Portrait by Sylvia Kim.A visit to the MIT Media Lab a few weeks ago put the work of experience and interaction designers Zigelbaum + Coelho back on our radar. We had so much fun playing with their colorful and responsive pixel installation Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, which we’ve previously talked about here, that we decided to bring it to DUMBO to show at our New York event last weekend. We caught up with founders Jamie Zigelbaum and Marcelo Coelho, who explained more about their design philosophy, why interactive art is important and the future of… cooking.The Creators Project: Tell us more about the piece you’re exhibiting this weekend.
Jamie Zigelbaum: The piece is called Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, and it's an interactive light installation. We made it because we won this award from Design Miami Basel, The W Hotel's Design of the Future Award in 2010, and they commissioned the piece for us to show at Art Basel in Switzerland. The concept behind the piece is that we're talking about the nature of digital representation. So much of our interactions now take place in the digital milieu, where we're looking at things that are all behind glass. And all of the things that we've created as people, like Facebook and eBay and everything else, are all pixels. So everything, all the vast richness of interaction that we have there, it's all represented to us by pixels, which are non-spatial—they're non-visceral, they're too thin to touch, they're away from the body, always behind glass.So what if you could take that, pull it out from there, and create something physical with it? Our minds, and so much of the grey matter that enables us to exist, is structured around [manipulating] three-dimensional spaces and objects. By using the computer all the time, you're losing a lot of that ability. And we also think that computation itself is much broader than the way that we use it now. We have phones now, we have iPads and we're starting to fracture. Instead of having the main frame, within the desktop, there's now all these little computation devices, and soon everything is going be a computer. So with this piece, we're trying to communicate a little about what computation really could be, and making it into a material that people can sculpt with.Marcelo Coelho: It's like, what happens when computers are all over the place, and start looking like everything else? How are we going to be able to use them? How is information going to change? That's kind of what we're trying to think about…Six-Forty by Four-Eighty is a very visually attractive piece… how do you usually find people interacting with it?
Zigelbaum: So there's four ways you can interact with the piece. One is just by moving the pixels around, they're magnetic. The second is by touching them, tapping the screen, and that'll cycle through the colors in the color palette. The third is though cloning: if you hold down on one [pixel], it starts to pulse, and then any other one that you touch will take that form. And the fourth is with the remote. And the remote can change color palettes, as well as give animations, and turn it off and on.Coelho: There's an interesting kind of dichotomy there, too, because some of the directions require you to be really up close with the piece, and some of them require you to be far away. So when you use the remote, you have to kind of stand back and then you have a sort of global picture of the piece. But when you're up close with it, you have to physically interact with it. And then in the case of cloning colors, you're essentially copying and pasting information.Zigelbaum: One of the interesting things about that is that—we realized this after we had done this, but—almost all technologies that we have are communications media for people. We use our phones to communicate with each other. Even now, you're using your phone to record us [in order] to communicate with other people at a later date. The pixels use humans to communicate with each other. The only way that they can talk to each other is through your body.How do you think the world becoming more augmented is going to affect people?
Coelho: It's an interesting question, and I think it's interesting that you use the word augmented, because it won't really be augmented. It's kind of a natural part of what things can already do, and are, and I think it'll build naturally into the fabric of life. It's really interesting because we used to live in a world where information was not connected to your computer, had nothing to do with computers. And all of a sudden, every single activity that we do now–if you design something, if you are a doctor, if you write–everything you do ends up being on a computer and there's no reason for that to happen. And I think what will happen is maybe a natural return to having the activities we had before, but using computation as part of the process.What kind of themes are you currently exploring in your work?
Zigelbaum: The one we can talk about is the next artwork that we're making, which right now we're calling Vallo, but that might change.Coelho: We're actually looking at the idea of entrainment. It's this behavior that happens in the actual world, where things synchronize. It happens in all different animals—it happens with bugs, fireflies, nature, it happens with neurons in the brain, with cells in the heart—they're all kind of synchronizing, and together they create something that happens beyond what they're actually doing. So we're creating this light installation, it's made up of a bunch of little lights and entrainment is what they do. They cycle information and together create this much larger behavior. Then when people enter the space that's covered in these lights, they become part of the behavior. It's sort of this big scanner structure.Zigelbaum: So you can imagine, if it was in this room, you might have a hundred of these pendant lamps hanging from the ceiling, and each one has its own respiratory process, basically. We're doing a kind of biological model.Coelho: Yeah, we're using this really new cool technology that lets us control the shading of the lamp, rather than controlling the light of the lamp.What is that exactly?Coelho: It's a sensor that's in your phone, but instead of having the visual address, we have this one large band.Zigelbaum: So like, a big, four-inch square piece of glass that can change from clear to black electronically and any gray scale in between. So to make it dark, you could dim the light, or you could darken the shade.Why is it important to make artwork that's interactive?
