Oregon Art Beat; #1012; Julian Voss-Andreae

I have an interesting image how if you look at it purely experimentally how bad the antibody looks compared to this let me find the right article quickly not much here there it is that's that's an image of the structure of an antibody just taken purely from experimental data they take antibodies and make a crystal out of a shine x -rays on it and by deflecting the x -rays in this very specific way they can use the position of all the atoms in there that's how they find the structure of those molecules and you can see this is a pretty asymmetric and not and floppy kind of looking kind of a fair here but what I'm using actually for my sculpture

is a molecule which is assembled from different experiments this year is one experiment to look at those fragments by itself after cutting them off the protein and then this is probably another experiment and then they modeled these hinge regions here and then they symmetrized it so everything is exactly rotational symmetric like the molecule should be so what we see here is already quite an abstraction in reality these things wave their arms in the wind so to speak because that's hungry oh yeah much more everything is water there in the in the body so what they do is they they wave their arms and they probably recognize by how far their arms are part if they attach to something that probably helps them also identify what they're attaching to I don't know all right in sequence I

somehow where did I do that I have for that in a slight talk yes let me get this talk we have a fixed watch that looks good it looks very good ding ding ding and let me quickly think I must be 2007 lectures no 2006 maybe they're called it's the four -trigger that was in German this one should have it oh that's some interesting images anyway in here like this one for example that shows in the background it shows the diffraction pattern of what you get when you do the research to find out where the items are and this

one shows the same protein in different ways of rendition but that's not what I was going to show you I get carried away okay let's see what we got here protein jellyfish this by the way was my first mitered cut sculpture in 2001 that was not a protein yet but that gave me the idea that's the principle of mitered cuts that's a jellyfish protein that's a virus that's that piece pulling yeah right that's a sheet of steel that with laser cut pieces there was before I could etch them so it was my first attempt at that there was shipping a piece to Australia

that's a hemoglobin in the stage of corrosion which is the same that happens in our blood okay here's the antibody dead um there it is can you back up and okay can you activate that there you go and then just for this one just rotate the whole computer a little bit clockwise more towards me yeah that's good any good yeah i will do that i can also give you this thing here that's a movie move file m o w movie that could be done one more time if you could go back the same thing with the yeah building the petroleum man

with your okay what's the timing good like this yeah it's good you good thank you that's good yeah i was going to ask you if any of those color animations that we saw um either the antibody or your representation of it of your art um could be output it as quick times yeah this this one would be no problem i have that ready to go okay um if you wanted in color like what i showed you i can make that that would be great if you could okay i'd be interesting because i'm sure we don't have the program to play your mathematical file no if it has the ability to output as an animated you for animated jiff or move probably a move file in the highest in the highest

resolution possible yeah that's a bit of a problem because those are like by default low resolution files but i'll do that okay where's bracket yeah okay okay it's just about to look at this that it does for me too you know what i'd love for you to do you've done it a couple times and i've got some of it already just about as fast as that thing will go you know what the why should i go through the why don't i go through the slight talk here because there's lots of nice visuals we wanted to just do really rapid fire changes but the rapid okay it looks great okay obviously we can't talk about it but it looks wonderful you can go in faster yeah when there were just ding ding ding ding ding ding ding yeah oh there with the bunny this is great fun stuff

it's like an episode of Star Trek where they're uploading something into somebody's brain who go fly even faster we'd speed it up in editing it's great we're slow down all right i'll just scout a little bit about the living room cool let me ask you first to say your name right man who who are you and what do you do i'm Julian Vasandrei and i'm i'm a sculptor there are many many artists we meet who are we picking up a lot of that noise next door um yeah the high end whatever that is they're

sawing now right a number of artists we meet especially people whose work is perceived as abstract leave definition of it just to the viewer and even they say oh it just comes to me as i work at it it's nothing pre -planned you strike me as exactly the opposite here's his very planned it's it's planned to a to a large degree at least most of my work is but but that's that's certainly not the whole the whole thing that interests me on the contrary what we can becomes really fascinating for me is often where it departs from the pre -planned and where it becomes just finding something in this strange mystical way it's hard to explain but that's one of the main reasons i'm doing art because you have a chance to attack those kind of sources and it sounds level for your inspiration yeah tell me about that where do you look i'm just since i was a

