Ep. 175: Artist Nancy Baker Cahill on Augmented Reality and Embodied Consciousness

Sep 6

Nancy Baker Cahill spent her youth gaining an appreciation for both civic engagement and dark humor. Her creative passions were ignited with a powerful youth arts program, but then went dormant for a difficult spell in adulthood. Now, fully in her stride as a new media artist known for work that examines power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness, her AR artwork can be found covering Time Square, at international festivals, and floating in unexpected, intangible places, worldwide.

Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to new media Artist Nancy Baker Cahill. Nancy is known for work that “examines power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness” at the intersection of fine art, social justice, and emerging technologies such as augmented reality. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) app that is an art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression - its intention is to challenge traditional conventions of public art and introduce a participatory, immersive art experience. Her geolocated AR installations have been exhibited globally, and have earned her profiles in the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications, and she was included in ARTnews’ list of 2021 'Deciders'. Her work was featured at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival in the Immersive Main Competition and was on 90 screens in Times Square New York City for the entire month of July as part of the Midnight Moments program. She’s an incredibly thoughtful and compelling new media artist, as well as powerful voice for justice and inclusion… here’s Nancy

Nancy Baker Cahill: My name is Nancy Baker Cahill. I live and work in Los Angeles, California and I’m a new media artist who examines systemic power, selfhood and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space. And I’m also the founder and artistic director of 4th Wall, which is a free augmented reality art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression.

Amy: Hot damn! I cannot wait to unpack all of that. But before we get to this fully developed version of Nancy Baker Cahill, I love to go back to the formative years to see what you were working with. Can you paint the picture of your childhood?

Nancy: Well, I was really fortunate to grow up just outside of Boston, which has a pretty robust public school system. And as a kid I was a total bookworm, I read everything I could get my hands on. But was especially taken with science fiction and thrillers, so that was sort of my literary diet for a long time. And I grew up in a very politically minded family. My father was a local politician and came from a long line of local politicians,he really,inculcated in me a deep sense of civic obligation and civic duty.

And really just kind of civics in general, the importance of civic engagement. So I, from a very early age, I was knocking on doors, having doors slammed in my face, as we canvased for various candidates. And Boston, while being a very complicated and flawed city on many different levels, did have a colorful roster of Democratic candidates when I was younger. And so getting to know some of them and working actively for them was really fun and really formative. I now recognized that it deeply shaped my approach to art and art making as an adult.

Amy: That’s why I ask the question, because we always unearth some formative elements that actually turn up in your career and also in your purpose. I don’t know, it’s fascinating to me how it all kind of alchemizes as a person grows up and these experiences end up really informing what they end up doing. And I loved hearing this story of you canvassing as a kid because it paints this really graphic picture of both an engaged dad, who is interested in teaching his child about what’s important. And also somebody who is interested in exposing you to, the raw edges of what it looks like to actually create change.

Nancy: Yeah, you know, I feel really fortunate in that regard and my father is nothing, if not persistent. And so having doors slammed in the face was never a deterrent (laughs). But I do think that it was great role modeling in terms of resiliency and resilience, accepting no, but continuing on the journey and in the pursuit of whatever it was we were trying to achieve.

Amy: Yeah and it seems like it’s kind of a whole picture of some people aren’t going to agree with you, but it’s not a personal rejection, so you don’t need to get downtrodden by this.

Nancy: Yeah, that’s a great additional window into it. I wish more of that had stuck. I was always sort of like, that’s so rude, you know, and he’s like, no, it isn’t, they don’t want to be bothered, we move on.

Amy: What about your mom, where is she in this picture? Was she also politically active?

Nancy: My mother really, no, my mother wasn’t politically active. But what my mother really brought to me, a whole different type of resilience. My mother has overcome all kinds of brushes with death, medically, and she’s just an incredible fighter. But I think my mother, perhaps her greatest gift to me is your irreverence. I’m a very serious person and my mother is not and she finds humor, often dark humor in literally almost anything. And so I am deeply grateful for that. That was also very formative (laughs). And certainly inflected my worldview (laughter). It’s like a great temperance to anything overly ideological.Let’s just say I’ve never been too susceptible to orthodoxy of any kind.

Amy: Talk to me about the teenage years because those can be rife with awkwardness or angst or I don’t know, needing to sort of break free from certain constructs. What was it like for you and where were you growing then?

Nancy: I again, was so lucky to go to an exceptional public school, a big, diverse public school called Brookline High. And I was raised in an incredibly strict household, which also, I would say, fed my, I would say deep suspicion of authority and my own subversive instincts. So I have known from the beginning that I do not like being told what to do. And I find excessively strict regimens incredibly oppressive. And I do think that that actually shaped my interest in really examining power structures as well.

So high school was both an incredible escape and also it was the late 80s, so it was a time for me, anyway, of tremendous angst. I looked and wanted to be… looked like and wanted to be Robert Smith from The Cure, a disastrous hair dye decision, I would say, that I made over and over again. But I also… I was really, really (laughter) fortunate to be a part of it. This was like a rare moment in history and I’ve talked about this with other friends of mine who graduated at the same time. And we were all, you know Brookline, and obviously the [tax fare base 0:08:02] could afford an extraordinary arts program, whether it was the visual arts, theater, any kind of… and music, oh my god, was out of, like next level.

So we were treated at every level, like professional artists. And I think that was a real anchor to Windward for me. I had an extraordinary teacher, Austin Sends who was my mentor and oftentimes a surrogate parent. So as we all navigated the upheaval, social, political, all of it, otherwise, all of those sort of fraught cultural wins, we had this community and this resource that continued to sort of… I mean I can’t express how lucky I was.

Almost to a fault, I graduated thinking I was a professional artist and that I didn’t need to learn much more. And I was quickly disabused of that when I went to college. But it was a time of great freedom. I could go virtually anywhere I wanted, whenever I wanted. And that was… and then I had this incredible program that I was a part of and friends and community that were all, that all took our creative crafts really seriously, that was my escape and that was the source of all of my joy. Not that I can remember experiencing a tremendous amount of joy during that period, but it was really kind of a lifesaver.

Amy: can see that because when you can kind of be amongst a tribe that affords you acceptance and challenges you to find your own voice and to express yourself, you develop a kind of decision making and creative agency that whether you go on to become an artist or not, it informs how you navigate the world in a really empowered way.

Nancy: Yeah and I think it was a really rare time. I’ve been told that those programs actually have been defunded somewhat, they’re not nearly as…

Amy: Oh yeah, they don’t exist anymore and it’s a tragedy.

Nancy: Yeah, it really, really is. Because I look at my peers and they’ve all gone on to do wildly creative things and they’re all successful in different arenas, whether it’s Hollywood or the art world or even academia because at that crucial moment of neuroplasticity we were really encouraged to explore and to believe and trust in our own creative instincts. And I just don’t think that that’s all that common anymore. And also, I would say that the creative piece of learning, which is so crucial, has also been excised.

