Episode 08: Space in Visual Design with Deborah Johnson
Show Notes
Have you ever wondered how concert sets and visual effects are designed? This week, Emily and Alexa talk with Deborah Johnson, aka Candy Stations, who designed the visual effects for Sufjan Stevens’ space-inspired “Planetarium” and “Age of Adz” album tours, and has collaborated with several other artists and musicians for performances across the country.
Resources:
Deborah Johnson (Website | Instagram | Pratt Institute | Vimeo)
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Transcript:
Emily
Hello and welcome to the Art Astra Podcast. I’m Emily Olsen.
Alexa
I’m Alexa Erdogan.
Emily
And we’re back with a new episode about visual design in performance with Deborah Johnson, who worked on a few space-inspired projects over the course of a really incredible artistic career so far. But before we get to that, we have another quick housekeeping note.
Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who supported us by voting in the Women in Podcasting Awards. We did not win, but as a brand new podcast with only 5 episodes released at the time, we were so thrilled to be included and the community support truly has been incredible.
Alexa
We're excited to finally be sharing this episode with you - this past month has been chaotic, to put it extremely mildly. Everything that could have gone wrong…did. There was a technical problem with Emily's laptop, followed by an Ordeal involving the plumbing at Emily's apartment, which was then followed by Alexa having dental surgery.
Emily
….Podcasting’s hottest club has everything.
But we’re BACK. We’ll keep everyone posted on our website and socials about our next episode. Thanks again to everyone for their incredible support of the podcast and patience as we worked on it around…everything Alexa already mentioned.
We’ve been very excited to share this episode as Deborah Johnson works a lot with light and lighting design, and several of her works have been inspired by space. Alexa and I were struck by how many - if not everyone’s - first impression of outer space is also through light when looking at the stars in the night sky.
Alexa
So thanks for bearing with us, and without further ado, enjoy this week’s episode!
[interlude music]
Emily
Today we are thrilled to have Deborah Johnson, AKA Candy Stations. Deborah Johnson is a multimedia artist, designer and educator, creating multifaceted visual experiences for stage and screen.
As an interdisciplinary artist specializing in stage design and performance visuals, Ms. Johnson has worked with musicians including Sufjan Stevens, Ray LaMontagne, M83, Saint Vincent, M Ward, Lamb Chop, and Wilco with performances at Coachella's Disney Concert Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Museum of Modern Art, Mass MOCA, Radio City Music Hall, Madison Square Garden, the Fillmore, and several others. She has also created site specific installations for events at South by Southwest, 92 Y Tribeca, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Chicago's Millennium Park, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Deborah, we're so excited to have you on the podcast! Welcome!
Alexa
Welcome!
Deborah
Thank you so much for having me!
Alexa
So to start things off, there might be some folks who are listening to this right now who aren't familiar with what the field of visual performance design really is. So could you perhaps give us a little bit of an overview of what that field really means and how you grew interested in visual design to begin with?
Deborah
Yes, I think I will start by talking about how I came to it and then maybe through that the definition of that will reveal itself and at least in terms of my experience.
I was thinking about this question and I think it's good to start way back and that was when about 20 years ago, which is unbelievable.
I really did start out as what you would think of as a VJ. I guess the technical term is “video jockey” and at the time VJ referred to generating visuals to accompany music performance. And really what that meant was like, creating and designing and manipulating imagery in real time to add a kind of what I call “synesthetic layer” to a performance. So a lot of like trying to translate sound and vision in various ways and shapes and forms.
And how I came to that was really when I was still in art school in Baltimore, and even at at the time in school, I was experimenting with doing also video installations and projecting on buildings and stuff like that. I was becoming increasingly detached from the idea of working as an artist as a solo practice and I had been hanging out with a bunch of graphic designers in school and they were taking me to these DJ shows.
And it was like Kitty Koala and so on. And they had these, like, live video feeds and then also animations and stuff playing as they were doing their sets. And I knew that in there that…Like I had been struck like this was love and I…this is what I wanted to do was be a part of that magic and more than that, it was about being in the room with a lot of other people having a shared experience that was very multi sensory.
