I Mustache for a Photo Shoot

Simoninne was like okay Simonne your mustache is so annoying to photoshop please shave it I did it we took a photo of it it was very I felt kind of nice it was like because I was doing this thing that I've seen my dad do all the time and I'm like it feels good okay yeah it was like it was like I was playing its fun until you have to do it twice a day mm-hmm and then you're just like good yeah yeah I stopped yeah but if you had a shaving robot built by me oh yeah it was so much easier safe do you think I think you just do an exposed blade okay the single the single edge this badly was as good a place as any to wrap it up today we should we should explain why Adams not here I realize and why you're wearing headphones and we're not worried yeah okay I'm wearing headphones because we did we didn't norms norm and Joey are in the Arctic what the they're like look did you know that when they leave the boat they have to get an escort with a some sort of polar bear gun well you know this cuz you're from the north but they have to have an escort with a gun these roller bears all the polar bears in Stockholm yeah they like take the subway commute everyone's coke ads right they're just sitting there they're cool Cola we've met American polar bears yeah like up your country so earlier they're fighting polar bears in our country hounds with astronauts

Adam is on a cross-country road trip and sent us a like 35 photos last night I think and he's in he's in Detroit I was in Detroit now right now is not big but he's on the way he's on in route making the long so you he showed pictures of I think he's tweeted a bunch of of like Mount Rushmore if you went to Devil's Tower yeah which oh we were supposed to speak about that because it was an amazing scene we're in in Close Encounters Close Encounters where Richard Dreyfuss is there two scenes he's starting to become obsessed with the the The Devil's Tower where the where the UFO lands yeah or whatever it's called the Close Encounters guy and he's carving it out of mashed potatoes if that at the kitchen table and he gets more and more obsessed and so obsessed that eventually his family leaves him and he takes over the kitchen he'd build a giant model of Devil's Tower when he doesn't know why because somehow the aliens are communicating to his subconscious and he's obsessed and he even takes a garbage can he makes the final tower part of it and he's like standing back and he's exhausted and he's like got the TV on the corner and there's a moment and he's like the classic obsessed artist building this sculpture in 3d which helps him find the route later versus another a woman later and the movies also making a painting of it because she's a painter but the 3d model helps him find navigate up the mountainside there's a moment where he's watching TV drifting off staring this thing trying to figure out his next sculpture move in the corner he sees a new story about the devil's tower and that there's all this activity around it and he's like oh yeah that's what I'm trying to make and at the moment that he sees that image on TV he just walks out of the house so he's drawing the thing he sees in his head he's building building it but he's building like a 12-foot high model in his house and he's destroyed his entire house his entire family for his art he doesn't give a about anything he's pure artists psycho vision of Bill why'd he didn't know doesn't know why he's building this things but he's compelled to and in the moment that he has the answer which is he sees a stupid news story he just walked straight out of the house and leaves it behind because he's on a vision and the vision is to leave earth and to go be with the extraterrestrials see I need to watch Close Encounters again it's incredible so that's where Adam is it's almost like a pilgrimage and they said it's only 250 feet wide I think they'd make it better Tom yeah or something so on that note Adam we're gonna be here next week the three of us we're gonna talk again and then I think Adam will be out next the week after that and we'll catch up with all the stuff like the reading of the dark forest and I think we said we talked about Star Trek I think they talked about stranger things a few weeks ago should I always talk about Star Trek we can talk about Star Trek next time if you want if you want okay well we like next week with more so you guys then bye bye

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday's episode is brought to you by blue apron for less than $10 a meal blue apron delivers a seasonal recipes along with pre-portion ingredients to make a delicious home-cooked meals some meals available in September include spicy hoisin chicken stir-fry with baby bok choy and sesame ginger cuckoo / salad or summer udon noodle salad with cherry tomatoes check out this week's menu and get your first 3 meals free with free shipping by going to blue apron calm / untitled that's blue apron dot-com / on titled blue apron a better way to cook and now on with the show welcome to still entitled the item 7 project I'm will X Mon I'm tom hey Chuck so Tom Sachs is art I guess you're our substitute Adam this week is that is that fair I've got my I'm wearing my fedora okay very good to us so Tom if you don't know tom tom is a sculptor he has made amazing art and you kind of I shall let you describe cuz I always feel like a jerk describing other people's work so so I've uh my name is Tom sacks I'm a sculptor that's my priorities always sculpture but I investigate other cultures and amplify them to make them my own so I have my own space program and in 2007 we landed on the moon at Coco's Ian's gallery in Beverly Hills are two astronauts landed on the moon jack-hammered up the Richard Meyer floor brought a sample back and tested it and found it we did a petrographic analysis and found that in fact our moon rocks were made of concrete in 2012 we went to Mars at the Park Avenue Armory and we found life I think I think you need to I think now I'm leaving out some details I think we need to take a step back yes it's it's it's kind of it's cut you do is it's kind of cargo cultish right sure cargo cult is is sort of a.m. topological term used to describe a culture that's adapted and morphed by another one the most famous is is the John from cult or maybe there's a movie called the gods must be crazy where the where the local or the Aboriginal people find a coke bottle that falls from the sky and worship it because it can be used for as a rolling pin and screws up their entire economy it comes from a text about the llamo mom yamomamo Indians who called iron axes for Stone Age Indians where anthropologists introduced iron axes into a Stone Age society and totally up they did this on purpose well was kind of on purpose or by accident they traded an axe for beads and then the economy the local economy got all screwed up and this has happened over and over again this is one of the terrible side effects of the Anthropocene at the time when humans have the biggest impact on the planet or the homogeneous teen when humans have the biggest