I’m making gross generalizations here, but as our public education systems have been so gutted for political reasons, we’ve really foreclosed a lot of innovation and potential for innovation by cutting out that crucial part of pedagogy.

Amy: Yes. My opinion too, and I’m really grateful to hear you say it. I also loved that you pointed out that that’s a really crucial time of neuroplasticity. I think that’s an important thing for all of us to be thinking about. I also think that kind of program kind of trains you to look at the world for possibilities and how you might enact those possibilities. And it’s the exact opposite when people are telling you what to memorize and how to get an A on a test. That’s programming you to just follow rules and not challenge things. And I think that’s a problem.

Nancy: And I just learned this morning, on my run, I was listening to this extraordinary podcast that the whole expression, ‘thinking outside the box,’ is related to an exercise where your challenge to connect nine dots with four lines. And I guess most people think it’s easy when they first look at it and then they realize, oh god, no, this is actually really complicated and difficult.

And apparently the answer, spoiler alert, involves (laughs) drawing a line outside of the box and that’s where ‘outside the box thinking’ comes from, that expression. And I think that’s so interesting…

Amy: Oh, I didn’t know that, what a great thing to learn. I’m gonna win the next trivia night! (Laughter)

Nancy: I know, but it was profound to think about the fact that like that’s because you haven’t yet developed the skill, the software, the instinct to literally think outside the box and you can’t just tell someone to do that. You literally have to train your brain to do that. And so I’m just really grateful that my brain, through a variety of influences has been trained to think oftentimes outside the box.

Amy: So with that tremendous public program of arts education, that probably informed your decision to study art at Williams College, but can you kind of unpack that decision making for me and what the college experience was like for you?

Nancy: I transferred to Williams from a college in Minnesota called Macalester College. And I had applied actually to RISD and Williams and I had gotten into both, and I was told by the people paying for my education, aka my parents, that they would pay for Williams. And so I did not go to art school as a result. So, I mean given that non-choice, which I do not regret, in retrospect, I’m really grateful for the education I got.

I knew that I wanted to pursue that [0.15.00] first and foremost, in any way I could. And the art faculty was small, but mighty at the time and I also knew that I had this twin star, this, you know, real interest in political theory. And so I really took as many of those classes as I could, in addition to the art classes. So I would say that defined my college career, those two things.

Amy: With hindsight now you can look back on those experiences, same way you look back on your canvassing with your dad and all of your mother’s resilience. Is there anything from the college years that really was very impactful residual experience?

Nancy: Well, one, just the basic, the basic rigor. I feel like it was the first time in my life that I really understood the value of critical thinking and was taught how to think critically. Prior to that, as wonderful as my education had been up to that point, I had never really learned those specific tools and skills. I also had the enormous fortune to meet a variety of people who were interested in political subversion. And so with a few other classmates, we formed an agitative propaganda group called Eat Me. And Eat Me took…

Amy: Oh my god, I love you Nancy (laughter)..

Nancy: Eat Me took a, let’s say a less earnest approach to addressing things like, oh, sexual violence, eating disorders and body image. We took on the issues at the time and with Abbie Hoffman as our sort of north star, and it was extraordinarily formative and for me anyway, not just cathartic, but again, kind of engaged these impulses to ask critical questions, jolt people out of a kind of inertia, using performative techniques.

And of course the use of spectacles is often very persuasive as well. And I think what was really revelatory to me too was that at the time when we were having all these really charged conversations, I made a lot of assumptions as one does. And I always assumed that the men, and I’m being very sort of reductive and binary now, because this was a reflection of the time. A lot of the men that took women’s studies classes, I thought they would be very natural allies and would support our cause.

And in many cases it was like football players, that kind of gave me a more nuanced appreciation for what allyship could be, if engaged thoughtfully. I learned a lot, I have to say. I was deeply unhappy in college. I was depressed 95% of the time and the 5% of the time I wasn’t, was when I was off campus. But when I look back, I do think that it really, I think, cemented my intellectual hunger and appetite, which remains truly rapacious. I love learning, I never tire of it and I think because I was fortunate enough to get those foundational skills, it’s something that is now to me like as necessary as breathing.

Amy: Hard same. But I do want to acknowledge your feeling of depression and do you think that was because you were kind of confined to an institution with rules and deadlines and people telling you what to do when you know you don’t like that? What was the nature of the depression and how do you not get yourself in those situations now?

Nancy: Oddly enough, it’s probably also related to embodied consciousness. I didn’t want to go there (laughs). So that was one roadblock from the jump. And this is… no disrespect to western Massachusetts, that is not where my body, my corporeal self likes to be. I find them to be dark, satanic hills (laughs). I don’t like the feeling, I feel claustrophobic, I feel the same way in other parts of the north east, which is why I couldn’t be happier to be in California and you’ll have to drag me out of here feet first.

I didn’t like or appreciate my environment. I was mystified by my peers who loved it [0.20.00] and found it idyllic. I found it oppressive. And it was only until my friend Valerie actually got me into hiking that I found another escape. Which is to say, when you ascend, you have a different perspective. And so that was something I started to do regularly toward the end, just to kind of keep myself from going insane.

And the other part of it was that socially I found it really difficult because of course I’d come from such a culturally rich and diverse high school environment, any number of different languages, you walked down the hall and you’d hear at least 10 different languages being spoken. I did not have a tribe. Until we founded Eat Me at the end. But it took me a long time to find my way socially and I truly just felt like a fish out of water most of the time.

So that kind of misfit feeling, combined with having my mind blown regularly by these extraordinary professors and techs that I was engaged with, it just, it really threw me off my axis and it took me a little while to recover, and it took me a long while to recover actually.

Amy: You know, thank you for sharing that. I think oftentimes we’re not given permission and therefore we don’t give ourselves permission to actually sort of acknowledge that our bodies, respond to space, both built space and geographic space. And the importance of a tribe, which it sounds like you had in high school and then you really didn’t find easily in college, so you also felt the absence, the grief of loss of a tribe is profound, but you know, I’m also hearing, in a very empowered way, you’ve taken all the learning from that experience and you’re now deploying it in your adult life, which is what we’re supposed to do with these experiences (laughter).

Nancy: I’m reading this wonderful book, I’ve just started it, which I highly recommend to your listeners called Ways of Being by James Bridle. There are all different types of intelligences and what I think a lot about is the intelligence of the body, the ‘embrainment,’ as we call it, of the body. Everything we know isn’t contained in that mysterious organ that floats around in our skull. That we know things on a cellular level and I just knew in my body that that was not the environment for me.