So I had moved to Chicago. The first opportunity I had to do live visuals, I just ran straight for it and really bulldozed my way into it with not knowing exactly what I was doing.
But I'm very grateful to that band for, you know, taking me on and taking the risk and giving us all a period of time to figure out what does and doesn't work in a live performance context and using visuals to support the music– not only, again, how responsive it is, but also how it works thematically, right?
And so I think that the more I grew into what I'm going to call a consciousness for the multitude of ways that imagery writ large, right, because projected imagery is typically pretty big on a stage and it can have this really tremendous impact on a live performance experience and the scope and I, the dexterity of my work was also expanding. And so with that, the terminology did, too. And I started to move away from the term VJ for myself and started using terms like visual performer or visual composer because at that point I was still performing visuals live but using “composer/performer” became more fitting because I was integrating more layered and complex elements and blending a lot of analog techniques and digital techniques and then beyond that there was a kind of increased sacredness about being a kind of silent member of the band and try to really handle that responsibility with care and not just reacting to the music, but really composing entire visual narratives alongside it. So for me, it got a lot bigger. I started to think about it more critically.
And for myself, too, I believe that all the technique that I have in the world doesn't matter unless it's enhancing and supporting the performance's narrative. Because the nature of video contrasts like the fleshy human things on stage with the ephemeral, it has this opportunity, and I think, again, responsibility to extrapolate like subtext within the story and the music.
And then you know over time, I also started beginning designing sets and projection surfaces and sort of the direct lighting. And so from there visual design became an umbrella term for kind of a wider range of disciplines. So part storytelling, part performance, part technical artistry.
And then most recently, I've used the term visual librettist. Because the last, I wouldn't say evolution, I've had was for a production called the Eye of Mnemosyne, and that was a co-commission with composer Sarah Kirkland Snider for the Rochester Philharmonic. For that, it was my first experience of building the imagery and the narrative first. So I built the narrative like around the image for the piece and then handed that off to Sarah and she composed the music to fit that visual art, which is like, a total professional and bucket list level twist for me.
Emily
That's such a cool collaborative process. I have a couple of questions just following up on that: when you were talking about digital and analog techniques before you got to the broader umbrella of visual design. Can you elaborate on what some examples of those techniques might be?
Deborah
Yeah, absolutely. So I was starting to blend, say like hand drawn charcoal animation with generative systems and so really trying to approach everything is like a 50/50 agreement. 50 can be digital, but 50 has to be analog and that became my niche using a lot of layers and making sure that there are always at least three layers and that, again, at least one of them needed to feel very hand touched.
Emily
That's so cool because I imagine when you're talking about the terminology changing throughout your career. What's so interesting about a career that spans 20 years is that I'm sure the technology is also changing…?
Deborah
Oh yeah. I mean, that's a whole other podcast for sure, like 100%. But yes, when I first started, it was like, running back really tiny little QuickTime videos because that's all the computer handled. The most layers you could have were like 2. And even then it would crash. You know, it's like it was very, very fragile. And now, it’s not, so it's really limitless in terms of what you can do. And I think that what I've appreciated because of the… what I'm going to call the paradox of unlimited choices, which I think is a term that David Byrne coined, but don't quote quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure it is. But it's like basically you can kind of do anything. And one thing that I ran into when I taught live performance design is I would have students come in paralyzed by the possibilities, right, and this feeling that if you didn't know every badass system or technique or software or whatever, you couldn't even start.
And I started to feel like, oh, well, because it's because there's no like limits, right? So we have to have this sort of freedom within the grid. In some ways, it was better to have a little bit of these guardrails where you had to think quickly on how to get around certain limitations.