impact on other cultures and that's the time so sort of from the 15th century till now is there no anthropologist prime directive like they don't have a rule that scenario don't come here in general these other cultures there absolutely is but as a result of learning the hard way over situations like that and and we you know we shove the prime directive up its own ass in our space program there's this thing called the planetary protection protocol which is mainly set up to avoid false positives we don't want to go to Mars and find a bacteria that we brought there but it's also used ethically to not bring earth bacteria to grow and take over Mars but we kind of say all that we're Americans were colonialists we're gonna represent who we are and we're gonna bring the noise so we spray-painted a flag an American flag on to the floor yeah yeah well we in a way our main science package is a boom box you know we bring the noise of American culture and that's the African Diaspora because we are built on African blood and we do not do projects of any kind without ignite lodging that because it's the Africans who helped us get to the moon who who brought cotton and tobacco from the earth and brought to Europe and gain economic independence and worked in the factories and helped us to defeat the Nazis and steal their best scientists and ultimately go to the moon and kill God this is so far away from my usual line of thoughts like I have a lot of people who ask me like do you consider yourself an artist and I'm always no because you're obviously an artist I mean you're like the embodiment of an artist and you're an artist I'm not I'm not cool enough to be an artist I feel yeren you're an artist because your robots are self-proclaimed robots not I I Google translated a headline on a Spanish article and it said Simone yet builds robot of they're not made of they're hero myself but I mean you because you have this like whole stock process around it and this very like good way to talk about what you do this beautiful way of talking about what you do do you feel that that's like telling the story of what you do is a big part of your artistry or is it mainly the art itself well make no mistake my priority is making sculpture and I will use whatever I have to get that job done there's that there's that line you got to use what you got to get what you want it's about shaking it and I might thing that saved sculpture saved my life I was a at a very troubled youth and I discovered sculpture in my early 20s and I had instant success I mean it was a dozen years before I ever had an exhibition or my work left my studio but I had an instant sense of self success I develop my own internal standards of excellence through sculpture the set of external ones and so I will do whatever it takes now all this storytelling about it it's very important because it's a way of communicating the idea behind the sculpture and these are things that I'm thinking about as a person as a sentient being as someone who's witnessed the incredible racism in our country I'm not gonna use what I do I'm not going to do what I do and not acknowledge the source I'm not gonna do what I do and not use it as an opportunity to talk about the larger problems that are bigger than the ones that I have you know I I'm not African I'm like an upper middle-class Jew from Connecticut who went to college but the art that inspires me people ask who are your favorite artists and they're all the artists of the Diaspora you know it's always James Brown and Louie Armstrong in that tradition so when you were when you were a kid I have to assume that the space program that like you were you're the right age to be there okay how old were you when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon do you remember that well you know the thing about memory is you don't remember what you remember watching the TV replay of the memory of the right and it all kind of mushes together so was three okay when it happened but I don't really remember but I watched Star Trek and I've seen and I've seen every episode of the original series I say well or all of them know the original and next generation but mainly the original I think I could be quizzed on pretty thorough and I've got to go to a shadow launch and I got to watch both disasters and as a kid I was definitely the right age to have had the vision that we all did that going to space would be an everyday thing mm-hmm right we'd all be living in in toroid dad well I I guess I would say that you know I'm not a native to the digital world then I'm a I'm an immigrant because I was born earlier however I was a native to the idea that of prosperity in space and I think the the the the locals in the digital world didn't grew up in a sort of cynical place with like the shuttle which is like totally idiotic and no Donald yeah tautological cycle right it didn't flying toilet would you go to space if you had the opportunity to I don't think I have the right stuff as in the right equipment no I think I'm too nervous I don't think I'm gonna whipped to do it mentally yeah and also I've done a lot of astronaut training and and I still kind of keep up with it like things like well I stopped with this with the underwater pressure stuff but I'd still do Alpine mountaineering and that's pretty much the exact same thing thing in terms of like preparation training and technical risk all that stuff it's about as dangerous and I don't as much as I do it I don't think I love it and to quote Adam steltzner the most dangerous place on earth is ten times safer than the most friendly place on Mars and the earth is like a big warm wet kiss and I want to explore earth before going okay the big wet warm kiss of Earth yeah that's the artistry and it I would never describe as that as like as stuff Oh No I've watched you clean fix your septic system on YouTube there's some good artistry yeah I mean look anybody who's done some amateur plumbing can watch that video not that I'm suggesting an amateur plumber no one no one can say as an amateur plumber myself you know the the joy of finally getting that making that right turn and getting it where you need to be it's amazing but I would say they aren't the expression of nausea I've never heard so perfectly articulate I think I have to rewind everyone I wash you gag on the smell because in movies and photography it's impossible to represent smell like the University any movie and you can tell that it's a bad smelling scene you never get a sense of it but that movie yeah you knew that you didn't want to be in that room yeah so okay so you're here in San Francisco mouth is you're doing the space program a space program yep in in San Francisco September 16th at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on mission and third will be launching space program three Europa our two astronauts will be landing on the surface of Europa they'll be drilling through its icy crust - it's liquid ocean they will be abducting a subject grilling it and eating it a subject as in we don't really know what lies beneath the ocean beneath the frozen