♪ethereal ambient music♪ ♪upbeat electronic music♪ -["Frida" VO] There's nothing worse than the word "art appreciation."

It implies that you're just there awestruck, and whatever you're being fed, you appreciate.

Art really is about discourse and about discussion.

-["Frida"] Do you have any ideas what museums could be?

-Decolonizing museums.

Like, not having stolen things.

-If your art is for the public, then the public should have a right to express their opinions and views.

-As a young artist, like, sometimes I see things and, like, get so frustrated and feel like nothing has changed.

♪♪♪ -["Frida" VO] From the very beginning, we have been fighting against sexism, racism, and the death hold that wealthy people and wealthy institutions have on art and culture.

-40 million dollars, 1-5-0-6.

-The Guerrilla Girls will complain about anything that pisses them off, and they always do it in an unexpected way.

-[Coco VO] What the artist has to say about things other than his or her art has not always been considered that important by the arbiters of the art world.

And the Guerrilla Girls were at the forefront of doing that starting in the 1980s.

-The power of the Guerrilla Girls' work was that whenever I looked at their material, I felt implicated.

It wasn't somebody else's problem, it was my problem.

♪♪♪ -["Frida"] I'm one of the founding members of the Guerrilla Girls, and I've been involved in just about everything the Guerrilla Girls have done since 1985.

I'm kind of a lifer.

But I am, in my real life, an artist.

-["Käthe"] And I'm also a founder of the Guerrilla Girls and also a lifelong political artist.

♪elegant orchestral music♪ In fall of 1984, the Museum of Modern Art did this exhibition -- an international survey of painting and sculpture.

There were 169 artists in the show, and only 17 women, and very few artists of color.

And women artists in New York were really pissed off.

♪aggressive rock music♪ -["Frida"] We were educated to sort of respect all the institutions and the people that were making decisions and the people who were writing art history, but it dawned on us that it was filled with its own biases and limitations.

-["Käthe"] We're marching in a picket line in front of the Museum of Modern Art, and we realize not one person going into the museum cares.

[music slows to a stop] And that was the "aha" moment.

It was so clear that there had to be a better way to convince people and make them understand how much discrimination there really was -- both racism and sexism -- in the art world.

♪moody synth music♪ -Most of the women who are doing all the bitching are completely talentless.

For example, like, the top women artists, you don't hear them making these embarrassing feminist pleas.

-["Frida"] The more we looked at the numbers, we realized that there was a systematic elimination of women and artists of color from the so-called mainstream of the art world.

-[Guerrilla Girl] What does it mean that museums are getting subsidies and have no obligations to be ethnically diverse?

-["Frida"] We thought it would be really important to just state the facts and see what people did with the facts.

We met at my loft, and we were just a hodgepodge of artists.

We called ourselves "the Guerrilla Girls" because we had to become anonymous to say what was obvious.

♪♪♪ Kathë and I came up with the two first posters.

The very first poster was this list of male artists who allowed their work to be shown in galleries that showed fewer than 10 percent women or none at all.

-[Kathë VO] When one worked, we would do another.

When another worked, we would do another.

The facts are a hugely important part of it.

But also, we had this kind of outrageous, in-your-face design and crazy headlines that you couldn't totally ignore.

We passed the hat around to pay for printing.

We were sneaking around New York in the middle of the night putting these things up.

And people saw them and all hell broke loose.

♪energizing electronic music♪ We mostly did them in SoHo and the East Village, which were the big art neighborhoods of that time.

So we put these posters up on the gallery windows right below the name of the gallery.

♪♪♪ -["Frida" VO] It was so exciting to go out the next day and to see a dialogue being ignited.

♪♪♪ I remember a gallery director came by with her son, and he singsong-edly sang, "Mommy, why is your name up there?"

[laughs] -If you look at the art schools, at least half of them are women.

So what happens to these women?

Where do they go?

But that's not the art world discriminating, that's their choices.

♪ethereal synth music♪ -["Frida" VO] The advantages of being a woman artist: Working without the pressure of success.

Not having to be in shows with men.

Having a relief from the art world with your four freelance jobs.

Being reassured that whatever work you make, it will be labeled "feminine."

Knowing your career might pick up after you're 80.

Over the years, about 60 people were in and out of the group.

Collaboration was wonderful when it worked.

It was painful when it didn't work.