It's been quite interesting to see goes, oh, I know what I was saying so within the
Like regardless of all the tools that you can use, of which there are so many, the thing that has always for me been like the structure that binds it together and have it not go off the rails is to make sure that whatever technique that you're using—it's supporting the story so you have to be a storyteller at the end of the day, even if in terms of an effect or technique, does this charcoal texture support the texture of the song? And so you're always thinking about these links between sound and vision and how analogous they are, and I think that for me when I'm faced with that paradox of unlimited choices, that it goes back to tapping into that synesthetic thing. I think that we all have bright blue sounds different than red, all that stuff. And that's something that I think that helps ground me anyway and in terms of all the things that you can do now. Am I making sense?
Emily
I think so.
Alexa
Yeah, absolutely. This is incredibly insightful and I love the way you talk about the synesthetic part of matching visuals with sound and also - and correct me if I'm wrong - but it also sounds like that also integrates with the layering technique that you're using, like different layers, because not every sensory experience is just a singular experience that's always integrated into multiple things.
Deborah
100% yes.
Emily
And what is really interesting that you brought up as well is the point that you've made about the limited choices. But you also have these limited spaces of the concert venue, and even the limited time of the performance itself. And some projects that you've worked on have been very space related. And how do you represent this infinite outer space in a concert venue or especially on a tour where the venue changes with each iteration of the performance?
Deborah
Yeah, that is a great question. I think it's all about relative scale, and then a lot of respect for negative space.
So that there's a lot of shapes cutting into the stage and venue so it doesn't feel boxed in, and then that allows also for projection or whatever visuals they can kind of get stuck onto their surface.
So the beautiful thing about lighting design is that the lights can just shoot beams everywhere, and especially if you have smoke or rain or haze. They become really volumetric and one thing that we always try to do is to feel like the lights were a graphic extension of what was happening in the visuals.
So for instance, if there are like little white charcoal dots floating around in mercury, then the light somehow mimics that movement and that shape, and then you have the haze, and then it feels like somehow that those shapes are then being cast into the room.
If lighting and video work together successfully, it kind of creates this really multidimensional experience, which is really exciting.
Emily
Absolutely. I'm in awe of lighting design generally, because this is something that I feel like can make or break [an exhibition]. We do lighting design for our exhibitions at my job and thankfully our art handlers mainly handle them and they're absolutely brilliant at it. And that's within just the same gallery space that we have every year. We're just lighting different objects.
But also what I was thinking of when you were talking about the sacred and the community experiences earlier is, in the history of Gothic architecture. Like we get Gothic architecture because in 12th century France, Abbott Suger, a Medieval theologian comes up with light as a way to get earthly people into like a higher heavenly plane of thought and just thinking about light in a musical performance in these venues as something that helps elevate the experience is so interesting to me.
Deborah
Yes, 100 percent yes, absolutely. Yeah. It really does become like this cathedral, which is incredibly powerful for sure.
Emily
The scope of your work is so staggering, but to narrow it down, one of the reasons why we were especially excited to have you on the podcast is that you collaborated on the Planetarium tour with Sufjan Stevens, and The Age of Adz, and both of them had these mythological but also space…elephants. Yikes.
[laughter]
Alexa
Wait, I love that visual.
Emily
That's… that's a clip for the blooper reel.
Emily
We were especially excited to have you on the podcast specifically talking about these visual designs, and in particular we'd love to hear more about your collaboration with Sufjan Stevens on planetarium, which was already a collaboration.
For listeners who may not be familiar, it was a collaboration with Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner from The National, James McAllister and Nico Muly. And the entire album is themed around the Solar System. What was it like to work on that project?
Deborah
It was amazing and it was incredibly challenging in the way that the previous production that I'd worked on with Sufjan, The Age of Adz, wasn't. And it was interesting coming off the Age of Adz into Planetarium.
Because with Planetarium, I think it was like more about the outer universe and then the Age of Adz was more about this inner universe.