And so you know, I got through it and I’m very fortunate, I would never, it’s certainly not like growing up in a war torn country or anything, famine or anything like that. These are really bourgeois concerns, having to live in western Massachusetts, but it just, it did, it’s that little thing that throws you off kilter.

Amy: I totally get it and I appreciate the disclaimer, but your experience is your experience and I think unpacking it for us in such granular detail also helps everybody else relate to their own experiences and also learn how to sort of process them for the positivity that you have done here. So thank you for that. And I’m also wondering, did you get the fuck out, like when you graduated, where did you go? (Laughs)

Nancy: Yeah, my grand intention was to ‘revolutionize’ the media. That was my modest goal.I landed in public television, which is not where anyone should go to innovate, although it was a wonderful landing pad right out of college. I worked as an intern on some, on the American Experience documentary series. But then my first kind of ‘real job,’ was for the Descriptive Video Service, which is a platform that provides narrative description of TV and movies for the blind and visually impaired. So I wrote the descriptive narration.

So it was not only like a great writing job, but more importantly, kind of underscored for me the essential, what is essential about making cultural products, cultural media accessible to everyone. Access to storytelling isn’t always right, but it certainly should be…but it should be something that everyone is able to participate in, because it’s a deeply, deeply human need we have to hear and tell stories and share stories. [0.25.00]

I think it forced me to become a much pithier and more thoughtful and observant writer because I had no… I was limited to the pauses in between dialogue or sound effects. So you know, you might have 10 seconds to communicate a tremendous amount of information and that’s what I did.

Amy: This is fascinating! It's so meta too because you’re understanding first the power of storytelling and what a deeply human need it is, and why it’s important to make sure it’s accessible to everyone. But then also needing to sort of reverse engineer the storytelling in a way that makes it applicable to a different set of bodies.

Nancy: Totally and it’s a particular responsibility to choose and isolate those moments or details that are relevant to the story. In other words, you could focus on a random vase in the background, but you haven’t served the story. And it literally forces you to kind of co-create with the storytellers what essential data has to be communicated for this story to remain fluid and coherent. So oftentimes it would be describing a lunge or grabs a knife or, you know, whatever it is, that allows those, everything else to make sense. You would be doing the listener or the viewer a disservice by making, honestly, like irresponsible choices around details…it was kind of interesting and it was there that I met my then husband and he is a screenwriter and TV writer and he really needed to kind of break the mold, break out of public television, because you certainly can spend your whole life there and that’s not a bad way to spend your life, at all. But he really wanted to tell stories on a bigger stage. And so we got married and moved out to California. And that was another sort of, I would say seismic change in my life, I guess it was 1995.

Amy: You clearly like California, you’ve already mentioned that. How did your body feel when you got to Cali?

Nancy: What’s kind of funny is actually when we drove in, on Melrose, back in the day, I was dismayed. I was like, argh, I looked at all the vernacular architecture, which I personally love and coming from Boston, it’s an antipodal. I mean you really couldn’t choose two more radically different cities. And so I was at first quite devastated. And drowned all my sorrows for about a year, eating Trader Joe’s cookies and feeling sorry for myself.

But I actually grew to love it, rather quickly after that, there’s something about the openness of our landscape that is, I don’t know, it just works with my soul. I feel the same kind of expansiveness of the landscape, and I don’t mean this to sound colonizing at all, I just mean literally there is so much space that is available, just when you look up, it’s just broad and vast and it’s not crowded by a lot of, to me claustrophobic trees. That to me kind of cracked something open inside of me and so this is where I feel most at home and most grounded, I would say.

Amy: Well, I’m happy you found your home and your body feels at peace there. So 1995 was seismic, you’re eating cookies and then what happens? Because I know you graduated in 1992 and then your art career really doesn’t get started in earnest until around 2007. So I think there’s a motherhood chapter here, I’m waiting to hear.

Nancy: Correct, yes! So best laid plans, if I’m being really honest, I had intended, when we got to Los Angeles, to start an art career. And what I found was that I was so disoriented, deeply disoriented and became almost like if there’s an equivalent for agoraphobia, but that’s related to creativity [0.30.00], that’s what I had. I was terrified of going out, of coming out of my brain, of my body, whatever. And I couldn’t… every creative fit and start that I took, in my mind was a failure. And didn’t reflect whatever it was that I was feeling.

And so I essentially gave up and had children and my first child, my beautiful daughter, Bellen was born with quite a few medical challenges. And so that really occupied me and my attention for a long time. Mercifully she’s totally healthy and amazing now. That kind of tone set what was to come and I ended up having two more children, my beautiful boys, and throughout that whole period, really until 2005, I was engaged in a real internal war with myself.

I knew that I wanted to be making art, but I was gripped with a kind of paralysis that is difficult to describe. I felt I probably couldn’t do it, I probably shouldn’t do it, what if I did do it and I failed? All of that creativity energy just comes out sideways. I took up knitting and became adept at knitting lace, which has me no good. (Laughs) Things like that. I wrote a book proposal and I got an agent, I never finished the book. And I got deeply depressed again, so that returned and that was also really, well you know, that just shuts everything down. So it was really in 2005 when my son Rowan was born, my third and last child. But I thought, I remember the exact moment where I was just sitting in my ex-husbands office and I was thinking, what am doing? Like I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and what have I done? I have no… of course I have these three beautiful, wonderful children, but I’m not doing the thing that I know I’m meant to do. And how on earth do I start? And I just started really small. I just started drawing again, which has always been, drawing and video have always been my primary media that I feel most fluent and comfortable with.

And I would say drawing is even more of a first language than English. It’s just, it is the most direct translation of what I’m feeling into something material or manifest. So I just started drawing and what ended up happening is it just, the dam cracked open. I mean it just… everything I had been holding in, containing, started rushing out like a torrent. And honestly, it just hasn’t stopped since then. So note to anyone who is repressing their creative instincts. They’re going to come out. (Laughs) You might not know when, but they’re coming. If you can avoid repressing them, do. (Laughter)

Amy: There’s this great quote, I believe it was Brené Brown who said something like: Unused creativity doesn’t just disappear, it metastasizes.

Nancy: It does.

Amy: And yeah, you’ve kind of described this and I’m really grateful you talked about that kind of paralysis because I’ve been through the same thing. Maybe not quite as intense, I’ve definitely been through paralysis and I’ve had my creativity come out sideways and I’ve questioned it and I’ve been fearful. And yeah, it squirted out in all kinds of different ways that were like sort of false starts and weird attempts. And I don’t think I’ve ever quite put it together like that. I think it’s important that we talk about creativity and how it gets sometimes stampeded or sometimes, locked in chambers that we don’t quite understand how to unlock again, but it sounds like you just started drawing, you just took it back to a familiar place and you let it out in small ways which became bigger and bigger and bigger and the flow started again.