We didn't understand where it would go, but we knew that what we were saying, moment to moment, was something that was irrefutable.

♪♪♪ -["Frida"] Well, do you ever think to count how many women, how many artists of color?

-[woman] Oh, absolutely.

-["Frida"] Yeah.

And does that change your attitude or your idea?

-[woman] It has a lot, and the idea, I think that's why maybe my mother and grandmother were never really that interested.

Because they didn't see anything that was done by people that looked like them.

♪sparse ethereal music♪ -["Frida" VO] I always felt distance from the socioeconomics in the art world.

I grew up in Pittsburgh in a working-class family.

There was a lot of trauma in my family with parents dying and getting sick, and I had a lot to take care of, so I really never felt the freedom to rebel in my adolescence.

-["Käthe" VO] I grew up in New York City.

I was an activist in my teens, and I got kicked out of college for being in a demonstration, and that kind of pushing the envelope has always been my life, and it's always been the kind of art I do.

♪♪♪ -["Frida"] I was always uncomfortable with this idea that there was a level playing field, because it was not my experience in life or in the art world.

So the minute I felt the freedom to criticize it, it was wonderful, it was great, it opened up a whole part of my brain.

♪quirky upbeat music♪ I couldn't stop.

I can't explain why, but I couldn't stop.

And it became as important to me as anything else I did in my life.

♪♪♪ -["Käthe"] Those of us who were unfairly left out of the system, it was like a breath of fresh air.

It was so-- it seemed daring, it seemed exciting, and the people on the posters were really pissed off.

-[Guerrilla Girl] They now feel they have to contend with us as a power.

And it's very bizarre to be at a point where I get more respect with a gorilla mask on than I get with it off.

♪energetic percussion♪ -[Frances VO] In 2006, we had, at The Tate Modern, a small room with a group of the Guerrilla Girls' posters.

But I was put on the back foot by journalists grilling me about precisely what the Guerrilla Girls were charging us with -- lack of representation of women artists, lack of diversity -- and I had no way of responding.

My inability to respond was published in The Guardian.

I felt profoundly exposed, profoundly embarrassed.

And in that moment, the Guerrilla Girls' wonderful pink letter really resonated with me -- that idea that I had agency in this and I had to take some responsibility.

-["Frida" VO] [echoing] Dearest art collector, it has come to our attention that your collection, like most, does not contain enough art by women.

We know that you feel terrible about this and will rectify the situation immediately.

All our love, Guerrilla Girls.

-About a year later, I took over the leadership of building the international collection, and I presented a strategy to massively broaden the diversity of the collection, and to really address the representation of women.

That moment with the Guerrilla Girls was profoundly influential.

♪♪♪ -["Frida" VO] There are wonderful individuals on the inside trying to change things.

But there is a corporate, capitalist, institutional structure that's connected to much larger forces.

-["Zubeida"] Right now, art institutions do not get enough government funding, and so they're reliant on individuals to donate to them to make art exhibitions happen.

A lot of the people are very wealthy individuals for whom art is an investment asset, and so they will support exhibitions that raise the value of their art collection.

I feel like in any other industry, that would be considered insider trading or something, but it's not.

-["Frida" VO] [echoing] Guerrilla Girls' Code of Ethics for Art Museums: Thou shalt not give more than three retrospectives to any artist whose dealer is the brother of the chief curator.

Thou shalt provide lavish funerals for women and artists of color, who thou planneth to exhibit only after their death.

-[Käthe VO] We did a whole series of these posters.

After many years, we thought it would be great to do an updated version and build the actual monument and drag it around to every museum we could possibly get to.

-["Frida" VO] [echoing] Thou shalt honor all thine employees, never undermine their efforts to unionize, and pay them a living wage.

Thou shalt banish board members who make the world a worse place.

If thou exhibiteth super-expensive art bought at super-fancy galleries and donated by super-rich collectors for super-big tax deductions, thou must renameth thyself The Museum of Super-Rich People's Art.

-[Käthe] Everybody, this is a monument we think needs to be outside every single museum.

So who wants to talk?

-The public has no say whatsoever; they just go and look at the art.

What these museums are doing is they've basically turned it into a business.

-[Käthe] You are now an honorary Guerrilla Girl.

-[man] Oh, really?

-[Käthe] Yes.

-Thank you.

-Now, I think, in a lot of these institutions, they've, like, clung onto the fact that it's trendy to be, like, putting art out there that is promoting social justice, but when you look at what they're actually doing in practice, it doesn't support those ideals.