child i was very interested in looking very carefully at at stuff at nature whatever it was grain the grains of sand or whatever it was and and kind of that passion kind of like led me to to study physics and in physics you look at very tiny things like atoms or even smaller things and one of my main interests is the science of life so the science where atoms get together make molecules very complex and complicated molecules and then they built this marvelous complicated machinery hang on a second i need you to jump in and tell me if it's overpowering us if we if we need to stop um well i mean it's it's in the background um maybe i can ask them to be quiet for now what's the what's the track hole that made the sound because it was a sign it sounded like and the creaking yeah maybe it's this track i just asked them to to

so it sounds like science is a huge part of your art yeah it's a huge part of my my whole personality i just love you know to to look at how stuff works and how how stuff looks and nature is just the most incredible world i mean it's like it's just like it's it's much more interesting to me than most inventions and most made human made things and what kinds of parts of nature are you looking at i'm mostly interested in right now in the in the in biochemistry just the machinery of life you know it's it's a concert of thousands and well actually a hundred thousands of molecules which do more highly complicated things with each other in concert and and looking at proteins is kind of looking at reduced like little spots in that kind of incredible machinery there's a lot of artists will look at things like

the human body it'll be an arm it'll have fingers or hand we've been doing this for so many times right you are looking at such tiny pieces that are you're looking at molecules but i look at arms too you know but about what moves an arm why does why is an arm so beautiful that interests me you know i i love an arm with the muscles and how it works but it's it gets even more beautiful if you if you go from this organic macroscopic realm down to the constructivist mathematical realm of little molecules you know which which kind of which which make all this wonder happen but it's it's not important to look at of course only these little details it's important to kind of reassemble in your head and see the whole picture but it's informed by the knowledge of the detail it also sounds like you're incredibly methodical in how you design and then in how you create the pieces it's a funny mixture you know i'm

i am a methodical if i want to i'm kind of it's like it's my natural thing is to be methodical but but at the same time i can be i'm i'm just a very spontaneous person i just i do decisions and then follow them without even having a reason for it so like moving here for example was one of those and or becoming an artist and and that's so i always balanced like the zen spontaneity with the scientific logical reasoning step by step thing i think that's kind of fun to you know switch between those two worlds so you're a logical spontaneity type i tried to yeah that's i think that'd be ideal if you can achieve that what prompted you to move to Portland my wife love basically yeah she Adriana is a went to read college so and then she she did her graduate studies here in Portland and i was at that time in Vienna and Austria doing physics and i i was at a point where i was ready to leave and she wasn't so it was natural for me to come here what prompted you to leave science for art i had always you know wanted to do art i was

i was a painter before i started science in the first place and i i always thought of science as as kind of a i felt like a tourist there always you know i did it with all the power i had but but i still thought at one point i'll be leaving it again and the point was there i kind of had a feeling now it gets really too much into details and i had really kind of gotten a feeling for the stuff that interested me the most why i went there in the first place which is kind of the quantum weirdness of nature and after i had a feeling that i not master that at all but but get a taste of it what we know and what we cannot know then i felt this is time to go again so as you bring these tiny pieces of nature to life in your art how do people react do they understand they're looking at something that's got a scientific representation to it well typically yes because either i tell them or in that context it's it's obvious it really depends you know in the in the in the there are some examples of people who are

like only in the art world and they totally refuse to look at anything scientific and i think that's really big pity because they just fail to see the sublime just because it happens to be found scientifically but thank god there are many people with an open mind so that helps and who what types of people are gravitating towards your work? well i know typically often scientists of course but but that's not always the case i'm trying to not cater to the specialized audience you know i'm trying to make pieces which are art in itself i don't want really people to have a PhD and you know i don't know biochemistry or something to be able to say oh this is a great piece that wouldn't that wouldn't be my goal at all but it's interesting that scientists who are not generally thought of as the art types are so drawn to your work right yeah but i mean for me it's kind of natural if you for example

i assume you don't know much about classical chinese music like i don't you know if we listen to a piece like that it could be the greatest composer the greatest in you know player and we would just not get it so we basically lack a certain knowledge and that prevents us from having this art experience so but that's very different for somebody who's skilled at that you know so i kind of it's it is important for some of my work that you have a knowledge which enables you to see the piece as what it is let's talk about the script's piece take us through how you decided what to make it right and how you actually build that okay so it started out i was asked to to propose a sculpture based on the antibody that was all i heard basically so an antibody is a is a very complex very large molecule which is the central aspect or one of the main aspects of our immune system and not only ours but all mammals and all many animals and so it's basically a wide -shaped molecule which attacks