And, you know, Planetarium was indeed inspired by the Solar System, but there was still this, like mythological and poetic point of view of the lyrics and the multifaceted layering of all the instrumentation and the voice. And so because of that, there was this opportunity to really explore the planets using a wide range of imagery and techniques and again like visual point of view, that was definitely the project where there was a deal struck that each visual would be 50/50 analog in digital and making sure that even if the imagery went really crazy and like impossible and complicated, that it was still grounded somehow, and I think unreal and magical in ways that still felt very human. And I was thinking of it as like a “ as above, so below” kind of approach, so that we were using everything from charcoal animations there and inks and oils and water and light painting. And then like even pulling from the Cassini archives, the satellite imagery and mixing those in. And then like glass and geometric and generative stuff, and taking all of that and really trying to braid and weave it together to form this mixed media universe that felt distinct and unified, right? And divine and human at the same time.
Yeah, that was the approach. And I think for me it was really pushed me in terms of technique and then justifying the technique for the musical content and then also, yeah, just making sure, too, that the visuals did feel like that they were having a conversation with the performance.
That was one in terms of the live show, had the sculptural elements as well. So there was like a giant orb that had been coded in this custom black projection surface. And then behind that was like this giant projection screen so that it felt that there was this main character of the orb, which is primary, and then also being supported by background elements and then lights. And, of course, we had lasers.
So that was a really, really great experience just to learn about how all the different elements really came together to make something that felt both atmospheric and also very concrete in imagery as well, if that makes sense.
Emily
It does. It does.
Alexa
Yeah, that layering approach again that you were mentioning.
Deborah
Yeah, the layering approach.
And then the Age of Adz was a little bit more predestined because even though there was like a lot of freedom to explore and amplify the work of Royal Robertson, who was the artist and prophet that really inspired the album and definitely the artwork. The challenge there was a bit different because it was like to dynamically illustrate the concept and arc of the record as like this apocalyptic space rock opera that preached love and heartbreak and hope and redemption. But then make sure that that we're always kind of coming back to the point of view of Royal and paying homage to their artistic style, you know? In that case, it was used as this device to maintain an aesthetic cohesiveness
Planetarium felt a bit more varied, right? Because each planet has its own personality and its own colors, even, right? And its own mythology. And the whole thing. So, that was different that way. But you know, for both of them, I think that I was, like, rationally confident, emotionally terrified to be translating the sound to vision in a way that felt like respectful and courageous, but innovative, and relatable, and no matter what makes sure that the audience could walk away with like a trove of visceral moments.
Emily
When you're in this process of translation and you're trying to mine the source material of Royal Robertson or also in Planetarium, like when you're engaging in these different resources, can you talk a little bit about how you find inspiration or how you make certain choices when you're designing the visual design?
Deborah
Yes! Can I expand out from these two projects?
Emily
Yes, of course.
Deborah
OK, great. It all comes down. I think to finding some essential message or motif or lyric or just this essential concept of what what is this about? What is this trying to say?
So even if it's like 2 1/2 hour opera, finding what the essential message is and the emotion behind that message, getting that little jewel of like, this is what this really means. If we just cut away everything else and we just leave this little sliver of, like, “this is really what I'm trying to say,” that is the thing that I will take and run with in terms of trying to find the imagery that would be really exciting to translate that message into a larger visual space.
So for instance, you mentioned light like what light is on a basic level and like lights in the dark being like everyone's first impression of celestial bodies and then you mentioned Gothic architecture.
The thing that's so exciting about the term of like, divine light and medieval approaches to light is that it was so symbolic. I've been thinking a lot about light and darkness and shadow and depth in terms of how they can be treated as dramaturgical strategies and extrapolate themes for a piece that I'm working on that happens to be an opera about a medieval.
Saint Hildegard, who was a prophet and artist and a composer, and you know, polymath and all of these things.The way that we're approaching that visual direction is to actually focus on this concept of like divine light. And what I'm also going to call, like, divine darkness. And that casting light and shadow to reveal, let's say, longings or like hidden natures and desires, and that then those shadows that are cast by this divine light are the things that actually lead us to meaning and imagery.