-["Frida"] Oh, I agree.

We think that trustees should be chosen who make the world a better place.

What did you see in the museum today?

-Oh, we didn't go in.

-We are yet to go in.

-We came to meet you first.

-["Frida"] [gasps] -Yeah.

-["Frida"] Oh, that's so great!

-[woman] Yeah, we saw it on your Instagram!

-["Frida"] Thank you so much!

-I consider my art Guerrilla art.

Well, like, I, like, put a poster up in my city in India and stuff like that about mental health.

-["Frida"] That's wonderful!

-["Käthe"] Fantastic.

-This is great.

Oh my gosh.

-[woman] Thank you, thank you so much!

-I took, like, 15.

-Aw, thank you.

-["Käthe"] We've been so lucky that people all over the world want our work.

♪ambient oscillating synths♪ -["Zubeida" VO] The Guerrilla Girls' work has always been statistics.

People don't believe you unless you show them the numbers.

♪♪♪ Without the numbers, you really have a false sense of diversity.

-["Frida" VO] For the last 20, 25, 30 years, we get people saying to us, "I never knew this before."

Our stuff is easy to understand, and then you take off with it on your own.

-I've been teaching now for almost 30 years.

I make sure that my students are aware of the Guerrilla Girls' contributions.

They get museum shows in Europe, not so much in the United States.

I think that that's an indication of the resistance still to the practice and to the message of the Guerrilla Girls, despite the fact that there are probably, you know, 200 art history majors writing papers on them right now.

-["Zubeida" VO] One of the most exciting things for me has been the shift where the younger generation are learning about the Guerrilla Girls earlier and earlier -- in high school, or they saw the work on social media.

It gives me a lot of hope.

It gives me a lot of hope.

-["Frida"] Bye-bye!

And I hope you find things that you love to look at!

Can't we think about art as not being about winners, but about something that we all need in our lives?

Thank you so much, and good luck with your own work!

-[man] This is a big moment in my life!

Yay!

-["Frida"] There are so many cultural traditions where art is collective, and it's done in a community, and artists work together.

They might do individual work, but they somehow present a kinder idea of what it means to have a creative life.

♪♪♪ ["Käthe"] Come over!

♪♪♪ [water running] ♪tender ethereal music♪ -[Anicka VO] Humans have a fear of impermanence.

We go against nature to try to preserve and stabilize and control something that resists all of that.

In around 2010, I started deep-frying flowers and plants.

This very clunky batter is almost masking and destroying the flower itself, and then you subject them to 300-degree hot oil.

♪♪♪ The visual aspects of it was definitely something that I was aiming for, but the odor of, like, french fries [laughs] of an artwork or something, that was very much compelling me to, you know, fry up a batch of these.

♪pensive synth music♪ There's always been an incredible vulnerable aspect to my work.

Many of my works use this element of deterioration and perishable materials.

♪♪♪ I'm interested in the kind of mutations that can take place in these changes.

I work with living creatures, ultrasound gel, bacteria, algae, kelp, and soap.

-[Anicka] Looks so good.

Oh my gosh, I forgot all about this.

Wow, it's like seeing the piece for the first time again.

It's really good.

There is such a sensual quality to this soap.

The thing that really keeps haunting me is this glowing, floating underwater kind of quality.

And it's really hard to do, you know?

-Because resin doesn't do it... -[Esther] Right.

-[Anicka] Acrylic doesn't do it... -[Esther] Right.

-And as problematic and volatile as it is, I'm trying to retain and capture that quality.

I can tell you what to anticipate is that, because glycerin is a humectant, it will just over time slowly shrink a little.

-[Esther] And so that's okay?

-If you get dents and cuts and gashes, that's fine; it's not intended to be pristine and perfect.

♪ethereal oscillating synths♪ -[Anicka VO] I'm quite omnivorous in the areas and disciplines where I draw from.

Before it's even a fully-fleshed idea, I start small trials in the studio, much like you would do in a laboratory.

As the trials start to bear fruit, we bring in the experts to help us, whether it's a software engineer or a forensic chemist or a perfumer.

I look to the natural sciences, synthetic sciences, artificial intelligence research.

That seems like a very maximalist approach, but I think that we can't really discount how we are influenced by all of these different systems and ideas and information.