Nancy: I was pretty protective of myself at first. I just did it for myself and forgave myself when it wasn’t great and I remember I had a professor in college who forced us to hold onto our ‘mistakes,’ the drawings, the artworks we wanted to rip up and throw away. Because he really identified those as our teachers, that that’s where you learn the most.

Amy: That’s torture!

Nancy: I know, it’s a horrible, but it’s a practice I continue because even if there’s just one thing that did work, that’s valuable. And it’s also instructive to remember what not to do again. So I had to be a little more generous with myself than I normally am. I’m a pretty hard-driving boss of myself. But I think once I realized that that muscle had not completely atrophied, and could be retrained and I really am speaking both literally and metaphorically here, it became my greatest passion, which I’d always dreamed it would. But it wasn’t until I kind of really slogged it out for quite a while that it became so.

Amy: I don’t know why I’m all into quotes right now, but there’s another saying about how what we’re really afraid of is not failure, it’s assuming our power..

Nancy: Stepping into it. And that is more true for, I would say, women and non-binary folks than it is anyone else. And not to go on a diatribe about hetero patriarchy, but I had actually allowed myself, and chosen to box myself into a more traditional lifestyle. And with that decision comes all of the cultural baggage that created that decision and informed it and continues to. And so that was very difficult to both resist undue and ultimately transcend.

Amy: Yeah and it’s also, there’s a moment when you discover that you’re locked in this box, but you also have the keys and then becomes this sort of terrifying trajectory of unlocking it and taking a few steps out of the box and feeling your way. And in many cases, confusing the people around you who are comfortable with you in the box…And also becoming a target for people who are uncomfortable with this kind of change.

Nancy: Yeah, I mean that’s beautifully said and I think also being acutely aware, and yet not aware enough of the kind of compound damage that’s possible when you bring children into the equation. You know? So when you start to claim for yourself your dreams/desires, you know, wants/needs/goals, there are other people involved as well. And certainly that’s the case with divorce. Maybe there are some divorces that are flawless and easy and amicable and nobody (laughs) is worse off afterwards, or experiences any pain. But that hasn’t been my experience. it's very complicated, it’s a very complicated thing to claim those things for yourself, particularly as… again, I hate to be binary gendering in any way, but particularly as a mother in this culture, that’s a real risk. And it comes with consequences that are also real.

Amy: Yeah, yeah, I can imagine and that sounds complex and important I don’t have children, but the thing that I’m hearing is that you ultimately made a choice to claim your wants/needs/desires and authentic self and I can’t imagine that role modeling that for your children isn’t net positive. It has to be, right?

Nancy: I think ultimately, and hopefully yes. And I think that as time goes on, that becomes [0.40.00] increasingly likely and apparent. But it certainly is grueling in the moment and confusing, I think, especially to younger kids. It’s certainly not a decision that I regret and because it has allowed me to pursue this passion, but also to include those years that at the time felt really creatively fallow, but in fact really forged the artist I am now I remember at one point I had a… it was very complicated; I don’t even want to say ‘parenthood’ because it really is gendered in the art world. And I had a curator to the studio and I had just finished a suite of, I think 75 drawings, I was really excited about them and they were called Manifestos. And I remember she said, she was asking me about them and I was telling her about them.

I don’t even remember how this came up, but I said something like, “Does this have anything to do with being a mother?” And I said, “Absolutely not. It has nothing to do with being a mother, this is my work, it’s separate, it’s all separate, never the twain shall meet.” And she shook her head and was like, I don’t think you understand, this is everything to do with motherhood.

Because the drawings themselves were these very abstract articulations of struggle and of two opposing forces in a kind of dynamic tension. And I think she rightly identified that deep internal conflict and the pull toward one thing and the push toward another. And how that is an irresolvable dynamic, thus iterated 75 times (laughs). And it certainly remains that tension.

Amy: Irresolvable means not necessarily trying to change it or solve it but growing to a place where you can live with that kind of tension, that kind of discomfort. And accept it, yeah, and dwell in it and not be in resistance all the time of that, like tension, but more in acceptance of it. And in some ways, tension can actually really propel us forward.

Nancy: I completely agree and I have to say, embracing it, has just opened up all kinds of artistic risk taking, honestly.

Amy: Ooh, I’m excited to hear all about this artistic risk taking because you have been on a rocket trajectory since the floodgates opened and man have you gotten into some interesting work. So can you kind of give us the overview of your career from that moment when you started drawing to now, where you’re all into augmented reality and you know, everything you said at the beginning (laughs), embodied consciousness.

Nancy: Well, you know, it’s so funny, and I think that there’s this way in which things are much clearer when we look backwards, because they’re not always clear when we’re in the moment. And when I look backward, I can see that I have been trying and attempting to make immersive experiences. Not quite from the beginning, but kind of from the beginning. And have been trying to make VR for a very long time before I actually started working in VR. And I should say that one greatly valuable thing my ex-husband said to me was, early on before I’d started drawing, I remember I was just sobbing and calling myself a failure. And he said, “You can’t call yourself a failure when you haven’t even tried.”

Amy: Oh damn!

Nancy: I know, tough medicine, but really good medicine. And so when I look back, I see oh, this is a long story of trying and trying different things and some of them working and some of them not. And I could get into a whole conversation around, like the connection between, drawing and video, drawing and cinema. I believe they are [0.45.00] intimately entangled because when we look back to Paleolithic cave painting, those cave paintings were misidentified early on as sort of anatomically incorrect animals and what they’ve since discovered, now that they’ve looked at these artworks with a flickering torch, is that actually they were sort of pre-animation. They were animating…

Amy: What?

Nancy: Yeah, so like when they looked at it…

Amy: No!

Nancy: Yeah, so when they looked at it, archeologists would look at a three-headed mastodon or a three-legged saber-toothed tiger, oh, those silly Paleolithic humans really didn’t understand anatomy. They understood it acutely. And there are all these striations and these marks on the walls that if you’re shining a contemporary light on them, look like… they don’t make any sense. But when you kill the lights and you just walk with a torch and you wave the torch back and forth, there’s movement.

Amy: Oh my god.

Nancy: It’s kind of incredible!

Amy: I’m so… never underestimate humans, man!

Nancy: Never!

Amy: They’re just, yeah.

Nancy: Right, and we knew that they weren’t living in the caves, they were going into the caves for some purpose other than… it may have been seeking some sort of transcendence, which is a common opinion. Some sort of mind-altering experience.

Amy: They would eat mushrooms and go in the cave, right?

Nancy: I mean I don’t know if they did or didn’t, eat mushrooms…

Amy: I wanna do that! (Laughs)

Nancy: I definitely do too! (Laughter) But I think most importantly, we have been drawn to this type of storytelling, and so I have always felt that what contemporary technologies allow for, and of course there’s a whole separate conversation we could have about the extractive nature of such technologies and how they are complicated tools, they’re never neutral. But if we deployed them thoughtfully and intentionally, and with some criticality, they too can kind of recreate transcendent experiences that are embodied and that engage embodied consciousness.