stuff in your body which would otherwise make you sick so it protects you on a daily basis a million times and they're very different some attack only they attack very specific kinds of viruses of pathogens so the so they already had in mind they had in mind because it's not only interesting because of the role that plays in our bodies but also for research it's it's a very important molecule because it's basically our eyes to the protein world where they make certain antibodies which connect to a specific molecule to look at them and on the other hand they use antibodies as as prospective cures you know that's your son now that's my daughter okay all right so so it has very big potential in medicine so it has these kind of it's important for research important in our bodies and it's important for for medicine so that's why it's a central molecule and i was drawn to the to its shape because it's a very kind of if you if you make it drawn in a symmetric way it's a very iconic thing with the potential

to making something really iconic so that's what then i was thinking of how what to make with this molecule i knew i want to have it in this upright standing y shape because that made the most sense why does it make sense because it looks a bit like a human being so and when i start thinking about that and drawing to get ideas one of my ideas was to basically to to kind of to the association with a with a famously or not a guy standing in the circles this man drawn in 1490 with with a hands up here in the legs like that so i just for fun i superimposed the image of the antibody onto this human being in the circle and it turned out that it had exactly the same aspect ratio in the same aspect it hit the same proportions which which was really kind of stunning and interesting so i i planned on using that analogy and and use the ring and and just put around the antibody and and then i i kind of had the idea to to kind of attire to religious images and and kind of have raised emanating under those

wings all pointing to where the head would be if it was a human being to kind of like suddenly elude to that to that image without really saying oh look Leonardo you know i don't want to make it to obvious but but somehow you should connect to it because you know we are so attuned to the human proportions and then to actually build it yeah that's that's a big deal the last piece we did a little piece on you was 15 pieces right how many pieces are in this one well this time we have about 1400 yeah so the amino there's the antibody consists of 1336 amino acids and i got a i got a long ways from 2004 till now you know now i i'm able to use laser cutting which gives me the precision i need and i'm able to mark all these pieces automatically so i find my way through this enormously difficult puzzle and so i found several like techniques to save time and effort basic to make this possible at all so i could make the protein part in about 400

hours maybe which is still a lot of work but it was possible at least and also which is really nice in that piece is that it's there there's consists of two identical halves so i could always work in pairs and make sure that i don't make any mistakes and kind of compensate each one to make them look alike so to basically i'm using everything to compensate for possible errors accumulating yeah because if you're off whoops that's going to sound in the background if you're off so i want me to once say if maybe there's a door that could be called anica conservative rolling because i imagine if each piece is off by just two millimeters well that would be a lot it'll it'll a thousand miles of an inch it'll magnify when they're all put together that's absolutely right since it's essentially one dimensional piece every error accumulates and accumulates accumulates and what i'm doing is so after a few pieces locally it's pretty accurate but then globally i need to readjust all the time

so that's that's that's absolutely right yeah so it's very difficult yeah and but it's since i've been doing this for a few years now i have enough experience to actually make it which wouldn't be possible otherwise that was but but the the hardest part was probably then to assemble the whole thing where i built a stage in my studio 12 by 12 feet and and had printed out the whole top front view of the whole sculpture as it was supposed to be so i could use a plumb line and see where exactly do i need to be and of course this is not completely accurate because steel moves and stuff when you build it and i could but i could then use that to kind of find again a compromise and then kind of make it into into the position i wanted in and oh and also another important trick was that i i a certain prominent spots in the molecular structure i put little posts of a specific height in there so i know so i got an idea of the height of it so i have the x and y axis and the z axis with some spots so i'm pretty good

to find my way in this complex thing sounds like you also end up becoming an engineer yeah it's all engineering questions those kinds are very engineering like it's like science you know you have these engineering type of problems and then they require engineering type of solutions i've never met an artist who is so scientific in his own approach that you can write your own programs to tell the computer how to right cut the stuff because you know nobody would write those for me so what can i do i have an idea like i want to render a amino acid chain as it might not cut sculpture so what can i do try it by hand i tried it doesn't work it's super complicated so i basically wrote a program which translates scientific data into cutting instructions and that's what i'm doing yeah i've known one artist who will send a sketch over to yeah an architect who then renders it for a computer hated and then sends that to the laser cutting steel place right to cut his pieces or him i love working with the computer directly because i if i'm in control of all the steps then that gives me a