-[Anicka] I just want to climb up on these hills... -[man] [chuckles] -[Anicka] And just enter into the screen, -and go into the drawing.

-[man] Yeah.

-How can I translate that then into the outer world -- that feeling of wanting to climb up these hills?

'Cause that's what these anemone panels do for me.

-Yeah.

-You know, that rolling, undulating feeling.

-Yeah.

-But then, when we were talking about more of a kind of a... Maybe-- I don't know, maybe we need to think about something more immersive.

♪upbeat bouncing synths♪ -[Anicka VO] We have a very limited imagination when it comes to machines.

We have a lot of anxiety that they will replace us.

But what if we could relate to them in a more optimistic way?

♪♪♪ I really wanted to merge the biosphere with the technosphere.

I consulted software engineers, molecular biologists to create what I called "aerobes."

I was inspired by the comb jellyfish, the lion's mane mushroom...

The machines respond and detect one another through high frequency radio waves.

And they're able to detect heat signatures of visitors.

Some aerobes are curious about the visitors, while some are more shy.

It was really important for me that they were unpredictable, and that they had space and time for their own evolution.

You know that they're mechanical, and yet they feel palpably alive.

♪uplifting ethereal music♪ It inspires a feeling of awe and calm, like you're swimming next to a humpback whale.

I'm always surprised how much power that they had to quell a lot of anxiety.

With these aerobes, I, too, get to inhabit this space of wonder.

-[woman VO] Another kind of trace is formidably encapsulated by the French word "sillage."

It means "the degree to which a perfume's fragrance lingers in the air when worn."

So in a way, an organism's sillage is a living presence sensed even in the absence of a body or an author.

-Oh, yeah.

This is the bullfrog.

-[woman] [laughs] -That is very animal.

-It's like boggy, frog... -Mm-hm.

-Swampy.

-[woman] Very swampy.

-One of the earliest forms of inquiries in my research is how we relate to smell, how it informs what I would call "the biopolitics of our senses."

I grew up in a very pungent home, and was very keenly and acutely aware of how smell does start to create these forms of identity around these invisible scent molecules.

♪ethereal piano music♪ In the Western world, we really tend to reject very pungent odors as a sign of weakness, as a sign of being more animal.

We have left those odors behind us to a perfectly-sanitized world where we control what we can smell and what we can't, and that is an impossible approach to existence.

I had an exhibition in Milan, and I worked with a French artist and perfumer, Christophe Laudamiel.

One of the central series are two dryer doors with two different scents.

One dryer door had a bullfrog aroma.

The other contained this broomstick, sort of cardboard sweeping-away aroma after everything has been packed up in your home, getting ready to evacuate a space that holds a lot of memories of love and sadness and despair.

It really is about memory, but also forgetting and letting go.

♪bittersweet string music♪ I always straddle this awkward line between perishability and non-perishability.

We look to art as a form of preservation, as a statement on our civilization, on our species.

And yet, you can't have monumentality without recognizing the embedded vulnerability around monumentality.

My work deals a lot with what it means that things are perpetually blossoming and decaying.

Change is the most constant form that we can acknowledge and embrace.

-[Hank] This is nice.

-[Rujeko] Mm-hm.

So are these negatives all your grandfather's photographs?

-Yeah, and I haven't seen them, actually.

It's kind of awesome just to, like, open up a box and... find these things.

These...

This is one of the first shoots I was ever on.

-[Rujeko] Oh, wow.

-[Hank] These are photographs from my mom's archive.

This is a picture I've used a lot in my work.

-Mm-hm.

-[Hank] They're being baptized in the pool.

-You see the horns here and... -[Rujeko] Mm-hm.

-[Hank] This woman here.

Look, this is so powerful.

-[Rujeko] Mm-hm.

-The two things that I remember people saying to me as early as three or four years old are "You ask too many questions" and "You're not supposed to stare at people."

♪playful oscillating synths♪ [chuckling] Most of my work is some combination of the two.

Photography was a reason to stare.

All of my work is about framing and context, and about how, depending on where you're standing, it really shapes your perspective of the truth, of reality, and what's important.

♪♪♪ Along with photography, I have to work in different mediums.

♪♪♪ I have to try different ways to look at something that we might think that we've already looked at a thousand times.

♪arpeggiated synth music♪ I was reading Roland Barthes' book 'Camera Lucida,' where he talks about the punctum.