crust of Europa well I mean Arthur Clarke said don't go there right right I'm use these in peace yes all these others belong to you and use them in peace but this one doesn't and we say that we're going okay maybe an unfortunate museum visitor will be there and you're grilling I need it possibly better turn off your cellphone's so how are you feeling about the Excite are you are you excited about it are you nervous about it are you I'm really excited we have the best installation crew tesslar freeman the director of installation has been kicking ass for months Dorothy Davila the curator has been leading an amazing amazing team of people we've got dozens of people working over at YB CA right now we've got Mission Control section being set up on Wednesday we have a historical section of earlier sex works with a time line we even have log jam cafe we can come buy a cup of coffee that we collaborated with with we've got lofted coffee from Bushwick Brooklyn because we're bringing up representing East Coast hmm and no gang signs please Tom and troubled you still love Tupac but you know biggie in my heart and Byron Kaplan's cafe peddler is art collaborator with that so you can go to log jam cafe and sort screws we've got an algorithm of sorting random screws so you can in a way indoctrinate your in the culture of the studio and I hope that you guys look oh that's awesome ruse with us so so this is something you talk about this on the talking room with that I guess a couple years ago yeah three years a good working well but the the sorting screws you talk about something you bring people so you have a fairly large studio in New York where you have what 15 or 20 people working in 85 13 13 okay and and you said that you bring people into the studio and I can't this might not have even made the final cut we might have taken it out I can't remember but you said you bring people in the studio you take their a DD Medicine and then you give them incredibly tedious tasks to help them learn how to focus and and and find inner peace with with like the kind of repetitive work that most of us don't do anymore right there's a there's this there's this quality of the work we call it tedium where we do these unbelievably tedious tasks but at a pretty high level it's like um it's almost like making the tour aaalac you cannot make a mistake so we built in section so you throw the whole section out if it doesn't work but that section might take a week but it doesn't take a year so you only lose a week's worth of work about a year's worth of work and a week's worth of work is a lot yeah even at minimum wage which we don't pay you don't want to lose a week's worth of work ever right so we have these ways of testing and vetting now we don't take people's adderall away however I was given a jar of of adderall farmers adolescent adolescent grade pharmaceutical I'm fed amines by an by an employee an intern who said that she didn't need it anymore because she found her ability to focus on her life through the work oh that's awesome and her mom called me and I was really happy because I love adderall it's like the modern cocaine it's the superior party drug but I only use it for fun I don't really it's not for focusing it does it does work I just don't need it are you gonna be on adderall on the date of your exhibition exhibit well I there is a marathon demo that's very long it's I think in New York it was 11 hours we're trying to figure out a way to make it 5 and in the middle of that there is this thing called the indoctrination ritual where we all gather around and we mix adderall with kool-aid and we recite the mint at prayer you have people drink the kool-aid yeah fundamentally which one semester it's but I um it's Frank Herbert right it's well it's actually David David Lynch wrote it it's not actually in the book but they you know they stuck it in it's by will alone I set my mind in motion is by the juice of Sapho the lips acquire stains that thoughts acquire speed it is by will alone I set my mind in motion so you're saying adderall is our closest equivalent Asafa it's it is and and that's a movie not the book is about drug culture and he's committing comparison between drugs that were addicted to like heroin and cocaine when there's a lot of cocaine on that set if you read the stories and the mind-altering substance of the spice melange that helps people see visions and gain strength and also the worms that the the worms mind Milosh on Arrakis and then the the navigating guilds take the melange to navigate to like fold space hyperspace but but the important thing is that this movie is a metaphor about our dependency on petroleum because they the the locals on Arrakis are these poor people that are miners and they're being exploited by these Belgians the Atreides and there's a war of other European states and developed nations so it's really a metaphor for how we exploit the resources on earth and fight over it and you see that happening in Nigeria with this incredible wealth that new wealth that this that this countries has but it's the government so up from its Belgian roots and French roots that it doesn't have a structure of democracy that's viable so it's it's a good it's a big mess there's incredible poverty there so these issues are you know not not explicit in the work but they're implied and these are issues that I'm interested in so it's Mel when you say that I'm a real artist and that you're not I really gonna argue with you about that because you have a rich cultural history of your own life and I work hard to bring those ideas into the work but bottom line it's just about making spaceships I only want to make cool and I think that's where you and me and Adam that's where we we meet is that there can be a reason behind it but bottom line it's the stuff like like um Adams blaster right from Blade Runner ma it's it's more accurate than the one that's made in the movie it's heavier it's not made of rubbers made of metal it's there's a I'm just wondering if that is like one of the main deficits to me in in in in the in the projects I do I shy away from having a reason to do them because people always ask me why do you do it and I'm like why not I think I think the building process is a reason in itself and if it feels for you there's a lot of like reason around it and and and a lot of focus on the reason as well as to as to why you build these things well I think there's there's probably more reasons behind why you build them then you're admitting and/or that you are even aware of and I don't think it's necessarily important for you to convey those in the way that I'm conveying them now I'm interested in conveying them because I think the storytelling hell opens the door for different ways of understanding the work these are just my interpretations of my work you'll come and see it hopefully later today and maybe you'll have your own views and I don't think that they're wrong even if they're divergent mm-hmm I think if this is the only way that you could look at what I do it would be propaganda I'm not interested in that I want the work to have