TAUBA AUERBACH: I want to learn new things constantly.
And I'm always trying to find the pattern behind things.
I've educated myself about a number of scientific or
mathematical principles through crafts
like weaving and paper marbling.
♪ethereal ambient music♪
To marble paper, it's all about relationships and ratios.
You have to mix your paints so that they float on the water and
so that they spread out –
not too much, not too little.
♪undulating ethereal music♪
There's a limit to how controlled it can be.
♪♪♪
I like that idea quite a lot of cultivating your sensitivity in
this really practiced, purposeful way.
And I've used paper marbling as the source material for a lot of
my public works.
♪♪♪
It seems appropriate to me to work in a lot of different
materials and media and processes...
because I'm focusing on connectivity and the
relationship between lots of different things.
Every time people come to my studio,
I like to show them these shelves,
because there are just so many treasures on them and things
that I like to live with and think with.
Some ashes of artwork that burned in a fire.
This is a sea sponge.
The water pressure where this creature lives is very extreme.
The architecture of this skeleton has been studied for
its strength.
It's a powerfully strong lattice shape.
I would say I had a really profound experience with this
puzzle, actually.
It takes over a thousand moves to disentangle this bar from
these rings.
I got to where there was just one ring left.
It turned out that having one ring left was sort of the
equivalent of having gone as far as possible
into a maze in the wrong direction.
[laughs]
And I had to completely backtrack,
put all the rings back on, and then take them off a slightly
different way.
And so I felt like this puzzle taught me a lot about the
assumptions that you make about progress along the way.
♪ethereal synth music♪
I am quite compelled by things that just barely work.
The near-impossibility is key.
I stumbled upon this beading technique
via a chemist from Taiwan.
He's been using this technique to model molecules,
and in his models, the beads are the bonds between the atoms.
Now I'm trying to do something of my own with the technique.
I'm interested in the edges of where a system coheres and
where it starts to fray and come apart,
and also where the edges of our understanding and comprehension
fray and start to come apart...
like my own limitations and then some more collective limitations,
either because we haven't gotten there yet
or it's just really out of bounds for the human mind.
[mouse clicking]
♪choral singing playing from computer♪
The kind of learning I'm really interested in is not just to
learn a fact but to change how I digest and think about all
[chuckling] future facts.
For example, my friend Cameron sent me this Bulgarian state
television choir record.
♪singing in Bulgarian♪
-[Tauba VO] I felt like there were sounds in there that had
that effect on me or that I could never come back from,
in the best possible way.
The first time I was told about the idea of different sizes of
infinity, that was an idea I never came back from.
♪Bulgarian singing continues♪
Encountering the idea of four-dimensional space and the
shapes that inhabit it has been a tool for retuning my gaze,
retuning my imagination.
Ideally, it would be nice to make something that isn't just
an image that a person might remember,
but an image that has a tiny effect on all images after that.
I love painting so much,
and there's so many different ways to approach it as
a technology.
♪energetic oscillating synths♪
During college, I was just looking for a summer job,
and I thought, "I'm gonna try the sign shop!"
I worked at New Bohemia Signs in San Francisco as an apprentice
and assistant for about three years,
and they were just beautiful hand-painted signs.
♪♪♪
In sign painting, if you go too fast,
you're gonna be sloppy.
But then if you go too slowly to try to be perfect,
it really doesn't look very graceful.
I really learned a lot about finding a kind of sweet spot,
which is something I think about a lot in lots of different ways.
♪♪♪
I love painting and I think I'll always do it,
but I think I just select the medium that's gonna serve the
idea best, so sometimes that's painting,
but a painting can't do the same thing that a piece of glass can,
for example.
So when I felt like a certain set of ideas called for working
in glass, I went and learned how to flame-work glass.
That's my approach to materials and media.
[rumbling and churning]
The Wave Organ is one of my favorite places
in San Francisco.
It's pretty close to where I grew up.
[rumbling and churning]
Essentially, it's, like, a whole bunch of pipes that are
half-submerged in the water, and at different levels of the tide,
you get different sounds out of them.
I think I'm so attached to it because it exists across a
boundary of air and water and sand.
[rumbling and churning]
The whole instrument is played by the sort of instability of
this boundary, and it's different every time I go.
When I talk about trying to cultivate the right state of
mind, that's one of the things I'm trying to get to --
to be somewhere that isn't a hard edge.
♪wonky single notes playing♪
♪wonky organ music playing♪
-[Tauba] I think that sounds good too.
What do you think of how long I hold that note there?
-[Cameron]I think that was good.
But I did think that the timing was a little...
-iffy. -[Tauba] Wonky?
-[Cameron] On that one.
-[Tauba] Mm-hm.
-[Tauba VO] The Auerglass is a two-person interdependent pump
organ that I made with my friend Cameron Mesirow,
who performs under the name Glasser,
and so it's A-U-E-R, glass.
♪Auerglass playing♪
The Auerglass started when Cameron and I decided we wanted
to make an instrument that required cooperation between two
people to play.
♪♪♪
Each player only has half a keyboard,
so there's a four-octave keyboard that's been divided up
between the two sides in alternating notes --
one has C, the next one C sharp, et cetera.
♪♪♪
Each player pumps air for the other player's notes.
Cameron's way of putting it is that we have to breathe for one another.
[cheers and applause]
♪Auerglass playing♪
Playing the Auerglass feels just barely not impossible.
The instrument has this quality of near-symmetry but just off by
a click that feels like a really activating relationship.
-It's hard!
-Yeah, it's hard.
[cheers and applause]
-[Tauba VO] It's great when we achieve that synchronicity,
but I feel like the times when we fumble in our performances,
I end up being really fond of them.
♪Auerglass playing♪
I do a lot of drawings that involve this knit structure,
and I often figuratively lose the thread when I'm drawing,
I lose the rhythm.
They're really fast, spontaneous work.
And then sometimes, I get kind of fixated on completing one
long connected form that has a set of changing rules to it.
It's almost impossible not to go into a kind of trance state.
♪Auerglass playing♪
Often, when I'm drawing, I ask myself,
"Can I move from the wrist?
Can I move from the fingers, from the elbow,
from the shoulder, from the center of my chest?"
♪♪♪
I feel like a better thinker when I draw.
There's so much wisdom embedded in techniques and procedures for
crafts passed from person to person.
I think that if you're a person who marbles end papers for books
for decades, you know just as much
about viscosity and flow as a scientist.
But you know it through your fingertips and your senses,
and in a different way.
♪♪♪
The body is a valuable thinking tool.
In the past, I was really moving through the world from my head
primarily.
But now, the enterprise is more about trust,
and a change for me in the last decade is to draw on my own body
for knowledge.
♪♪♪
[cheers and applause]
♪ ethereal ambient music ♪