Amy: That’s what you’re doing, that makes perfect sense. Yes!

Nancy: That end up really being just a more three-dimensional version of same, you know? In every case it is an invitation into a different experience of reality. A different understanding of what is seen, perceived, felt, heard, tasted, smelled, engaging all of those senses to honestly just achieve a different type of connection and to sort of tap into that distributed neural network that we all share. Which in my opinion is what grounds us and gives us a sense of not just community, but existential purpose. So when I look back, of course, I didn’t get right back into video immediately because of course all of the technology had catapulted forward and of course I hadn’t kept up with anything. Not even photoshop.So I’ve had to do a tremendous amount of learning and then this is… I’m still, right now I’m learning Houdini and Unreal 5. There’s no end to the learning. But again, sort of as Anne Lamott would say, Bird by Bird, I just started tackling one thing after another.

And so I’ve pretty much taught myself to do most everything, or I’ve gotten somebody to just show me how to do it and then I do it and then I learn beyond that. But I started spray painting and I didn’t do it in an orthodox way. And then I refine that to air-brushing. And I developed a whole body of work that then became a video series that was then my very first museum show, which was an immersive experience. It was immersive video, immersive sound and that kind of changed everything.

And when I looked back at it I was like oh, I was trying to make VR, I didn’t realize it, but I was trying to create an experience for a viewer where they would walk in and feel transformed, and feel a kind of a transcendence in their bodies.

Amy: And you would be speaking to all of their senses.

Nancy: Yes, except for taste and smell at that point. I have an exciting opportunity coming up soon that actually will allow for all of those things (laughs). It’s like the first time in my life I will have been able to engage all senses, so I’m like geeking so hard on that one. It wasn’t until [0.50.00] I had developed massive sort of immersive drawing series. And by ‘immersive’ I just mean large scale, that received a very powerful response from people who had seen it.

It was a very visceral series and it was called Surds and it was inspired by a book called Aftermath, by a feminist philosopher named Susan Brison who really talks about the way she as an abstract thinker and as a person who lived this life of the metabolized, this very animal sexual assault that had occurred on her body, to her body. And so it was really about the way that trauma lives in the body. And I was very compelled by that. And she said the only way that she could really understand and process her trauma was using philosophical math because these patterns in math that made sense of the senseless and actually ‘Surd’ means senseless. So it’s like absurd is nonsense, no sense. So anyway, I had this whole series and because of the visceral reaction of the people that had engaged with the drawings, mostly women had very visceral reactions, I realized I wanted to push that much further.

I wanted to put them inside the drawing. And it was then, in that very same meeting that I described with that curator, Caroline [** 0:52:19] who said, you’re wrong, all your work is about this. She said, I was sort of gnashing my teeth and ringing my hands about how I wanted to put people inside the drawings. She said, “Why don’t you just do it in VR?” And that was the game changing moment because I hadn’t thought about VR since I was an undergraduate. Of course we talked about it in ’92, we talked about in terms of immersive journalism and empathy and how do you create empathy.

And could you use these technologies as like empathy machines, which of course is now a very contested and complicated presupposition, a whole other conversation that changed really everything, that conversation. And then my brother-in-law and my son built me this Mad Max computer and I got some of the art drawing software and that began my whole journey and led to augmented reality, which has led to 3D software, which has led to the work I’m doing now, which includes projection mapping and immersive video. Iit’s been a really… an extraordinary confluence of both tools that are available to me, having the privilege to have access to electricity, which enables those tools to function. And then also kind of being able to blend the ideas that come from my life experience, all of the reading I do, with these projects.

And having tremendous collaborators and teams. I can’t underscore enough how important teams are. so as I sort of built my practice out, brick by brick in terms of what I was making, I was also building it out in terms of my community because I didn’t have the advantage of an art school education, so I didn’t have that community or that built in infrastructure. So I basically had to build my own infrastructure. That’s a different type of creative freedom. You get to pick and choose. You’re not just stuck with people. And so I feel tremendously lucky that I have, you know, this scaffolding of peers and artists and curators and people in institutions and out who I think comprise a beautiful ecosystem that’s ever growing and ever expanding. And so I’m very lucky to be a part of it.

Amy: I’m so glad you mentioned that because I think that it’s sometimes culturally, we talk too much about the work as in the output, the finished product and we don’t talk enough about the creative design of a sustainable practice to continue creating that work. And of course nobody makes anything in a vacuum all by themselves. Or maybe they do, you know, to start, but then the minute you want to make this your livelihood, you need to rely on other people. And building that out in a way that affords you the freedom, the resources and the access you need to create a sustainable practice is such an important aspect of the business side of being an artist.

Nancy: I couldn’t agree more. I’m so glad you said that. I don’t think it is taught, at least it’s not taught broadly. And I kind of came to it out of a sense of desperation. And [0.55.00] truly just feeling so isolated. But it is essential to any practice. I did a TED Talk in 2018 about using AR as a tool for equity and access.

Amy: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, so let’s get into that because maybe you can also unpack your creative process as you share about the TED Talk.

Nancy: It really is just to really amplify your point, which is that I started the TED Talk really, and ended it, with the myth of the lone genius, the lone genius artist. And that that is a complete fallacy. And it’s not just that of course we need and want to engage different people with different skills on different projects, to realize those projects. But it’s also about, I think, being open to and recognizing in others their own creative contributions and to the discourse we have and share. And that those conversations, conversations with other artists, generally, and thinkers with anybody actually, I don’t want to limit it to artists, that we’re essentially interdependent and those conversations are often what allow us to grow. But like for me anyway, I just get so much out of listening and learning from other people, listening to and learning from other people.

Amy: Amen sister, me too! Yes.

Nancy: You’re extraordinary in that way. And that that too can shape your practice, our mutual friend Tanya was one of my very first collaborators on 4th Wall app, on my AR platform,

Amy: Wait, I got to back you up for a second because we are getting… we need to set up for the listeners what the 4th Wall app is, and then also I just want to remind our listeners that the Tanya you’re referring to is Tanya Aguiñiga, and she’s episode 13 of Clever.

Nancy: (Laughs) Yes, okay, so the 4th Wall app is a free app on the App Store, it’s also available on Android, Google Play, and I developed it with my then team at Drive Studios, first and foremost, to challenge notions of public art, who has access to public art, who decides what public art is, where it is, how it’s experienced. But also to give access to these VR drawings I had made, which were… I mean basically the barrier to entry, not just to create VR, but to experience VR is very high because you need a certain type of hardware and obviously you need that software as well.