a little openness now smarter artists and myself say nothing I mean what I so when I haven't seen anything and I didn't seen anything you made in person I I don't I mean I obviously like this stuff the bags and stuff like that you made which I are these unbelievable kind of they look like artifacts from an alternate space reality right the the because you make them out of the what's the spacesuit material Oh God ortho fiber right or this one is that of Cuban fiber and it appeals to me in the same way that that Tran also that's such a good name that watching like my my three year old kid will take a cardboard box and play with it and the difference is that she's three and that you spend about a year or two or longer in some cases building these incredibly elaborate displays and and and making that fantasy even more and more real within their context of what what what is yo he said cargo cult and the word I use I like sympathetic magic another anthropological term sympathetic magic is a voodoo doll that you push pins into or you build a model of your enemies for it and burn it down as a way of visualizing the demise of your foe in the same way you could there's this thing called an X Votto which is you build a model of your arm maybe you're broke your own build a model of it you bring it to your religious practitioner he helps you pray to it and what he's helping you do is visualize creatively the success of your healing I'm at if you hurt yourself and you believe you'll never get better you'll stay sick for a while if you believe you're getting better you'll get better you can control the only thing we can control is our thoughts and through our thoughts we can affect things up to 20% which is in business they say that's the leverage you need to like build or destroy anything and similarly I built my space program because I couldn't afford my own and at the beginning I did want to fly but as I was learning about it it was such a difficult thing that I realized that to organize everything I really couldn't fly I had to be organized ago but similarly this came this has been my whole life I grew up in at this affluent community but I didn't have as much my parents didn't have as much money as the neighbors so we buy things at Goodwill and fit refinish furniture my mom Tom about how to do that and I went to a fancy prep school and it was really gross he had to wear like the blue jacket in the in and the gray slacks and the and a striped tie or you could wear a suit but all the kids were uniform so I'd go to Goodwill and I would buy these like sixties mod polyester suits in there and I was the only non preppy at this school and I felt in a sense of artistic expression there before I remained sculptured through clothes did you realize you just do it to be different into I'd what was I did it because I love I love punk culture and like I always introduce the ska new wave and it was a way of of adapting to the things that inspired me which is the music and and and the clothes were available because it was the 80s so you could get clothes from the 60s and now if you go to the thrift shops you get buying clothes from the 90s those things were better made then so it was so I didn't really view it as art or creativity it was just something that I did that had an honest connection with my life and I think all we're looking for is authenticity and I would argue that you are an artist because if you're making a shitty robot that addresses issues of femininity and like makeup application hair hair brushing you know shampoo all these like these these rituals there that are part of presentation the feminine body you are channeling your experience as being a woman in the world and you're you're smashing that up against your love of robots and science and ultimately you're all your and you're only doing that because you love making how much I'm hoping I'm not putting words no I just see I think it's interesting with the feminine any point because I think I've only done one project that's like makeup related the lipstick robot and the rest no hair washing I haven't done here a brush you know wasn't there over here I know I've done it I've done it no one o'clock the slaps me in the face and a hair washing machine that washes your hair I think you could use it to hair washing machine is like kind of so the wake up machine I I was thinking it was a hair brushing machine because of the spectacular failure oh that may be a hair curler yeah because it like catches my hair tangled though but none of them are like feminine or have having stuff to do with that I've shied away from it a little bit because I think that a lot of yeah people want to put it as like oh this is like how a woman tackles electronics or robotics and I just I say I do more general stuff but maybe I should do like a hair or like a shaving robot like shave you I can do beard shaving though my sister forced me to shave my mustache for a photo shoot because she was like okay Simonne your mustache is so annoying to photoshop please shave it I did it we took a photo of it it was very it felt kind of nice it was like because I was doing this thing that I've seen my dad do all the time and I'm like it feels good okay yeah it was like it was like I was playing it's fun until you have to do it twice a day mm-hmm and then you're just like good yeah yeah I stopped yeah but if you had a shaving robot built by me oh yeah it was so much easier safe do you think I think you just do an exposed blade okay the single the single edge this badly was as good a place as any to to wrap it up today we should we should explain why Adams not here I realize and why you're wearing headphones and we're not worried yeah okay I'm wearing headphones because we did we didn't norms norm and Joey are in the Arctic what the they're like look did you know that when they leave the boat they have to get an escort with a some sort of polar bear gun well you know this cuz you're from the north but they have to have an escort with a gun these roller bears all the polar bears in Stockholm yeah they like take the subway commute everyone's coke ads right they're just sitting there they're cool Cola we've met American polar bears yeah like up your country so earlier they're fighting polar bears in our country hounds with astronauts Adam is on a cross-country road trip and sent us a like 35 photos last night I think and he's in he's in Detroit I was in Detroit now right now is not big but he's on the way he's on in route making the long so you he showed pictures of I think he's tweeted a bunch of of like Mount Rushmore if you went to Devil's Tower yeah which oh we were supposed to speak about that because it was an amazing scene we're in in Close Encounters Close Encounters where Richard Dreyfuss is there two scenes he's starting to become obsessed with the the The Devil's Tower where the where the UFO lands yeah or whatever it's called the Close Encounters guy and he's carving it out of mashed potatoes if that at the kitchen table and he gets more and more obsessed and so obsessed that eventually his family leaves him and he