Is something that we're playing with and this definitely comes directly out of my teaching. Is a class I teach at the Pratt Institute, is literally called “light and color and design.” And so often what I'm teaching will run right alongside with, like a project I'm working on are some problem I'm trying to solve.
Something that we were playing with a lot last semester was using red, green and blue lights, and shining them on objects. And then you get the secondary colors right, the cyan, the magenta and yellow and you get this wonderful spectrum. And so thinking about the fact that Hildegard was a prophet, we’re thinking about vision.
We're thinking about prisms piercing like light and revealing the entire - all the colors of the universe.
And how that relates to, you know, her having these visions of what she would call the living light of God. It's about trying to again use projections and light and evolving shadow forms. And like turbulent expressionistic drawings to illuminate her inner conflicts, like I said.
And this is all meant to really reveal the essential thing that was going on, which was a period during her life that was particularly tumultuous and fervent.
She was balanced between life and death due to forces beyond her control and embracing light and darkness and uncertainty, and all of this is born from this one thing that she said, which is “our soul should be like a transparent crystal through which God can be perceived.”
And that was the quote that I think set the tone for the direction that we're going in, which is fairly radical because she was herself a medieval artist. But we're approaching all of this as a way to treat light as the dawn of the universe, and it pierces through time and space, and it itself is a deity. And the way that I talk to my students about the presence of light is the way that I like to talk to them about the evidence of, like, space through shadow.
So always meditating on the relationship between light and dark and seeing and not seeing in the known and the unknown. And all those spaces in between.
Emily
That's a beautiful way to think about it especially because in a previous episode, we've talked to flight operations engineer Janelle Wellons about the different types of light that spacecraft instrumentation can pick up that we can't perceive ourselves with human eyes. I believe it was, it was VIMS. It was the infrared light on Cassini.
And to just think about it in different types of just what different types of light are revealing or casting certain things in shadow is a really interesting way to look at it, yeah.
Alexa
I also love the… as you're talking about light and its connection to spiritualism and sort of has a purifying symbolism to it as well. And as you were saying all that it was making me think of, for example, when astronauts go up into space, they experience this overview effect, which is in itself a very spiritual self transcendentalism experience, right, where they are seeing the illumination of the Earth, you know, coming off of the earth enveloped surrounded by darkness and that sharp contrast is a really spiritual thing, and especially when you were talking about how darkness can also be related to spiritualism and the contrast between light and dark, it's so fascinating the the parallels that are there and how, like darkness, can be a spiritual thing too.
Deborah
Yes, I agree, and I should mention at this point that when I was a girl, the first job I ever wanted to have was an astronaut.
Alexa
Ohh, really? That's cool!
Deborah
And so I think that the joke is that I just never got over it, and so I'm just like, keep making space for myself.
Alexa
I love that.
Deborah
Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Emily
That's absolutely fantastic. Going back to Planetarium and Age of Adz, do you have a favorite song or a specific visual effect in support of a song that you had on either of those albums?
Deborah
I think favorite song is different than favorite visual for me, but, for Planetarium, it's 100% the same on Planetarium. It was “Mercury,” and the visual is this little like charcoal planet. And then there's like all these little tinier charcoal planets and stuff. And then what I call a “space coaster” anyway. But that song for me was the most emotional and I was kind of like low key crying the whole time I was making the visual animations ‘cause I just kept imagining this heartbreakingly restless, oscillating, speedy little planet trying to find its heart in this turbulent universe. And then for The Age of Adz, I think the visual that never failed me was Vesuvio.
But in terms of the performance, it was “Impossible Soul” performed live because it had just such this insane arc. It's like a 25 minutes and it takes on so many different shapes and forms, not only visually, but certainly musically, and then the way that it just builds to this really ecstatic confetti-filled rave moment, the way that we would get there was really satisfying and it was delightfully complicated and surreal and confusing in the whole thing, but live. That was amazing.
Emily
Amazing. I never got to see either tour unfortunately, but Mercury was my favorite, too. I was so excited when you referenced it earlier with the charcoal planets.