And so I really wanted to make these things available to a broad public and an unknown public. So we basically, with my team, we translated my VR drawings into augmented reality, in three dimensions and the invitation of the app really, which was an remains with, on that part of the app, was for people to ‘place’ or locate these different artworks in the context of their choosing. So that they would basically co-create and have their own art experience and create their own content and meaning for the work, which was an extraordinary and remains an extraordinary thing. Because people do the most amazing things with their imaginations.

Amy: Yes they do, and I’ve seen some of it and I’ve experienced it myself. And the other things, as you’re talking about access, that’s really interesting to me, is it’s a deliberate removal of the gallerY…

Nancy: Intermediary, yeah. And as a gatekeeper and I really wanted to take it outside the realm of any institutional permission and that included museums. I just felt, I felt what about a one-to-one experience? Because my experience working with communities that haven’t had access to the kinds of art programs that I did, is that you literally… like I don’t want to be this, I don’t want to sound like, I don’t know, some sort of Pollyanna idealist or whatever. I do believe most people; most people have tremendous creativity inside of them. And…

Amy: Oh for sure!

Nancy: And when you invite that opportunity to engage, what comes out is like, honestly, if you want to have your faith in humanity restored [1.00.00], just do that. Like it’s just…

Amy: Yeah.

Nancy: It’s amazing. And from work I’d done before and, you know, that felt really important to me. And so it was one of the… and there were other things that I won’t bore everybody with, that the app offered at the time. But it was Tanya who took one of my drawings, which is called Hollow Point 101 and it’s based on a type of ammunition that does extraordinary damage. Imagine a drawing in three dimensions that almost looks like a rupture in space, with radiating shrapnel coming out of it. But it’s also very beautiful. It sounds very violent, but it’s also quite alluring visually.

So she was down at the border wall, where she does a lot of her work and is an activist. And put the drawing in AR, in the United States and pulled it, actively pulled it through the border wall into Mexico. And that was this extraordinary moment which is, yes, exactly, your reaction… it just said, that one gesture spoke volumes. Spoke volumes. Iit was deeply, deeply moving and powerful. And it occurred to me, and I thought of course, leave it to an artist, particularly an artist like Tanya, to identify immediately, not just the potential of this medium, but how it could be deployed too, as commentary. And as insight into larger questions of borders and borderlessness and art and language. And all of that, that none of it, that’s a wall that was put up for all the wrong reasons. But that this can transcend.

So she actually, she and my friend Deborah were the very first artists I asked, when this lightbulb went off, I thought, you know, this has been a great tool for me to sort of engage this unknown, unseen audience. But what if I collaborated with artists like Tanya, artists who were so rigorous in their practices? Who have so much to say, and invited them to geolocate their work in context where it would have the most resonance and meaning outside of any white cube?

And where they get to define that context. And so the very first piece Tanya did was a beautiful sculpture. It was a photograph of a sculpture and it’s there now, we checked last time we were there. It’s called Impotence Incarnate. And it’s this kind of limp form that just hangs in space and we put it directly over the border wall at Playas de Tijuana. And it sits there sort of straddling that ugly scar of a fence as this you know, kind of reminder of what it feels like. And the power of that image in that exact location, think about it.

If we wanted to try to build something, you have to get permits, you know, it would raise all kinds of suspicion. But it’s invisible to the naked eye. So you can only see it through the prosthesis of your phone, of the camera of your phone. And so for that reason it just, to me occupies this beautiful poetic space that is non-space, that is shared cultural thought space, that can’t be policed, it can’t be monetized, or it will be, I’m sure. But you know, at least for us the way that we operate and the way that I operate the app, it is with none of those concerns. It is to literally ignite meaning in situ.

Amy: (Laughs) I love what you’re doing. I also love, the technical and philosophical rigor that you’re applying to ideas of empathy, inclusiveness, embodied consciousness, as you say, but also a very generative and generous community building. That is accessible for everyone to sort of find their own meaning and kind of own it a little bit on their own, clearly you’re a very empowered person and you need a healthy ego to do that, but it’s not ego driven. [1.05.00]

I mean this is an example to me of when we really focus on how our work can bless or enhance the lives of other people, this is what it starts to look like. Because it starts to be part your creation, and then part in the hands of other people. And it’s both an offering and an invitation and a challenge, all wrapped up in one.

Nancy: Oh my god, that is the most beautiful… I would like to just print that out and put it next to my computer so I could look at it every day. Thank you so much, that is such a gorgeous and generous,, summary. And I think you know, what drives me and really animates all of my desire to work this way is a, just abiding and deep concern around issues of justice.

Amy: Yeah, I feel that.

Nancy: I feel sometimes like a child in my sense of… you know, looking at the world and consuming all that is (laughs) around us. And I think that’s not fair. I can identity that that’s not fair. And that the lesson that has to be… the lesson I seem to have to learn over and over again is that there is no fair, that’s not… that’s a fallacy to think that things are really ever fair. And so how can we take steps, even small steps to start to redress some of that in whatever ways we can.

Amy: I think you’re touching on something that’s very foundational, but this idea of coming to terms with the fact that things aren’t fair, frequently results in a kind of resignation. But that’s not what you’re saying at all. Because I think a more productive and creative and generative way to think about things, being not fair, is we can make them less not fair. We can make incremental steps towards balancing things. We can also change the way unfairness is rolled out. It doesn’t have to be the certain group of disadvantaged people stay disadvantaged. Maybe the pendulum flips. But if there is a balance of positive and negative, that balance can be evolving and so resignation is exactly the opposite of what we need. That’s a decay and stagnation.

Nancy: Yeah, and I have to tell you, I think that there’s… because there is so much… people are exhausted right now by the fire hose of…and it’s sometimes very healthy, by the way, to unplug and just pause, take a break. That can be very mentally healthy. For me, really facing a lot of these difficult ideas, realities, systems, is fuel. And I have to say, unless I am deeply depressed, which is, of course, as we discussed before, that forecloses all action, to me, I don’t know, it animates me, it quickens my pulse, it makes me jump out of bed. I feel like (laughs) there’s so much work to do and you know, and it is not, as you say, that struggle never ends. It’s not like it all just gets tied up neatly with a bow. But like you know, particularly with the overturning of Roe v Wade and we know where this could go.

Amy: Shaking my fist!

Nancy: Yeah! Exactly! And thank goodness none of the organizers in Kansas threw up their hands and figured, well, it’s a Conservative state, let’s not bother here. And we witnessed what’s happening to Trump right now. He is at the center of a multi-spoked wheel, in which he is the main criminal. If none of these investigations end up bringing him down, well, I myself might need to take a break. But it feels to me like there might end up, I dare to dream, that there might be some consequence, because we’re all exhausted by seeing this asymmetrical accountability. And the people who commit the smallest of infractions [1.10.00] are penalized often and usually depending on the color of their skin, for decades, years or decades.