takes over the kitchen he'd build a giant model of Devil's Tower when he doesn't know why because somehow the aliens are communicating to his subconscious and he's obsessed and he even takes a garbage can he makes the final tower part of it and he's like standing back and he's exhausted and he's like got the TV on the corner and there's a moment and he's like the classic obsessed artist building this sculpture in 3d which helps him find the route later versus another a woman later and the movies also making a painting of it because she's a painter but the 3d model helps him find navigate up the mountainside there's a moment where he's watching TV drifting off staring this thing trying to figure out his next sculpture move in the corner he sees a new story about the devil's tower and that there's all this activity around it and he's like oh yeah that's what I'm trying to make and at the moment that he sees that image on TV he just walks out of the house so he's drawing the thing he sees in his head he's building building it but he's building like a 12-foot high model in his house and he's destroyed his entire house his entire family for his art he doesn't give a about anything he's pure artists psycho vision of Bill why'd he didn't know doesn't know why he's building this things but he's compelled to and in the moment that he has the answer which is he sees a stupid news story he just walked straight out of the house and leaves it behind because he's on a vision and the vision is to leave earth and to go be with the extraterrestrials see I need to watch Close Encounters again it's incredible so that's where Adam is it's almost like a pilgrimage and they said it's only 250 feet wide I think they'd make it better Tom yeah or something so on that note Adam we're gonna be here next week the three of us we're gonna talk again and then I think Adam will be out next the week after that and we'll catch up with all the stuff like the reading of the dark forest and I think we said we talked about Star Trek I think they talked about stranger things a few weeks ago should I always talk about Star Trek we can talk about Star Trek next time if you want if you want okay well we like next week with more so you guys then bye byetoday's episode is brought to you by blue apron for less than $10 a meal blue apron delivers a seasonal recipes along with pre-portion ingredients to make a delicious home-cooked meals some meals available in September include spicy hoisin chicken stir-fry with baby bok choy and sesame ginger cuckoo / salad or summer udon noodle salad with cherry tomatoes check out this week's menu and get your first 3 meals free with free shipping by going to blue apron calm / untitled that's blue apron dot-com / on titled blue apron a better way to cook and now on with the show welcome to still entitled the item 7 project I'm will X Mon I'm tom hey Chuck so Tom Sachs is art I guess you're our substitute Adam this week is that is that fair I've got my I'm wearing my fedora okay very good to us so Tom if you don't know tom tom is a sculptor he has made amazing art and you kind of I shall let you describe cuz I always feel like a jerk describing other people's work so so I've uh my name is Tom sacks I'm a sculptor that's my priorities always sculpture but I investigate other cultures and amplify them to make them my own so I have my own space program and in 2007 we landed on the moon at Coco's Ian's gallery in Beverly Hills are two astronauts landed on the moon jack-hammered up the Richard Meyer floor brought a sample back and tested it and found it we did a petrographic analysis and found that in fact our moon rocks were made of concrete in 2012 we went to Mars at the Park Avenue Armory and we found life I think I think you need to I think now I'm leaving out some details I think we need to take a step back yes it's it's it's kind of it's cut you do is it's kind of cargo cultish right sure cargo cult is is sort of a.m. topological term used to describe a culture that's adapted and morphed by another one the most famous is is the John from cult or maybe there's a movie called the gods must be crazy where the where the local or the Aboriginal people find a coke bottle that falls from the sky and worship it because it can be used for as a rolling pin and screws up their entire economy it comes from a text about the llamo mom yamomamo Indians who called iron axes for Stone Age Indians where anthropologists introduced iron axes into a Stone Age society and totally up they did this on purpose well was kind of on purpose or by accident they traded an axe for beads and then the economy the local economy got all screwed up and this has happened over and over again this is one of the terrible side effects of the Anthropocene at the time when humans have the biggest impact on the planet or the homogeneous teen when humans have the biggest impact on other cultures and that's the time so sort of from the 15th century till now is there no anthropologist prime directive like they don't have a rule that scenario don't come here in general these other cultures there absolutely is but as a result of learning the hard way over situations like that and and we you know we shove the prime directive up its own ass in our space program there's this thing called the planetary protection protocol which is mainly set up to avoid false positives we don't want to go to Mars and find a bacteria that we brought there but it's also used ethically to not bring earth bacteria to grow and take over Mars but we kind of say all that we're Americans were colonialists we're gonna represent who we are and we're gonna bring the noise so we spray-painted a flag an American flag on to the floor yeah yeah well we in a way our main science package is a boom box you know we bring the noise of American culture and that's the African Diaspora because we are built on African blood and we do not do projects of any kind without ignite lodging that because it's the Africans who helped us get to the moon who who brought cotton and tobacco from the earth and brought to Europe and gain economic independence and worked in the factories and helped us to defeat the Nazis and steal their best scientists and ultimately go to the moon and kill God this is so far away from my usual line of thoughts like I have a lot of people who ask me like do you consider yourself an artist and I'm always no because you're obviously an artist I mean you're like the embodiment of an artist and you're an artist I'm not I'm not cool enough to be an artist I feel yeren you're an artist because your robots are self-proclaimed robots not I I Google translated a headline on a Spanish article and it said Simone yet builds robot of they're not made of they're hero myself but I mean you because you have this like whole stock process around it and this very like good way to talk about what you do this beautiful way of talking about what you do do you feel that that's like telling the story of what you do is a big part of your artistry or is it mainly the art itself well make no mistake my priority is making sculpture and