Mistakes Have Been Made - Lauren Redniss at TEDxEast

Lauren shares her process both as a writer and and artist to create her works, as well as the unexpected benefits of trail and error throughout her journey as an artist.

I recently published a book
called 'Radioactive.'

It's a visual book about invisible things.

It combines artwork and written text.

It tells the story of two scientists,
Marie and Pierre Curie.

It's a love story and a story full of drama.

At the turn of the 19th century
a young woman moves

from Russian-occupied Poland
to come study in Paris.

She finds room to do her research
in the laboratory

of a reserved and handsome scientist
studying heat and magnetism.

They fall in love.

They marry and have two children
and begin working together.

They discover two new elements,

expanding the Periodic Table,
with radium and polonium,

and they begin investigating
the startling properties of these two elements.

She coins the word 'radioactivity.'

They recognise this radioactivity
to be an atomic property.

And this is a momentous insight.

It's one of the critical moments
in the history of modern science.

They win the Nobel Prize.

And all seems to be going quite well --

great marriage, accomplished couple,
two beautiful daughters.

And then in 1906,
Pierre Curie is killed in a tragic street accident.

Marie is forced to continue their work alone,

which she does, earning a second Nobel Prize.

Which, by the way, is completely unprecedented.

Now not only is she the first woman
to have won the Nobel Prize

but she is the first Double Nobel Laureate

in two different sciences, Chemistry and Physics.

And a few years later she falls in love again --

this time with the physicist Paul Langevin.

Another fabulous romance --
a coupling of two scientific giants --

but, unfortunately, there is a catch.

Langevin was married.

Needless to say --
famous people in a love triangle --

scandal ensued, duels were fought.

So this a 200-odd page book.

In addition to the narrative
about the Curies' biography,

it also leaps forward in time
to look at the contemporary

ramifications of the Curies' work.

From nuclear weapons
to nuclear power to nuclear medicine.

But, long story short,
there are these two central themes:

Radioactivity and love.

Those are the invisible things
I was referring to earlier.

And, because this is a book
in which I'm doing the writing and the research

and the artwork and also
the design of the book itself,

it's very important to me
that each of these components is meaningful

and that they each embody
the ideas in the narrative.

So, when it became time for me
to choose the medium

with which I was going to create the artwork --

and in fact choice is very important -

I decided that I would make
the images with something

called cyanotype printing.
Cyanotype printing is

a camera-less photographic technique.

And I had two reasons for this choice.

The first was thematic.

To make a cyanotype print,
you take paper, you coat it with certain chemicals.

You take that chemically coated paper,
you expose them

to the ultraviolet rays of the sun
and that turns the paper a deep blue.

Now, a process using exposure
to penetrating rays --

I thought made sense in a book
about the history of radioactivity.

And, my second reason was aesthetic.

A cyanotype print has this kind of moody,
twilight quality.

The white lines against the blue background --

I thought captured what Marie Curie described

as the element radium's spontaneous luminosity.

A kind of internal glow.

So, I just want to step you through here
the making of one page in the book.

This is a spread, it depicts
the royal banquet when Marie

has arrived in Stockholm
to accept her second Nobel Prize.

So just to take one step back from that --

When I begin, basically,
I'm always collecting drawings.

I'm just, everyday drawing
and I never know when I do a drawing

if it's going to end up in my published work,

but I just keep gathering
this little archive for myself.

This is a still life I did on my kitchen table.

These are some jazz musicians
that I drew at a club downtown.

My sketchbook from a Parsons' faculty meeting.

I was doing archival research
looking at different source material.

And then, I take these disparate elements
and I recombine

them into one composition
that gives them a new context.

And sometimes I'm surprised
by the new meaning

that emerges from this new context.

Because I wanna make a cyanotype printing,
I then take this drawing,

I turn it into a negative
on transparency, on an acetate sheet.

I then take that acetate sheet,
I place it on the chemically coated paper.

As I mentioned, I expose that
to the UV-rays of the sun.

And -- this is the blue image that would result.

I'll then oftentimes hand-color the image
-- in this case with color-pencil.

And then, the final step is adding the typeface.

So, this all makes the process seem very smooth.

Which, of course it never is.

So, now I tell you the truth,
which is in one example:

as I mentioned earlier,
Pierre Curie was killed in 1906 in a street accident.