And then we have people like our former president who commit crimes, perhaps even on a scale that no one has yet conceived of, and/or understands, and we see no consequences. So that dissonance and that asymmetry is very destabilizing and depressing. But I believe that we have to keep at it.

Amy: Well, I love that it fuels you. And it clearly does because I can hear it in your voice, and that’s one of the things that, you know, when you talk about embodied consciousness, one of the things that was… this is a little bit of a tangent. That was so important to me when I entered podcasting was I wanted to hear people’s stories in their own voices, with their own inflection, with their own passion. Because I think that informs, with a richness, the depth of the story. And you can tell where people’s fire is lit when you let them, and give them the space to speak their own story, from the depth of their soul. So I’m really grateful to you for sharing that with us and yes, I hope there is consequences.

Nancy: There better be! (Laughs)

Amy: Switching gears for a second, I don’t want to let this podcast end without giving our listeners kind of an exploded view of your creative process. We’ve heard the conceptual development part, but some of the work you do is so fascinating technically, can you talk about how some of these works come together? I think the Slipstream series might be a good case study to unpack, but I’ll let you choose what work you want to talk about.

Nancy: I would love to talk about Slipstream because it’s what I’m currently working on the process is actually directly related to the philosophical nature of the work. And it also goes back to the caves. This series begins with large scale graphite drawings that are abstract and biomorphic, like most of the drawings I’ve done for the past decade. And I take those drawings and tear them up, which is a other whole process that is sometimes really hard and sometimes actually very cathartic. And then I reconstitute them. I rebuild them into bespoke 3D sculpture. And they’re paper based and because the paper curls in this very natural way and I’m sure it’s related to the physics of the paper; they really end up looking like leaves or feathers. And when they are reassembled in these bespoke sculptural arrangements, they tend to look either like an exploded bird or something, people have often described them as looking like angels, which okay, that’s not my intention. They really contain a tremendous amount of energy because I’m using a lot of sort of circular, centrifugal force.

I really wanted them to look like a moment of motion that was frozen in time. So like a frozen moment of motion. So they’re quite dynamic actually. And I take those sculpture and scan them and in scanning them, I bring them into the computer then as 3D objects. And what happens in the scanning process is that data and information is both added and subtracted. So it’s the additive and subtractive process. So we’re already talking about a project of translation where parts of the original have not only been transmuted in terms of their physicality, but then there’s this added layer of lost information and added information. So almost like a game of telephone.

I also like to think of it as a Ship of Theseus, which I’ll bring back in a second. So anyway, they come into the computer, I use an AI to render them as 3D objects and they often, parts of them resemble the originals to the millimeter and parts of them are glitchy, messy, blobby. I love it all! Because that’s the new incarnation. So then I take that mutated form and I light it and I animate it and I subject it to laws of physics that are impossible outside of the software. [1.15.00] And from there I then again, bring it into an additional software after effects to render it out as a final video.

And I’ve also take the added step of taking stills from the video and having them printed by a master printer, Lapis Press, and then you have this full journey paper to paper, but the drawing itself in no way resembles its original form and in that sense it is a Ship of Theseus. It’s like what of the original remains? As all these pieces are taken and added and replaced and morphed and mutated and that sort of thing.

And this whole series came out of a concern, a deep concern I had with the misinformation campaigns that really kicked into high gear in 2016, but of course in 2020 were peak, and of course they remain peak. And so how do we take these invented truths? How do we take the process of mutated truth and turn it into something constructive versus destructive and use it and deploy it in ways that illuminate and kind of offer new insights and traverse into new territories versus using them as tools of manipulation and oppression?

So they’re quite colorful. They’re getting more and more complicated. I have a solo show coming up, so I’m madly creating work for it. Slipstream, by the way, I should just say, the reason it’s called Slipstream is because Slipstream is a genre of literary fiction that describes the familiar strange or the strange familiar. So there’s this whole engagement with the uncanny and I really love that. I love it when you look at something and you think… I recognize something in it, I know something in it is familiar to me, but I can’t put my finger on it because it’s so strange.

So I think all of the work does that and I’ve started to work with GPT-3, it’s an AI text generator and have done a little bit of collaboration within AI on some text to add to some of the videos. And I’ve had to edit the AI text fairly heavily because it’s, let’s just say the poetics are accidental, it feels.

Amy: Can I just stop with something silly right now? You know how when somebody speaks a foreign language and it’s kind of sexy, that’s what it sounds like when you’re speaking tech…

Nancy: Oh no, really?

Amy: GPT-3, yeah, I have no idea what GPT-3 is, but say more, it sounds so good. (Laughter)

Nancy: It’s a project by OpenAI, you probably, or maybe some of your listeners have been hearing a lot of controversy actually around DALL-E sort of wonder and controversy, which is a text to image AI and this is where, and I’m talking about DALL-E right now, you, the person using the software, or the platform, type in a text prompt and based on images that the AI has aggregated, millions and millions and millions of images, it’s aggregated from essentially the internet and who knows what other… I don’t know what the data culling process, what it actually involves.

It will generate, automatically generate a series of images based on what you… based on your prompt. And so the possibilities are sort of infinite and endless, but it’s a whole other conversation. It’s quite controversial for a variety of reasons. But with the text version, I was sort of more interested, oddly enough you’d think I’d be more interested in the visual, but I’m actually more interested in the textual work because when you input a prompt, it reads the prompt and it interpolates it in its own way and then regurgitates something to you in response. Either to continue your sentence or in response to your sentence. And there are all these different settings.

Amy: This sounds fascinating!

Nancy: It is, oh, it’s tremendously fascinating. There are a number of artists who are huge innovators… I am literally only playing with it for this very discreet purpose, this is not the direction I’m going in at all, by any means. But there are artists whose entire bodies of work are dedicated to this and they’re brilliant and wonderful. But I’m just sort of more interested in again, engaging that uncanny, will a viewer be able to tell that it is inflected with an AI voice or not.

And what will feel familiar and what won’t, and what of my voice remains in that original. Like what of my voice and my intention remains in that output? So it’s just sort of an added layer of meaning that I’m adding to these new pieces in some cases.

Amy: I love it. And I’m so curious, the Slipstream series [1.20.00] that you mentioned, I mean where do these pieces live? There’s an actual physical sculpture, there’s a video and then there’s two paper versions…

Nancy: They live essentially online. You know, I just showed one of them in Time Square, immersively, on every, on 90 different screens all at once, every night for three minutes, for the month of July.

Amy: It was incredible. I mean I wasn’t there in person, but just to see the images of them all being projected from these skyscrapers into this communal space, but it’s also kind of a, you know, boxed in space because it’s boxed in by skyscrapers, so it feels at once like it has these boundaries, but also this unlimitedness.