But I was thinking of that as an extension of what you're working on now with Hildegard. Because I remember thinking in terms of this connection of mythology and outer space of Mercury as the God of several things. Obviously messengers, thieves, but also divination, which I thought was really interesting.
Deborah
Hmm.
Emily
So, it's just so cool to see that thread. I'm very excited to see or hear more about your Hildegard project. You won a NYFA Grant for that, right?
Deborah
Yes, I did and and that - that was a lighting device playing around with translating like some of Hildegard's designs or imagery into actual lighting device.
And I think the thing that - really taking away from that - using those kinds of devices is going to be about how lights, like practical lighting and digital projection, will work together to achieve these effects that we're going for, which is to say having the shadows feel multiple and legion from just one body. And that those shadows will be transmogrified and in this sort of like zoetropic kind of way with lights and stuff, and then the shadows will actually build the visions that she's seeing.
I’m probably revealing too much right now because we haven't done it yet, but this is the idea, and so using lights as these devices and not only that, but like how like the candles on stage will produce any kinds of effects and stuff like that and so.
I've worked with Sarah on a few pieces and I think one thing that's really exciting is to go back to like Victorian era animation techniques and toys and things and those beautiful inventions and still look to those things on how to create real magic, even if digital projection is intervening in some way so there again goes the 50/50 right, the analog and the digital.
Emily
That's so exciting. I'm so looking forward to it. It reminds me. Are you familiar with the work of Jeanette Andrews?
Deborah
No, I'm not.
Emily
She's a magician and an interdisciplinary artist, and she gave a talk recently at the National Arts Club. She had done a project a couple of years ago, I think it might have been in Chicago, that was talking about the history of computation around the same time as the development of Victorian Parlor games.
Deborah
Oh my God. That is awesome. Yeah. I'm following her on Instagram right now.
Emily
Yeah!
Deborah
Well, thank you.
Emily
Of course.
Alexa
And you've had such a breadth of work that you worked on like from different types of effects and techniques and different people that you've collaborated with.
I'd be so curious to learn about like, what that actual process of collaboration is like, because as you're talking about the amount of thought that you're putting into these projects, it really shines through how much you want to respect the true meaning of these performances of these songs.
Or any of these performances, you're really trying to find the core of it and sort of illuminate it to keep the the symbology of light going through. So what is that process of collaboration like? Is it a very dynamic back and forth with the artist? Is it more of a “I'll work on this and then you view it” kind of thing? How does that actually work?
Deborah
It varies by project, certainly. But it generally….
I will be approached with a piece that's already been done, or a concept, and then we will typically all kind of get in a room and decide.
Well, yeah, go back to that question and I'll try to ask it of the person that I'm working with, like if you could summarize this piece, this album, this song, this whatever into one word or one sentence - could you do that? What would that be?
And then I find that if they can do that, it sets everything off on a really good journey.
In some ways, it's about like, taking this really huge thing and then bringing it down to a point and then from that point, going back into this really big thing, right? And expanding from there.
So once I have the points, the expansion and this is probably the period of time where I have the most fun is research and going back and like OK, so here's the point of entry and just boom and then doing tons and tons and tons and tons of research on that concept, or ways that it shows up in nature, or ways that it showed up in art or architecture or whatever, and really try to pull all those things together.
And then go back to the person that I'm collaborating with and present, “OK, so here's the concept. And then here's how this shows up in the world, I think is what I'm trying to say, and then how can we take that and reimagine it using various media. And what media do we want to be using? And I think that is that critical juncture where you think to yourself, “Well, I can do like hundreds of these different things. Which of them are going to do the greatest justice, right, to the concept? And then, and of course, the texture and the dynamics of the music.
And so at that point is what I'll start making what we'll call style frames or we’ll test images to share and if that feels right to my person, then we move on from there and then in terms of feedback, most of the time and this is great, the feedback that I get from working with musicians or composers really has to do with the structure and the motion of things, and making sure that the movement of the vision feels like it's matching the movement of the music, and really hitting like accents and shifts and you know, punctuating really important moments and that's always really exciting, right?