I will use whatever I have to get that job done there's that there's that line you got to use what you got to get what you want it's about shaking it and I might thing that saved sculpture saved my life I was a at a very troubled youth and I discovered sculpture in my early 20s and I had instant success I mean it was a dozen years before I ever had an exhibition or my work left my studio but I had an instant sense of self success I develop my own internal standards of excellence through sculpture the set of external ones and so I will do whatever it takes now all this storytelling about it it's very important because it's a way of communicating the idea behind the sculpture and these are things that I'm thinking about as a person as a sentient being as someone who's witnessed the incredible racism in our country I'm not gonna use what I do I'm not going to do what I do and not acknowledge the source I'm not gonna do what I do and not use it as an opportunity to talk about the larger problems that are bigger than the ones that I have you know I I'm not African I'm like an upper middle-class Jew from Connecticut who went to college but the art that inspires me people ask who are your favorite artists and they're all the artists of the Diaspora you know it's always James Brown and Louie Armstrong in that tradition so when you were when you were a kid I have to assume that the space program that like you were you're the right age to be there okay how old were you when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon do you remember that well you know the thing about memory is you don't remember what you remember watching the TV replay of the memory of the right and it all kind of mushes together so was three okay when it happened but I don't really remember but I watched Star Trek and I've seen and I've seen every episode of the original series I say well or all of them know the original and next generation but mainly the original I think I could be quizzed on pretty thorough and I've got to go to a shadow launch and I got to watch both disasters and as a kid I was definitely the right age to have had the vision that we all did that going to space would be an everyday thing mm-hmm right we'd all be living in in toroid dad well I I guess I would say that you know I'm not a native to the digital world then I'm a I'm an immigrant because I was born earlier however I was a native to the idea that of prosperity in space and I think the the the the locals in the digital world didn't grew up in a sort of cynical place with like the shuttle which is like totally idiotic and no Donald yeah tautological cycle right it didn't flying toilet would you go to space if you had the opportunity to I don't think I have the right stuff as in the right equipment no I think I'm too nervous I don't think I'm gonna whipped to do it mentally yeah and also I've done a lot of astronaut training and and I still kind of keep up with it like things like well I stopped with this with the underwater pressure stuff but I'd still do Alpine mountaineering and that's pretty much the exact same thing thing in terms of like preparation training and technical risk all that stuff it's about as dangerous and I don't as much as I do it I don't think I love it and to quote Adam steltzner the most dangerous place on earth is ten times safer than the most friendly place on Mars and the earth is like a big warm wet kiss and I want to explore earth before going okay the big wet warm kiss of Earth yeah that's the artistry and it I would never describe as that as like as stuff Oh No I've watched you clean fix your septic system on YouTube there's some good artistry yeah I mean look anybody who's done some amateur plumbing can watch that video not that I'm suggesting an amateur plumber no one no one can say as an amateur plumber myself you know the the joy of finally getting that making that right turn and getting it where you need to be it's amazing but I would say they aren't the expression of nausea I've never heard so perfectly articulate I think I have to rewind everyone I wash you gag on the smell because in movies and photography it's impossible to represent smell like the University any movie and you can tell that it's a bad smelling scene you never get a sense of it but that movie yeah you knew that you didn't want to be in that room yeah so okay so you're here in San Francisco mouth is you're doing the space program a space program yep in in San Francisco September 16th at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on mission and third will be launching space program three Europa our two astronauts will be landing on the surface of Europa they'll be drilling through its icy crust - it's liquid ocean they will be abducting a subject grilling it and eating it a subject as in we don't really know what lies beneath the ocean beneath the frozen crust of Europa well I mean Arthur Clarke said don't go there right right I'm use these in peace yes all these others belong to you and use them in peace but this one doesn't and we say that we're going okay maybe an unfortunate museum visitor will be there and you're grilling I need it possibly better turn off your cellphone's so how are you feeling about the Excite are you are you excited about it are you nervous about it are you I'm really excited we have the best installation crew tesslar freeman the director of installation has been kicking ass for months Dorothy Davila the curator has been leading an amazing amazing team of people we've got dozens of people working over at YB CA right now we've got Mission Control section being set up on Wednesday we have a historical section of earlier sex works with a time line we even have log jam cafe we can come buy a cup of coffee that we collaborated with with we've got lofted coffee from Bushwick Brooklyn because we're bringing up representing East Coast hmm and no gang signs please Tom and troubled you still love Tupac but you know biggie in my heart and Byron Kaplan's cafe peddler is art collaborator with that so you can go to log jam cafe and sort screws we've got an algorithm of sorting random screws so you can in a way indoctrinate your in the culture of the studio and I hope that you guys look oh that's awesome ruse with us so so this is something you talk about this on the talking room with that I guess a couple years ago yeah three years a good working well but the the sorting screws you talk about something you bring people so you have a fairly large studio in New York where you have what 15 or 20 people working in 85 13 13 okay and and you said that you bring people into the studio and I can't this might not have even made the final cut we might have taken it out I can't remember but you said you bring people in the studio you take their a DD Medicine and then you give them incredibly tedious tasks to help them learn how to focus and and and find inner peace with with like the kind of repetitive work that most of us don't do anymore right there's a there's this there's this quality of the work we call it tedium where we do these unbelievably tedious tasks but