Nancy: Yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean that was an incredible opportunity and I think because I’ve designed these experiences to be immersive themselves, and by that I just mean the video, like take Time Square out of it, you know, I really want to… I’m really trying to play with camera work and intimacy and you feeling like you have some ability to engage with these, really these kind of imagined types of consciousness, and sort of iterations.

And so at that scale with that 360, with the ability to present the work in 360 on all these screens, it really fulfilled this dream I had of for just a moment, imagining that those screens had dissolved into this living, breathing, pulsing, you know, hybrid entity that was hot pink, among other colors, and bathing everybody below in pink and all collectively participating, for a moment in this shared moment.

Amy: How exciting! Okay, so you mentioned some cool things that are coming up in the pipeline. Can you talk to me about maybe what you’re working on now and what’s coming up for you?

Nancy: Yeah, I mean the things I’m allowed to talk about are imminent. So for example, I have a solo show at Vellum gallery, here, Vellum LA it’s called, here in Los Angeles, which is an NFT gallery with the most, literally, truly, the sexiest LED screens anybody has ever seen. When I first saw these screens I was like, oh, I mean I will never be able to go back to a regular, it’s like (laughs) they are insane! They’re beautiful! So I have a solo show there on September 15th, which opens September 15th and I am going to be showing again this year at Luminex, which is a citywide project map… it’s not citywide, it’s actually confined to a few city blocks, but it’s very dramatic and we take over a bunch of buildings, the sides of buildings.

And so it’s a sound a visual projected mapped experience and this year it includes AR, I’m actually not doing the AR, I’m just doing the projection mapping. And I have an incredible sound collaborator Anna Luisa Petrisko, who is making a soundtrack as we speak, or soundscape I should say. And then I’m also participating at the Format Festival in Bentonville, Arkansas at the end of the month, of September. And there are a bunch of other things on the horizon, including the LACMA Art + Tech Grant, a project that was recently funded and awarded.

And I’m really excited to do that because it’s going to allow me to learn even more about my mycelial networks and block chain and any points of intersection and overlap that might be useful in creating new civic models of interdependence and community care and reparation.

Amy: That sounds amazing. I’m going to cough, hold on one second (Coughing) So sorry about that. Wow, that sounds really intense. I love that you’re exploring mycelial networks as a sort of source inspiration for your work. I mean some of the things that you’ve already mentioned here are collective, intersubjective field, those neural networks that we’re all connected to. I feel like mycelial networks is a perfect analogy for all of that space that you’re kind of working in already.

Nancy: Yeah, I mean when I first started learning about them, now well over a year ago, they really captivated my attention because I thought, we have so many models and systems that are clearly not working. And a lot of that is related to hetero patriarchy, a lot of it is related to late capitalism. But what if we looked [1.25.00], what if we really used biomimicry, what if we looked to natural systems that are incredibly efficient. That are life sustaining and regenerative and took a few notes (laughs). And then because of my abiding interest in block chain technologies, how could those, which are also complicated and not neutral and also inflected with a lot of the things we discussed earlier. How could we be more intentional about all of these things moving forward? Because no technology is… there’s no immaculate conception (laughs). Everything is inflected with the builders and the people who build it, and the source material and the data it uses to do whatever it does.

And that’s where we have the opportunity to be more involved and at the same time, I think decenter our very human and generally western approaches to any number of things. But most importantly, looking at the climate and climate change on all fronts and by that I mean, also include the social and political and cultural, how do we survive together and an acknowledgement of that interdependence.

Amy: That’s beautiful. I also love your way with words, this whole talk, you’ve been really, your word choice has been so descriptive, so vivid, I feel like you’ve been painting with words and it’s also been very immersive. So you really embody everything that you’re about and it’s been such a trip, I mean a beautiful trip to hear this story directly from you.

Nancy: Oh thank you.

Amy: In that immersive way.

Nancy: I so appreciate your generosity, thank you so much, it really, it’s such an honor to talk to you and to talk to someone so, you know, deeply, deeply thoughtful and engaged and inspired. So I really… I’m really grateful to you, thank you so much.

Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening, for a transcript of this episode, and more about Nancy, including images of her work, and a bonus Q&A - head to cleverpodcast.com. If you can think of 3 people who would be inspired by Clever - please tell them! It really helps us out when you share Clever with your friends. You can listen to Clever on any of the podcast apps - please do hit the Follow or subscribe button in your app of choice so our new episodes will turn up in your feed.We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter - you can find us @cleverpodcast and you can find me @amydevers. Please stay tuned for upcoming announcements and bonus content. You can subscribe to our newsletter at cleverpodcast.com to make sure you don’t miss anything. Clever is hosted & produced by me, Amy Devers, with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit airwavemedia.com to discover more great shows. They curate the best of them, so you don’t have to.

What is your earliest memory?

My earliest memory is making drawings when I was 3 and signing them “Nancy 3”.

Vote for my daddy - early activism for Nancy

How do you feel about democratic design?

I never really thought about democratic design until I read How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things by Dr Jenny L. Davis. One sentence that resonated is, “Technologies don’t make people do things but instead, push, pull, enable, and constrain.”

What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?

My grandfather used to tell me I needed to learn to tolerate ambiguity.

How do you record your ideas?

I keep a series of thematic journals.

What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?

I am learning Houdini right now and I am fully in its thrall.

What book is on your nightstand?

The book at the top of the ten books on my nightstand is Ways of Being by James Bridle.

Why is authenticity in design important?

The authentic output of a designer/creator directly communicates to an unknown/unseen audience. This is the place where the potential for connection/recognition occurs.

Favorite restaurant in your city?

My favorite restaurant was Mh Zh but it closed during the pandemic. My current favorite restaurant that is open is Kazu Nori in Downtown Los Angeles.

What might we find on your desk right now?

A jade buddha, an hourglass, some lip gloss, and a mess of post-it notes with render settings written on them.

Who do you look up to and why?

I look up to all of the people who are reeling from the draconian anti-abortion laws in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to negate Roe v. Wade. Their burdens are inconceivably huge and must be relieved through a tidal wave of activism and resistance.

What’s your favorite project that you’ve done and why?

That’s like asking me to name my favorite child, but I’m especially proud of CORPUS, a five story future human in augmented reality, that, along with my team, I anchored in the five story atrium of the Bradbury Building in Downtown Los Angeles.

What are the last five songs you listened to?

Chewing Cotton Wool by The Japanese House

You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around by Grimes

Shooting Star by MUNA

Jelmore by Bon Iver

Hot Shit (feat. Ye and Lil Durk) by Cardi B and Kanye West

Where can our listeners find you on the web and on social media?

nancybakercahill.com

@nancybakercahill

@nbakercahill

Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.