His perspective of the punctum is the thing that pierces you, the thing that sticks with you in the photograph.

When I look at this photograph of a Harlem Globetrotter standing in front of the Statue of Liberty, the punctum for me was this arm.

♪♪♪ I like to balance the spectacle element of sports with the context of history and politics.

During my research, I was reading Ernest Cole's landmark book 'House of Bondage.'

He, as a black photographer, traveled all over South Africa documenting the horrors of apartheid, and then smuggled these images out of the country.

♪♪♪ The specific image of a lineup of nude miners with their arms up being strip-searched really struck me.

I had seen it many times before, but I recognized, with a critical eye, that I felt often guilty looking at this picture because I was always gawking at their bodies.

My looking at it was reinforcing the oppression.

♪♪♪ I wanted to remake that image as a sculpture, so I titled it Raise Up.

I want to give viewers a chance to walk around and look up and look over, to just try to look at these men with dignity.

♪♪♪ Just about six months after I made that sculpture, halfway across the world in Ferguson, Missouri, the phrase "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" became popular after the murder of Mike Brown.

-[crowd] [chanting] Hands up, don't shoot!

-[Hank VO] When I finally exhibited this work in the United States, people called it "the Hands Up, Don't Shoot piece."

♪♪♪ I see everything as connected, so if I'm making work about coal miners or Ferguson or basketball, frankly, a lot of the bodies are connected through this history of oppression.

-[Hank] Zoom in, and then you can just cycle through the pages.

Mm-hm.

I'm so glad that we chose the 3D-scan real hands for this instead of digitally-made hands.

-[Sam] I wanna show you the finger.

They take the 3D print, and then they coat it with this wax, so that it can stick to the ceramic.

And that level of texture is gonna come across in the bronze.

-Yes, that is crazy.

-[Sam] Yeah.

-[Rujeko] They look good.

-And so, do you know what that piece is?

-[Sam] No, this is actually just a sample.

-[Rujeko] Sample for, like, the patina?

-[Sam] Yeah.

-[Hank] This is so nuts imagining how they broke the sculpture into 650 pieces... -[Sam] Mm-hm.

-[Will] Mm-hm.

-[Hank] And how many people are working on this one.

-[Sam] Yeah, it's all hands on deck.

-The whole foundry.

-[Rujeko] Great.

-Yeah, we break ground on Coretta Scott King's birthday, and then... it debuts on MLK Day.

-[Rujeko] Mm-hm.

-And so the eight months in between, everything's gotta get done.

♪sparse ethereal music♪ -[Hank VO] A few years ago, I was invited to submit a proposal for the Boston Common -- an installation in memorial to Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King.

I didn't really know at the time that two of the most prominent civil rights leaders from the South actually met and fell in love in Boston.

The fact that their love would actually ripple out in so many ways from that first meeting was really profound for me.

I wanted to make a sculpture that was inspired by their intimacy that's larger than life.

I found a picture of them at the award ceremony for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The punctum of the photograph -- the part that I was struck by -- was the way that their arms were wrapped around each other.

His weight was resting on her.

The fact that we speak so much about Martin Luther King without acknowledging or celebrating Coretta Scott King was something that was important to me, as well as everyone involved.

There was tension, you know, in me and also my collaborators about what does it mean to not include their faces and other body parts?

But really, when I think about Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King, I have a feeling.

It's not the pictures I've seen, it's a sense in my heart.

There is a poetry in these interlocking arms and this sculpture that people will go inside of and replicate that gesture.

We wanted the sculpture to actually get to the heart of it.

-We always talk about the hidden archive of Black history that's not hidden but it's there, and it's really the... the researcher who has to reimagine the archive.

When I think about, you know, Aunt Cora's quilts... -[Hank] I wonder if that's part of the inspiration for me -- just a lot of the work that I do is always very much in conversation subconsciously with the work you're doing.

-[Deb VO] I'm Deb Willis.

I'm a photographer, a professor.

I teach at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, chair of the photography program there.

♪ethereal synth music♪ I'm a writer about photography.

♪♪♪ As a child, Hank was fascinated with photographs.

He would go into the photographic album, ask my mother, "Why is this photograph in color?

And why is this in black and white?"

And he would change the pages to tell his own story.

At that time, I worked for the Schomburg Center of Research in Black Culture as a photo specialist/archivist.

After school, I would pick him up during my break, take him to work with me.