at a pretty high level it's like um it's almost like making the tour aaalac you cannot make a mistake so we built in section so you throw the whole section out if it doesn't work but that section might take a week but it doesn't take a year so you only lose a week's worth of work about a year's worth of work and a week's worth of work is a lot yeah even at minimum wage which we don't pay you don't want to lose a week's worth of work ever right so we have these ways of testing and vetting now we don't take people's adderall away however I was given a jar of of adderall farmers adolescent adolescent grade pharmaceutical I'm fed amines by an by an employee an intern who said that she didn't need it anymore because she found her ability to focus on her life through the work oh that's awesome and her mom called me and I was really happy because I love adderall it's like the modern cocaine it's the superior party drug but I only use it for fun I don't really it's not for focusing it does it does work I just don't need it are you gonna be on adderall on the date of your exhibition exhibit well I there is a marathon demo that's very long it's I think in New York it was 11 hours we're trying to figure out a way to make it 5 and in the middle of that there is this thing called the indoctrination ritual where we all gather around and we mix adderall with kool-aid and we recite the mint at prayer you have people drink the kool-aid yeah fundamentally which one semester it's but I um it's Frank Herbert right it's well it's actually David David Lynch wrote it it's not actually in the book but they you know they stuck it in it's by will alone I set my mind in motion is by the juice of Sapho the lips acquire stains that thoughts acquire speed it is by will alone I set my mind in motion so you're saying adderall is our closest equivalent Asafa it's it is and and that's a movie not the book is about drug culture and he's committing comparison between drugs that were addicted to like heroin and cocaine when there's a lot of cocaine on that set if you read the stories and the mind-altering substance of the spice melange that helps people see visions and gain strength and also the worms that the the worms mind Milosh on Arrakis and then the the navigating guilds take the melange to navigate to like fold space hyperspace but but the important thing is that this movie is a metaphor about our dependency on petroleum because they the the locals on Arrakis are these poor people that are miners and they're being exploited by these Belgians the Atreides and there's a war of other European states and developed nations so it's really a metaphor for how we exploit the resources on earth and fight over it and you see that happening in Nigeria with this incredible wealth that new wealth that this that this countries has but it's the government so up from its Belgian roots and French roots that it doesn't have a structure of democracy that's viable so it's it's a good it's a big mess there's incredible poverty there so these issues are you know not not explicit in the work but they're implied and these are issues that I'm interested in so it's Mel when you say that I'm a real artist and that you're not I really gonna argue with you about that because you have a rich cultural history of your own life and I work hard to bring those ideas into the work but bottom line it's just about making spaceships I only want to make cool and I think that's where you and me and Adam that's where we we meet is that there can be a reason behind it but bottom line it's the stuff like like um Adams blaster right from Blade Runner ma it's it's more accurate than the one that's made in the movie it's heavier it's not made of rubbers made of metal it's there's a I'm just wondering if that is like one of the main deficits to me in in in in the in the projects I do I shy away from having a reason to do them because people always ask me why do you do it and I'm like why not I think I think the building process is a reason in itself and if it feels for you there's a lot of like reason around it and and and a lot of focus on the reason as well as to as to why you build these things well I think there's there's probably more reasons behind why you build them then you're admitting and/or that you are even aware of and I don't think it's necessarily important for you to convey those in the way that I'm conveying them now I'm interested in conveying them because I think the storytelling hell opens the door for different ways of understanding the work these are just my interpretations of my work you'll come and see it hopefully later today and maybe you'll have your own views and I don't think that they're wrong even if they're divergent mm-hmm I think if this is the only way that you could look at what I do it would be propaganda I'm not interested in that I want the work to have a little openness now smarter artists and myself say nothing I mean what I so when I haven't seen anything and I didn't seen anything you made in person I I don't I mean I obviously like this stuff the bags and stuff like that you made which I are these unbelievable kind of they look like artifacts from an alternate space reality right the the because you make them out of the what's the spacesuit material Oh God ortho fiber right or this one is that of Cuban fiber and it appeals to me in the same way that that Tran also that's such a good name that watching like my my three year old kid will take a cardboard box and play with it and the difference is that she's three and that you spend about a year or two or longer in some cases building these incredibly elaborate displays and and and making that fantasy even more and more real within their context of what what what is yo he said cargo cult and the word I use I like sympathetic magic another anthropological term sympathetic magic is a voodoo doll that you push pins into or you build a model of your enemies for it and burn it down as a way of visualizing the demise of your foe in the same way you could there's this thing called an X Votto which is you build a model of your arm maybe you're broke your own build a model of it you bring it to your religious practitioner he helps you pray to it and what he's helping you do is visualize creatively the success of your healing I'm at if you hurt yourself and you believe you'll never get better you'll stay sick for a while if you believe you're getting better you'll get better you can control the only thing we can control is our thoughts and through our thoughts we can affect things up to 20% which is in business they say that's the leverage you need to like build or destroy anything and similarly I built my space program because I couldn't afford my own and at the beginning I did want to fly but as I was learning about it it was such a difficult thing that I realized that to organize everything I really couldn't fly I had to be organized ago but similarly this came this has been my whole life I grew up in at this affluent community but I didn't have as much my parents didn't have as much money as the neighbors so we buy