Zigelbaum: We've been thinking about this a lot, actually.Coelho: I mean, there are a couple reasons, and I don't think we even have a definite answer, but one of the things that I'm currently really interested in is what technology allows you to represent what we couldn't do before. We have this very fascinating history of art, how we use different techniques for representing communication in the physical world, what's happening outside and a lot of it is mediating your senses. What's happening with technology now is that it's expanding a lot of what we can experience in the world, so I think art is an amazing world [as well as] showing that to people. You can be a part of this system, which happens to be how computer networks work. It's kind of this really amazing world. And I think being interactive allows you to be part of it, rather than just watching from the outside.Zigelbaum: And there's something about programmatic behavior, what technology allows you to do is represent or render something, not in a static way or not even in a linear, temporal way, like a film, but in a multi-dimensional, multi-temporal way. You can interact with it, you can render the behavior rather than a specific storyline. So, with Vallo, we're not representing entrainment behavior, we're presenting entrainment behavior.Coelho: And we make you a part of it.Zigelbaum: It is the exact thing. We're not representing it, we're making the exact thing. Which is different, I think, than a lot of other methods. And that's what technology allows you to do.
Six-Forty by Four-Eighty at 55 Washington in DUMBO; Photo by James Medcraft.Is that something you guys are always going to continue striving for and working towards… helping people to really connect and be a part of something?
Coelho: I think it comes down to the experience, too. In the end, we're really interested in how people engage with a piece, and as long as it provides this really revealing and sort of engaging, fun experience. It's probably what we're gonna be doing, whatever form it's in.Did you ever think that you'd be doing that when you were little kids?Zigelbaum: I was gonna be an astronaut, I think. That didn't work out. But there's something amazing about creating these experiences, and that interaction gives you, too. That you can engage with the subject matter. Like, a lot of people that use Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, they might not directly and cognitively understand the concept without us telling them, but I think that it does get transmitted. Because they're interacting with light. And they're interacting with computation in a way that they might not have before, and the message kind of seeps through that behavior. You could paint that image and it wouldn't be the same thing.Coelho: Yeah, the other cool idea that we chose is the idea of co-creation. We made a piece to exist by itself, and you can just arrange it any way you want. It looks great, but if you want to go there and modify it you can. It becomes a kind of palette for you to play with, change and create with us. Just like you play with your food.Do you have any upcoming shows, or any other events that you guys are participating in?
Zigelbaum: We have one in the UK happening next week. [We’re showing] Six-Forty by Four-Eighty at an opening of a new science museum in Cambridge.Coelho: And I'm doing this kind of remote talk at this 3D printing event that's happening. It'll be good. It's really cool, because it's gonna be about food and instant fabrication and design. It's kind of an emerging field. I think it's gonna be really exciting to see what happens, when computers meet food.Zigelbaum: One of our pieces is Marcelo's PhD work, which is a food printer. He made the first one, the first one that really works.CornucopiaWhat's the best kind of food to make with a 3D printer?
Coelho:That question hasn't been answered yet, I don't think. I don't know.What was your first attempt?
Coelho: Chocolate. Just because, I mean, who doesn't like chocolate? I mean if you don't well…but I don't think there's quite an answer yet. I think it's this amazing emergence of food. For hundreds of years we have been using the exact same tools in the kitchen to make food, and earlier to that, we have completely changed every single creative discipline, but that hasn't happened in cooking yet. And I think now it's starting. I think there's this amazing revolution that's about to happen. It will be really cool to see what comes out of it. And to be honest, I don't know. We're gonna see people cooking with lasers, using computers to design meals with them, and be able to share recipes across the planet, make them in real time with each other…I think there's a lot of really awesome stuff that's gonna happen.
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Jamie Zigelbaum: The piece is called Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, and it's an interactive light installation. We made it because we won this award from Design Miami Basel, The W Hotel's Design of the Future Award in 2010, and they commissioned the piece for us to show at Art Basel in Switzerland. The concept behind the piece is that we're talking about the nature of digital representation. So much of our interactions now take place in the digital milieu, where we're looking at things that are all behind glass. And all of the things that we've created as people, like Facebook and eBay and everything else, are all pixels. So everything, all the vast richness of interaction that we have there, it's all represented to us by pixels, which are non-spatial—they're non-visceral, they're too thin to touch, they're away from the body, always behind glass.So what if you could take that, pull it out from there, and create something physical with it? Our minds, and so much of the grey matter that enables us to exist, is structured around [manipulating] three-dimensional spaces and objects. By using the computer all the time, you're losing a lot of that ability. And we also think that computation itself is much broader than the way that we use it now. We have phones now, we have iPads and we're starting to fracture. Instead of having the main frame, within the desktop, there's now all these little computation devices, and soon everything is going be a computer. So with this piece, we're trying to communicate a little about what computation really could be, and making it into a material that people can sculpt with.