So the storytelling is definitely one part of it, and then I think this story is so much more supported when all of the musical structure feels like it's really linked to the visual structure as well.
Alexa
It's such a fascinating process. I don't…I hesitate to ask you to pick favorites, but if you did have a favorite project or a collaboration in the past, or maybe even one that is currently ongoing right now, would you have one off the top of your head?
Deborah
Yeah, I've thought about this and I think you know every project has its own everything that like the two that I can highlight are… One’s old and one’s new. The newest is “The Eye of Mnemosyne” which is a piece or co-commission that I worked on with Sarah Kirkland Snyder for the Rochester Philharmonic.
And, it being the Rochester Philharmonic, it was their centennial season and so they were doing commissions in honor of Kodak's founder George Eastman. And we knew that they wanted to do something that was like musing on memory and sound and vision.
And so, Sarah… that's when Sarah and I made a deal that I would actually start instead of it being what I normally do, which is I just talked about which is get the music first, talk to the person, and then go from there. It was going to be the opposite, which was…I would approach it as a visual libretto using that term again, but like, create the narrative from the Eastman archives, figure out what that narrative is going to be, and then hand it off to Sarah to make music, which was super daunting, but very exciting.
And there I was—again, paradox of unlimited choices—like OK, so we're going to make something about George Eastman and the founder of Kodak like where do you start?
And I think…I kept thinking about the word “muse,” and his life and really doing a lot of research into that. And then beyond that, doing so much research into Kodak and their campaigns, which were amazing, like the way that he was able to create these campaigns that kind of predicted what was going to be happening in Americans’ lives and then create the camera that could capture that, and really was so instrumental in like how Americans would frame their lives, memories.
And his greatest invention, maybe in my mind, is the Kodak girls, which were these sophisticated young women that were, you know, showing off his snapshot cameras and really demonstrated the joy and the frivolity and the ease of these portable cameras that came after the Victorian era, which was not portable cameras and not, you know, pretty traditionally demure photographs, very solemn. So these women running around outside with cameras and like, amateur photography was all the rage. I’d always loved the Kodak girls, but really understood their power and their influence in Kodak success.
And so that's when I was like, well, what if instead of focusing on George Eastman, I start to think about him as this vessel for memory as a deity and then why not then start thinking about it as Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, and that the Kodak girls were actually her descendants. And they're these muses running around helping Americans figure out how to document their lives.
And then this helps us be like, “OK, cool. So like, that's the conceit.” Now we're going to limit the period of time between right before Kodak enters the scene and after his death and you know, honing in on that period of time, which was I think was like 1890 to 1932 ish.
It really got.. big chunk of time in Americans’ lives, namely World War One and that was huge. You talk about the way that people document their memories and what‘s sacred, and then you have an event like World War I shatter memory, right? Men were coming back from the war with these fractured memories.
And Kodak had fought so hard to kind of keep the lines between domestic and, you know, what was happening there, intact and it totally failed, you know?
This we found to be very interesting and amazing. And that we were able to take the projections and then map them onto the Eastman Theater, which, on the architecture. So that was like a further level of homage.
And then I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI for various reasons, but it was the first time that I consciously used it to solve a dramaturgical issue for the piece. So in terms of that World War I section, Sarah really wanted it to be pretty bombastic and fierce musically, and [the] archive didn't support that imagery. It was mostly dudes hanging out and smiling and playing football. And I didn't want to be so gross as to show the horrors of war photographs either.
So that's when I used AI Runway specifically to generate bombs from World War One going off.
That footage doesn't exist, but no one questioned it, you know, and it looks amazing. It looks insane. And so that was one time where I could justify, “All right, so now I'm using AI to solve, this dramaturgical problem.”
And then that felt OK with me, right? Like I could square that with myself. Whereas if it generated like Victorian era frames? Absolutely not, because we have that documentation.