He always wanted to know, "Why do you have photographs of people we don't know... [laughs] in our house?"

And I said, "Because we need to know the stories of the people in the image."

-[Hank VO] As a child, with my mother's work, I didn't really understand what she was doing.

Now, I understand that her work, along with many others', was really critical in building and expanding the field of photography, and especially Black photography.

Looking at the way that Hank grew up in a professional archive of a library but also in the family archive made him curious about how to create a narrative about Black life.

♪erratic synth music♪ What I took from photography was incredible knowledge and experience of how to look critically at the world, at myself.

Because I've always been reaching to the past and trying to connect with it, sometimes the closest I could get to history is the photographic document.

♪ethereal synth music♪ There's something really just beautiful about actually beginning to see the scale now that there is over 500 pieces welded together.

It's like, it's happening!

I would estimate that there are at least a thousand people who've had to work on it in some way, shape, or form.

♪♪♪ Engineers, architects, and the community boards... and then getting it shipped across the country.

♪sparse synth music♪ The sculpture is about the Kings, but it also is really imbued with the care, consideration, passion, and talent of so many other people.

-[Roberto VO] We're working on something historic.

Martin Luther King, he talked for the people like me.

♪uplifting synth music♪ -We wanted to make sure that we were really thinking about all different kinds of people coming into the sculpture.

We wanted to make sure wheelchairs can go inside.

We want people to come up and touch, so the patina lends itself to being touched.

-The story of Martin and Coretta was inspirational, and also looking at the other 65 heroes of the local Boston Civil Rights Movement, honoring those names in the plaza, and pushing forward a new narrative of what it means to be in the city of Boston.

-[crowd] Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one!

[cheers and applause] ♪tender synth music♪ -[Hank VO] There are so many monuments to heroes of war, and there are not very many to heroes of nonviolence.

I'd like to believe that this is just the beginning of a new way of thinking about how public space can be viewed, and how we reflect on the past with care and concern for the future.

I want to make work that really gives people a sense of pride and connection, that's going to mean something to people beyond my circle, beyond my world, and beyond this lifetime.

♪♪♪ -[Tauba VO] I want to learn new things constantly.

And I'm always trying to find the pattern behind things.

I've educated myself about a number of scientific or mathematical principles through crafts like weaving and paper marbling.

♪ethereal ambient music♪ To marble paper, it's all about relationships and ratios.

You have to mix your paints so that they float on the water and so that they spread out -- not too much, not too little.

♪undulating ethereal music♪ There's a limit to how controlled it can be.

♪♪♪ I like that idea quite a lot of cultivating your sensitivity in this really practiced, purposeful way.

And I've used paper marbling as the source material for a lot of my public works.

♪♪♪ It seems appropriate to me to work in a lot of different materials and media and processes... because I'm focusing on connectivity and the relationship between lots of different things.

Every time people come to my studio, I like to show them these shelves, because there are just so many treasures on them and things that I like to live with and think with.

Some ashes of artwork that burned in a fire.

This is a sea sponge.

The water pressure where this creature lives is very extreme.

The architecture of this skeleton has been studied for its strength.

It's a powerfully strong lattice shape.

I would say I had a really profound experience with this puzzle, actually.

It takes over a thousand moves to disentangle this bar from these rings.

I got to where there was just one ring left.

It turned out that having one ring left was sort of the equivalent of having gone as far as possible into a maze in the wrong direction.

[laughs] And I had to completely backtrack, put all the rings back on, and then take them off a slightly different way.

And so I felt like this puzzle taught me a lot about the assumptions that you make about progress along the way.

♪ethereal synth music♪ -[Tauba VO] I am quite compelled by things that just barely work.

The near-impossibility is key.

I stumbled upon this beading technique via a chemist from Taiwan.

He's been using this technique to model molecules, and in his models, the beads are the bonds between the atoms.

Now I'm trying to do something of my own with the technique.

I'm interested in the edges of where a system coheres and where it starts to fray and come apart, and also where the edges of our understanding and comprehension fray and start to come apart... like my own limitations and then some more collective limitations, either because we haven't gotten there yet or it's just really out of bounds for the human mind.

[mouse clicking] ♪choral singing playing from computer♪ The kind of learning I'm really interested in is not just to learn a fact but to change how I digest and think about all [chuckling] future facts.

For example, my friend Cameron sent me this Bulgarian state television choir record.