chance to you know to have my creativity kind of play with it you know if i outsource it then then then it doesn't nothing happens in my head and i don't use it for my growth but if i do every step by myself maybe not all the sanding all the grinding but but all these kind of steps then then i can develop new things because i think very much in terms of technology and what is possible tool wise to make i think many people don't realize how important it is that what technologically is available determines what kind of artist being made and i kind of i love to think in those terms you know what what can i do in principle and the laser precision of the cutting is right laser cutting is prime example you know you can take flat steel you can't do 3d that's difficult it's still very expensive you can do it but it's it's not really there yet but 2d you can cut out incredible precision water jet cut out of glass laser jet laser cut out of steel whatever you want it's and it's really incredible hmm how would you describe how your art has changed over the time you've been doing it

um i just i'm just much more it has a change oh yeah it has changed i mean i got much better tech technically of course i can i can pull it off now such a thing but also aesthetically i it's just like i don't do them take anymore that or at least not that much that i have a conceptual idea and then i kind of let it overwhelm that the artistic outcome you know i just it's for me the guiding ideas the guiding principle is what kind of what do i want to achieve in that object and then i just don't get distracted anymore so much so easily by by by technical difficulties or whatever if i want to achieve something then i do it no matter what if it costs money i don't care if it's at least if i can't afford it of course so i just you know everything is under this guiding principle of the art of the feeling of the metaphor of of what i want to achieve even if it's a pretty like cloudy image but i

have you know but it's in my mind and i want to achieve that and all goes towards that direction so i'm very much more clear about that now so what was your goal that you want to achieve in that piece well i had this you know i had this image of of this human like this it's called angel of the west it's like an angel it's an army of little angels in our bodies to help us every day to help us survive and it's kind of it's all about this this this problem slash beautiful thing that that we in science go and reduce everything to the smallest thing you know we we just take everything apart and there's a huge problem on the one side yes you can look at all these things and think how great they are but we take it apart and we often fail to assemble the whole thing so it's kind of my my my my thinking is is grounded in this kind of in this tragedy of science at one point or western kind of the western approach of the world at one point you you have the incredible benefits of technology and science

on the other hand we we eat horrible things and we think health is defined by the amount of calcium or vitamin C in our food you know and and and we drive our cars to the gym and then burn energy in the gym so we we lead a crazy life and that's all based on our on our scientific approaches but it's very hard to kind of like full circle think it together again and kind of heal it and my biggest wishes that that my work is kind of shows kind of a way to kind of heal what we what the damage we do with science basically but that's one aspect but of course it's also about you know finding these incredibly beautiful things these nuggets you know in the natural world and you've got a new project that you're working on that incorporates a whole new technique yeah describe a little bit what you're trying to do yeah I've been thinking about it started out yeah it started out with the idea of it started out with the bucky balls really I made these these bucky balls and it's the you have points and space which are connected just like a molecule and I was wondering what

happens if I generalize that not only from a surface but towards a three -dimensional to the bulk basically off the bucky ball and I was I was thinking what is a natural way of connecting dots and space and and I've been thinking about this for a while and and after I talk with an old physics professor of mine he pushed me in the right direction by pointing it doesn't matter what it is but some certain mathematical things out and so I realized that that this kind of structure exists already in in form structure and that happened when I when I went with my kids to Starbucks they had to share one of those vanilla milks and so they they got these big transparent cups and so they start bubbling it up so I saw this form structure in there and I realized that's exactly yeah they put bubbles it's incredible for forming yeah you know it makes this big bubbly froth thing and if you look at it carefully and just subtract the films the planes you know and just look at the connection of of where these bubbles meet you get a

network of points and space which are always connected with four neighbors in a very specific and beautiful way makes it very rigid and so very like it's an optimal kind of configuration because all the bubbles try to minimize the surface tension so that kept me started on that project so at the same time while I'm trying to emulate that on the computer I'm trying to do that in reality without computers and that that kind of thought gave gave me the idea to use for bubbles balloons and fill the gaps in between the balloons when you fill them in some mold with a hardening liquid like resin or wax and then you'll pop the bubbles and then I'm left with a with a with a structure yeah interesting see you just told me that you consulted a scientist oh yeah for your art yeah as opposed to an artist talking to other artists first of all many artists would say I'm not going to tell you I figured this out ten years ago and took me twenty years and I'm not going to tell you and I hate that scientists never do that they always share artists are sometimes very stingy with their knowledge and then again it's often not