And when I got to working on this part of the narrative,
I really struggled.

Because I couldn't imagine how I was going to
portray this harrowing moment.

How could I capture in an image
the wrenching emotion of a man killed,

a woman who loses her husband,
her scientific partner, the father of her children.

I looked to Japanese prints
and their portrayal of grief.

I read Marie Curie's own diaries,
which are just devastating.

She's described seeing her husband's body,
it's decomposing corpse.

And I cringe to show you this image but I will --

This is my first attempt and I'm sure you'll agree --

I think it falls far short.

I tried overexposing the print
to see if I could add drama.

I tried underexposing the print
to make the atmosphere dark and ominous.

I tried inverting the image
to make the skeleton white and the woman in negative.

And just nothing worked.

I knew this was not the right answer.

But, since I wasn't getting it,
I just set this section aside

and I decided to pick up
another part of the book

and I started working on a section that

comes much later totally different mood.

It's World War One
and Marie Curie is fleeing Paris

carrying a lead suitcase,
with her country's supply of radium.

She's taking it to Bordeaux
to prevent it from falling into German hands.

And in the text she's describing her adventure and --

the orange here is a digital manipulation --

But when I first attempted at printing this image,
this happened.

So I had completely botched
the chemicals and got this print

where basically none of the lines
of the drawing showed up.

You really can't see anything.

So I knew immediately
that I was going to have to reprint it.

But, I was shocked by the image
that had resulted from my mistake.

And when I thought about it,
in the context of that section

about Pierre Curie's death
something hit me

and I thought, well, actually,
it would be much more interesting

to use an image of nothing basically, an image

that could suggest the power --
the feeling of loss, rather than spell it out.

So, it's a little hard to see
in this slide but this is

the layout of that spread in the book
about Pierre Curie's death.

I took that accidental image
I scrapped those terrible skeleton drawings.

I placed that accidental image facing a black page

with the lines in grey, of Marie Curie's diary --

And I think, that in the end this is a solution

that is more subtle and hopefully more powerful

than the one I had originally planned.

It was a solution I had to really stumble into.

But, of course, it's not just
the artistic process that's full of accidents.

The history of science is full
of serendipitous discoveries.

In fact, the discovery of cyanotype chemicals themselves
was an accident.

In the 17th century,
there was a child born at the Castle Frankenstein

named Johann Conrad Dippel.
And Dippel went on to become --

I'm not making this up --
(Laughter)

Dippel went on to become
an alchemist and he wanted

to create a universal remedy,
a kind of elixir of life.

So he started to gather
all kinds of animals' skins and hooves

and horns, and all sorts of unsavory things
into what he called a Dippel's oil.

Now, Dippel shared his lab with a dye-maker.

And one day this dye-maker
was cooking up a brilliant red hue.

But he ran out of his key ingredient
so he reaches

into the cabinet and he pulls out
the Dippel's oil.

He adds the Dippel's oil,
stirs it up and instead of this

scarlet pigment that he was looking for,
he gets a deep blue.

It was vivid, it was light-fast
and it became instantly popular.

The Prussian army took it up
to dye their uniforms.

And we still use this formula today,
and one of the forms

we see it in is in the images of a cyanotype print.

But that's just one of the many
examples from science

of a serendipitous discovery.

We have Archimedes and his bathtub,

we have Isaac and the apple,

we have Christopher Columbus
setting out for India and finding the New World.

Someone is looking for one thing
and they find another.

Indeed, in 1896, the physicist
Henri Becquerel

was prepping for an experiment
using uranium salts.

For this experiment he needed bright light.

So, because it was overcast
on that particular day,

he took his uranium nuggets
and tossed them into a desk drawer

where they happened to fall upon
a photographic plate.

He closed the drawer and left the lab.

When a couple of days later he came back,

he opened the drawer and found
that photographic plate to look

as if it had been exposed to brilliant light --

which of course it hadn't.

It was the uranium salts themselves
that had exposed the plates.

Henri Becquerel had just stumbled into
something very significant.

A couple of scientists named
Marie and Pierre Curie took up the lead.

She coined the word 'radioactivity'
and the rest is history.

So, I just want to say that as we work toward,
whatever we think our goals are,

I think we should pay as much attention
to our missteps as to our successes.

And if at first you don't succeed it --

it might just be the best thing
that ever happened to you.

(Applause)