So that piece is…It means a lot to me because it's still very much in my heart and my mind, and then very much where I want to be headed in my creative journey.
And then this second piece, I'll just…I'll keep this really brief, but it it is the Age of Adz, and I think that that's one of those projects where I talk about it as a gravestone project it's one of the experiences that when I die, I will be proud of that can go on a gravestone.
I think that all of the projects, but certainly that one was where I think I grew the most in terms of consciousness of what imagery could be for performance and just how much it could take on the narrative and really support like a world building experience. That fundamentally changed me and I think, too, It brought together such a huge amount of talented artists, all of them in their own right.
And we really grew that performance over the course of two years together. Our first show was in Canada. It was a mess. And then by the time we were in the Prospect Park bandshell at the very end we were like oh, you know. And so that was really growing something over time with a Large group of people and seeing us all evolve… you know, you just can't replace those kinds of experiences.
Emily
Thank you so much for such a thoughtful walkthrough of the evolutions of those projects. That's so cool. Also just a quick note, I realize - I'm tracking - but we have a lot of more… STEM listeners. Can you expand on what you mean by dramaturgy?
Deborah
Ohh yes, that's like the science of dramatical art specifically to like opera or theater, and so developing like characters and the story arcs and making sure that that structure holds there.
Emily
Perfect.
Deborah
Drama studies, yes.
Emily
Amazing. Thank you. And I especially love looking at the Kodak girls and also sculpting that narrative with light when photography is such, I mean as a medium, it’s so light sensitive and light plays such a role in shaping those images, so it's just such an extremely cool project.
Thank you so, so much for chatting with us this evening. We have two last questions for you. Do you have any advice for people interested in your fields?
Deborah
I do. It's sort of threefold and these are just things that are in my heart forever. The first is that is something that I say to my students, and it's something that comes from Joshua White from the Joshua White Show and, that is essentially to say like technology does not define the art and it comes from a quote that he actually said to my students at NYU Tandon.
And he said, “If it works, use it. There are no rules. close your eyes and think ‘what result do I want?’ And then engineer it backward. First, do it by hand. Don't worry about the technical disciplines that will come later.”
And, secondly, is that live performance is comprised of a series of moments that happen sequentially, but they will all not be remembered by the audience, and every person is going to remember those moments differently, like a dream or like a montage. And as a designer, I think you can control how best those moments might be delivered, but you cannot control the moments that they take away, and there's some freedom in that.
And then third is that the first fundamental of live performance design is failure. And if you can accept that, like despite all of your best intentions, you're still subject to the unpredictability of technology and the chaos of time and the weirdness of collective energy, the better off you'll be, so you have to be fearless and tireless in your pursuit of this magic. But you cannot be an asshole about it.
That is my advice.
Alexa
I love those. I feel like those are applicable to, just life in general, too.
Deborah
Yeah, it's so true. It's really hard. [laughter]
Alexa
Life is hard. Pursuing your dreams is hard but rewarding, I think at the end of the day, you're doing it right.
Emily
Absolutely. It's on that same point when you were talking about failure is the first step. I was like, “that also tracks with what I understand about engineering!”
Deborah
I can't even imagine, but then like… real shit is at stake.
Alexa
Some failures are worse than others, but…
Deborah
Failure on its relative scale.
Emily
Amazing. And then a final question for you. Where can our listeners find you online?
Deborah
I have my website which is candystations.com and then there's the Instagram for candystations and then a very poorly organized Vimeo.
Emily
Amazing. And we'll be sure to link to all of those in our show notes. Deborah, thank you so, so much for joining us. This has been such an amazing conversation. We're so happy you were able to come. Thank you very much for listening.
Alexa
Thank you.
Emily
Thank you.
[interlude music]
Alexa
Thank you again for listening to today’s episode. All references, as well as a full transcript, will be available in our show notes on our website at artastra.space.
Emily
Please follow us on socials @artastrapodcast, and leave a rating or review on whatever platform you use to listen.
Emily & Alexa
See you next time!