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Zigelbaum: So there's four ways you can interact with the piece. One is just by moving the pixels around, they're magnetic. The second is by touching them, tapping the screen, and that'll cycle through the colors in the color palette. The third is though cloning: if you hold down on one [pixel], it starts to pulse, and then any other one that you touch will take that form. And the fourth is with the remote. And the remote can change color palettes, as well as give animations, and turn it off and on.Coelho: There's an interesting kind of dichotomy there, too, because some of the directions require you to be really up close with the piece, and some of them require you to be far away. So when you use the remote, you have to kind of stand back and then you have a sort of global picture of the piece. But when you're up close with it, you have to physically interact with it. And then in the case of cloning colors, you're essentially copying and pasting information.Zigelbaum: One of the interesting things about that is that—we realized this after we had done this, but—almost all technologies that we have are communications media for people. We use our phones to communicate with each other. Even now, you're using your phone to record us [in order] to communicate with other people at a later date. The pixels use humans to communicate with each other. The only way that they can talk to each other is through your body.
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Coelho: It's an interesting question, and I think it's interesting that you use the word augmented, because it won't really be augmented. It's kind of a natural part of what things can already do, and are, and I think it'll build naturally into the fabric of life. It's really interesting because we used to live in a world where information was not connected to your computer, had nothing to do with computers. And all of a sudden, every single activity that we do now–if you design something, if you are a doctor, if you write–everything you do ends up being on a computer and there's no reason for that to happen. And I think what will happen is maybe a natural return to having the activities we had before, but using computation as part of the process.What kind of themes are you currently exploring in your work?
Zigelbaum: The one we can talk about is the next artwork that we're making, which right now we're calling Vallo, but that might change.Coelho: We're actually looking at the idea of entrainment. It's this behavior that happens in the actual world, where things synchronize. It happens in all different animals—it happens with bugs, fireflies, nature, it happens with neurons in the brain, with cells in the heart—they're all kind of synchronizing, and together they create something that happens beyond what they're actually doing. So we're creating this light installation, it's made up of a bunch of little lights and entrainment is what they do. They cycle information and together create this much larger behavior. Then when people enter the space that's covered in these lights, they become part of the behavior. It's sort of this big scanner structure.
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Zigelbaum: We've been thinking about this a lot, actually.Coelho: I mean, there are a couple reasons, and I don't think we even have a definite answer, but one of the things that I'm currently really interested in is what technology allows you to represent what we couldn't do before. We have this very fascinating history of art, how we use different techniques for representing communication in the physical world, what's happening outside and a lot of it is mediating your senses. What's happening with technology now is that it's expanding a lot of what we can experience in the world, so I think art is an amazing world [as well as] showing that to people. You can be a part of this system, which happens to be how computer networks work. It's kind of this really amazing world. And I think being interactive allows you to be part of it, rather than just watching from the outside.
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Coelho: I think it comes down to the experience, too. In the end, we're really interested in how people engage with a piece, and as long as it provides this really revealing and sort of engaging, fun experience. It's probably what we're gonna be doing, whatever form it's in.Did you ever think that you'd be doing that when you were little kids?Zigelbaum: I was gonna be an astronaut, I think. That didn't work out. But there's something amazing about creating these experiences, and that interaction gives you, too. That you can engage with the subject matter. Like, a lot of people that use Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, they might not directly and cognitively understand the concept without us telling them, but I think that it does get transmitted. Because they're interacting with light. And they're interacting with computation in a way that they might not have before, and the message kind of seeps through that behavior. You could paint that image and it wouldn't be the same thing.
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Zigelbaum: We have one in the UK happening next week. [We’re showing] Six-Forty by Four-Eighty at an opening of a new science museum in Cambridge.Coelho: And I'm doing this kind of remote talk at this 3D printing event that's happening. It'll be good. It's really cool, because it's gonna be about food and instant fabrication and design. It's kind of an emerging field. I think it's gonna be really exciting to see what happens, when computers meet food.Zigelbaum: One of our pieces is Marcelo's PhD work, which is a food printer. He made the first one, the first one that really works.CornucopiaWhat's the best kind of food to make with a 3D printer?
Coelho:That question hasn't been answered yet, I don't think. I don't know.What was your first attempt?
Coelho: Chocolate. Just because, I mean, who doesn't like chocolate? I mean if you don't well…but I don't think there's quite an answer yet. I think it's this amazing emergence of food. For hundreds of years we have been using the exact same tools in the kitchen to make food, and earlier to that, we have completely changed every single creative discipline, but that hasn't happened in cooking yet. And I think now it's starting. I think there's this amazing revolution that's about to happen. It will be really cool to see what comes out of it. And to be honest, I don't know. We're gonna see people cooking with lasers, using computers to design meals with them, and be able to share recipes across the planet, make them in real time with each other…I think there's a lot of really awesome stuff that's gonna happen.