep conversation. And so I was really interested in. having a organization that played that role of bringing many [00:30:00] different communities of these open source tools together to have shared conversations, to talk about shared difficulties, thinking about funding, thinking about, the how to create a community in a healthy way. So having these big conversations together, and that's really the work of the Clinic for Open Source Arts. We're looking at having our first OSU based conference in the fall, so that's really quite exciting. And this past February we had a really great convening at NYU

with their IDM program. And we talked about what it looks like to have AI tools that are really accessible for young artists and how to go from super accessible tools to powerful tools and what does that pathway look like. So this is a lot of our work is also very educational.

David Staley: Hmm. So what's next, either for you in your creative practice or what's next for ACCAD? 

Chris Coleman: Yeah. You know, as an artist, I'm [00:31:00] constantly taking on little projects. I just got an invitation for like a virtual show that I'm trying to figure out. It's due Sunday. So that's a, that'll be a big question. So as soon as we're done here.

That's right. I've been working on a longer term project right now that thinks about labor and wage. You may know that the US government has very specific labor designations. I'm very interested in making a series of coins, one for each of those and so custom milling coins. And then back to my buried treasure story.

I actually wanna take all those coins and bury them in random places related to those various different. Kinds of labor and have them be found in the future. I, I like the idea of, of coins representing somehow somebody's effort or somebody's labor in the past and being found in the future. So it's a message to the future, I suppose.

For ACCAD, we continue to take on really interesting [00:32:00] collaborations, inviting different voices to the table. We've been working with an artist who is actually building a large scale interactive raft and thinking about how to sense where people are on the raft,

think flotilla the kind of thing that might come over from Cuba or come across the Strait to Gibraltar. What, what does it look like to put people into that experience? And we've been actually working with them to think about. How do you know when a person is in a different location on the raft and how can you make it come alive in different ways according to where they're looking and what they're doing?

If they lay down on the raft, can you have something different happen? So we're looking at sensing technologies and in some ways it's, again, we're. Doing some of the arts engineering work with artists to help make things happen. It's a really interesting capacity that we have as AC just I think at its core, all the work I'm doing is like, how can [00:33:00] I empower artists a little bit more with technology?

And sometimes the answer is, you don't use technology. And sometimes the answer is, oh, there's something new that's happened and we can now do this thing that we've been trying to do for decades. And it's really exciting to put that into place. 

David Staley: Chris Coleman, thank you.

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.