-[women] ♪singing in Bulgarian♪ -[Tauba VO] I felt like there were sounds in there that had that effect on me or that I could never come back from, in the best possible way.

The first time I was told about the idea of different sizes of infinity, that was an idea I never came back from.

♪Bulgarian singing continues♪ Encountering the idea of four-dimensional space and the shapes that inhabit it has been a tool for retuning my gaze, retuning my imagination.

Ideally, it would be nice to make something that isn't just an image that a person might remember, but an image that has a tiny effect on all images after that.

I love painting so much, and there's so many different ways to approach it as a technology.

♪energetic oscillating synths♪ During college, I was just looking for a summer job, and I thought, "I'm gonna try the sign shop!"

I worked at New Bohemia Signs in San Francisco as an apprentice and assistant for about three years, and they were just beautiful hand-painted signs.

♪♪♪ In sign painting, if you go too fast, you're gonna be sloppy.

But then if you go too slowly to try to be perfect, it really doesn't look very graceful.

I really learned a lot about finding a kind of sweet spot, which is something I think about a lot in lots of different ways.

♪♪♪ I love painting and I think I'll always do it, but I think I just select the medium that's gonna serve the idea best, so sometimes that's painting, but a painting can't do the same thing that a piece of glass can, for example.

So when I felt like a certain set of ideas called for working in glass, I went and learned how to flame-work glass.

That's my approach to materials and media.

[rumbling and churning] The Wave Organ is one of my favorite places in San Francisco.

It's pretty close to where I grew up.

[rumbling and churning] Essentially, it's, like, a whole bunch of pipes that are half-submerged in the water, and at different levels of the tide, you get different sounds out of them.

I think I'm so attached to it because it exists across a boundary of air and water and sand.

[rumbling and churning] The whole instrument is played by the sort of instability of this boundary, and it's different every time I go.

When I talk about trying to cultivate the right state of mind, that's one of the things I'm trying to get to -- to be somewhere that isn't a hard edge.

♪wonky single notes playing♪ ♪wonky organ music playing♪ -[Tauba] I think that sounds good too.

What do you think of how long I hold that note there?

-I think that was good.

But I did think that the timing was a little... -iffy.

-[Tauba] Wonky?

-[Cameron] On that one.

-[Tauba] Mm-hm.

-[Tauba VO] The Auerglass is a two-person interdependent pump organ that I made with my friend Cameron Mesirow, who performs under the name Glasser, and so it's A-U-E-R, glass.

♪Auerglass playing♪ The Auerglass started when Cameron and I decided we wanted to make an instrument that required cooperation between two people to play.

♪♪♪ Each player only has half a keyboard, so there's a four-octave keyboard that's been divided up between the two sides in alternating notes -- one has C, the next one C sharp, et cetera.

♪♪♪ Each player pumps air for the other player's notes.

Cameron's way of putting it is that we have to breathe for one another.

[cheers and applause] ♪Auerglass playing♪ Playing the Auerglass feels just barely not impossible.

The instrument has this quality of near-symmetry but just off by a click that feels like a really activating relationship.

-It's hard!

-Yeah, it's hard.

[cheers and applause] -[Tauba VO] It's great when we achieve that synchronicity, but I feel like the times when we fumble in our performances, I end up being really fond of them.

♪Auerglass playing♪ I do a lot of drawings that involve this knit structure, and I often figuratively lose the thread when I'm drawing, I lose the rhythm.

They're really fast, spontaneous work.

And then sometimes, I get kind of fixated on completing one long connected form that has a set of changing rules to it.

It's almost impossible not to go into a kind of trance state.

♪Auerglass playing♪ Often, when I'm drawing, I ask myself, "Can I move from the wrist?

Can I move from the fingers, from the elbow, from the shoulder, from the center of my chest?"

♪♪♪ I feel like a better thinker when I draw.

There's so much wisdom embedded in techniques and procedures for crafts passed from person to person.

I think that if you're a person who marbles end papers for books for decades, you know just as much about viscosity and flow as a scientist.

But you know it through your fingertips and your senses, and in a different way.

♪♪♪ The body is a valuable thinking tool.

In the past, I was really moving through the world from my head primarily.

But now, the enterprise is more about trust, and a change for me in the last decade is to draw on my own body for knowledge.

♪♪♪ [cheers and applause] ♪ethereal ambient music♪