things at Goodwill and fit refinish furniture my mom Tom about how to do that and I went to a fancy prep school and it was really gross he had to wear like the blue jacket in the in and the gray slacks and the and a striped tie or you could wear a suit but all the kids were uniform so I'd go to Goodwill and I would buy these like sixties mod polyester suits in there and I was the only non preppy at this school and I felt in a sense of artistic expression there before I remained sculptured through clothes did you realize you just do it to be different into I'd what was I did it because I love I love punk culture and like I always introduce the ska new wave and it was a way of of adapting to the things that inspired me which is the music and and and the clothes were available because it was the 80s so you could get clothes from the 60s and now if you go to the thrift shops you get buying clothes from the 90s those things were better made then so it was so I didn't really view it as art or creativity it was just something that I did that had an honest connection with my life and I think all we're looking for is authenticity and I would argue that you are an artist because if you're making a shitty robot that addresses issues of femininity and like makeup application hair hair brushing you know shampoo all these like these these rituals there that are part of presentation the feminine body you are channeling your experience as being a woman in the world and you're you're smashing that up against your love of robots and science and ultimately you're all your and you're only doing that because you love making how much I'm hoping I'm not putting words no I just see I think it's interesting with the feminine any point because I think I've only done one project that's like makeup related the lipstick robot and the rest no hair washing I haven't done here a brush you know wasn't there over here I know I've done it I've done it no one o'clock the slaps me in the face and a hair washing machine that washes your hair I think you could use it to hair washing machine is like kind of so the wake up machine I I was thinking it was a hair brushing machine because of the spectacular failure oh that may be a hair curler yeah because it like catches my hair tangled though but none of them are like feminine or have having stuff to do with that I've shied away from it a little bit because I think that a lot of yeah people want to put it as like oh this is like how a woman tackles electronics or robotics and I just I say I do more general stuff but maybe I should do like a hair or like a shaving robot like shave you I can do beard shaving though my sister forced me to shave my mustache for a photo shoot because she was like okay Simonne your mustache is so annoying to photoshop please shave it I did it we took a photo of it it was very it felt kind of nice it was like because I was doing this thing that I've seen my dad do all the time and I'm like it feels good okay yeah it was like it was like I was playing it's fun until you have to do it twice a day mm-hmm and then you're just like good yeah yeah I stopped yeah but if you had a shaving robot built by me oh yeah it was so much easier safe do you think I think you just do an exposed blade okay the single the single edge this badly was as good a place as any to to wrap it up today we should we should explain why Adams not here I realize and why you're wearing headphones and we're not worried yeah okay I'm wearing headphones because we did we didn't norms norm and Joey are in the Arctic what the they're like look did you know that when they leave the boat they have to get an escort with a some sort of polar bear gun well you know this cuz you're from the north but they have to have an escort with a gun these roller bears all the polar bears in Stockholm yeah they like take the subway commute everyone's coke ads right they're just sitting there they're cool Cola we've met American polar bears yeah like up your country so earlier they're fighting polar bears in our country hounds with astronauts Adam is on a cross-country road trip and sent us a like 35 photos last night I think and he's in he's in Detroit I was in Detroit now right now is not big but he's on the way he's on in route making the long so you he showed pictures of I think he's tweeted a bunch of of like Mount Rushmore if you went to Devil's Tower yeah which oh we were supposed to speak about that because it was an amazing scene we're in in Close Encounters Close Encounters where Richard Dreyfuss is there two scenes he's starting to become obsessed with the the The Devil's Tower where the where the UFO lands yeah or whatever it's called the Close Encounters guy and he's carving it out of mashed potatoes if that at the kitchen table and he gets more and more obsessed and so obsessed that eventually his family leaves him and he takes over the kitchen he'd build a giant model of Devil's Tower when he doesn't know why because somehow the aliens are communicating to his subconscious and he's obsessed and he even takes a garbage can he makes the final tower part of it and he's like standing back and he's exhausted and he's like got the TV on the corner and there's a moment and he's like the classic obsessed artist building this sculpture in 3d which helps him find the route later versus another a woman later and the movies also making a painting of it because she's a painter but the 3d model helps him find navigate up the mountainside there's a moment where he's watching TV drifting off staring this thing trying to figure out his next sculpture move in the corner he sees a new story about the devil's tower and that there's all this activity around it and he's like oh yeah that's what I'm trying to make and at the moment that he sees that image on TV he just walks out of the house so he's drawing the thing he sees in his head he's building building it but he's building like a 12-foot high model in his house and he's destroyed his entire house his entire family for his art he doesn't give a about anything he's pure artists psycho vision of Bill why'd he didn't know doesn't know why he's building this things but he's compelled to and in the moment that he has the answer which is he sees a stupid news story he just walked straight out of the house and leaves it behind because he's on a vision and the vision is to leave earth and to go be with the extraterrestrials see I need to watch Close Encounters again it's incredible so that's where Adam is it's almost like a pilgrimage and they said it's only 250 feet wide I think they'd make it better Tom yeah or something so on that note Adam we're gonna be here next week the three of us we're gonna talk again and then I think Adam will be out next the week after that and we'll catch up with all the stuff like the reading of the dark forest and I think we said we talked about Star Trek I think they talked about stranger things a few weeks ago should I always talk about Star Trek we can talk about Star Trek next time if you want if you want okay well we like next week with more so you guys then bye bye\n"