that great that knowledge because it's their personal knowledge and they don't put it in terms that anybody else can understand them so what's what's the use for for that and with this particular example I just happened to remember that about fifteen years ago when I was at that university in Berlin this professor computational physics professor I had these images of this random lattice where he did some simulations on and I just I thought that was kind of the thing I was looking for so I was asking him for what exactly did back then and are you willing to share your techniques then of course yeah well okay I have to patent it first you can't patent them that was a joke yeah um have you ever I'm actually looking into that but um I just you know it needs to get to a point where I can do that and I was I basically it's cost a lot of money so I was thinking if I make money then I'll probably do that but I have to be quick because after one year of publication it needs to be patented that's true that's true and whoever heard of art or an art technique being patented that's well I probably this yeah that you can you can patent I think

decorative processes but you could probably patent as something else too I think as a I don't know this is complicated last I want you to describe some of the early pieces you did that Norman Neal have okay um the two bucky balls the nested bucky balls end up yeah big one in the trees yeah describe those what we're doing well the nested bucky ball is based again on a Leonardo image he drew the first it's called the truncated icosahedron for mathematician what what physicist called bucky ball easy to say yeah that's kind of complicated pronounce but he basically drew this truncated icosahedron in this style with a wide kind of of strats so that's what's the image where I came from and then I had the idea it's interesting I cut it out of with a water jet out of out of a bronze sheet and then I realized what would happen if I just don't throw away the middles but just go smaller and smaller and you know and keep it so

to speak so I was again able to use the whole material just with a like with the proteins and then I had the idea to take this successfully the success of smaller bucky balls and put them into each other which is a bit tricky to do but it works if you if you take the positions of the 60 carbon atoms and stick rods through it so it kind of emanates from the center the idea behind it was basically to allude to the to the wave property of this bucky ball which is the research I'd I'd help with in physics and and if you think of a of a wave it's it's spherical object going in wave fronts you know from one point and that's kind of the image in this in this bucky ball what about the giant one in the trees well it's 30 feet diameter it's there it came from slightly very different similar may may research again was you know to show the quantum behavior of the bucky balls and quantum behavior in that case meant that a single bucky ball with a diameter diameter of one nanometer goes through two slits at once which if a part a hundred nanometers so if you blow it up to our world you have a soccer ball

this size and a goal here another goal over at your neighbor's house and the soccer ball goes through into both goals at the same time so that's odd to say the least but that's what happens or what what we measured you made it even larger right and and and the interesting thing is that thinking in our world of the quantum object bucky ball means you have to think of something cloudy something spread over space continually smoothly distributed in space while it's traveling not being looked at when you look at it becomes this particle we know but while it's traveling and you don't in principle even look at it you know it's this thing which is vastly bigger than just this particle do you ever envision it i don't know how it was displayed at try and creek before it moved there's how the floor it was on the ground was on the ground did you ever envision it no being hung no around trees oh yes oh yes that's all idea tree i made one for bucky ball which was 16 feet diameter and and i realized it would collapse so i just thought what can i do so i put around trees and then i realized

how beautiful that is and that kind of brings me to the to the initial idea it's it's about things intersecting with each other you know you lose in the quantum world you lose the boundary between this object and that object between you and me if you will you know there's this really one cloudy thing where stuff overlaps in a kind of spooky and unintuitive way for us molecules do merge and pass through each other they do yeah like this bucky ball a single bucky ball goes through two opening at once you know that's that's what the research research shows and it's just like it hasn't arrived in our heads yet how weird that is and and so it's about kind of like finding a metaphor for this kind of underlying reality of nature you know we we are so used to the what we call classic physics stuff has hard edges and it's either they're not there you know and stuff is determined that's all not true if you look just carefully enough what about the small red piece that they've hanging oh yeah i think it's a very early piece of yours yeah it's 2002 as my first welded

piece calata that's that's what you call calata it's that's based on a on a on a very interesting little protein from from from an African herbal plant which is used there in zaire to to induce labor when labor slows down in childbirth then the women get a tea out of that stuff and then the labor restarts and many survive that way as opposed to not probably if it slows down too much so it's a protein from an African tea from yeah from a plant called calata calata in the traditional language and and that protein is the one that kind of makes this effect on on on accelerating labor and i was just intrigued with the structure because it's an unusual protein it's cyclic it has no beginning and end so it's cyclic and i just happen to like it a lot so i made this my first steel structure of that and then you have a