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Q1 Please tell us your career as an artist.
My career began while I was still in university at the Parsons School of Design in New York. I was studying Design Technology and learning all sorts of things, from making experimental musical instruments, to electronics and building interactive environments. I was lucky to be studying there with some great professors. Zachary Lieberman and Marco Tandefelt both taught me a lot of the skills I use in my work today. My thesis project at Parsons was Audio Space, an interactive, three-dimensional, sound environment where you could explore and effect an invisible sonic space with your voice. I have since shown that project in New York, Amsterdam and Paris. After graduating from Parsons with honours I became a fellow at the Eyebeam Art and Technology center where I developed a bunch of work including the Generative Graffiti project with some friends who were starting the Graffiti Research Lab. While I was there I also worked on a show for Michel Gondry's 'The Science of Sleep' film at Deitch Projects in New York. |
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I designed and built all of the interactive elements for the show – which was a huge success and has since toured to Milan, Paris, Miami and Basel. After moving to the Netherlands I created Vinyl Workout; a giant projected vinyl record of Daft Punk's 'Around the World' which you run around the surface to control the speed and the direction of the record and therefore also the music. Immediately after that I started work on developing the Laser Tag – laser graffiti system which premiered in Rotterdam in Feburary 2007. Overnight it became massively popular and since then we have shown the project in Austria, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mexico, Barcelona, New York, LA, Amsterdam and Sweden. In Novemeber I just finished working on 'Funky Forest', an interactive installation for Cinekid – the world's largest media festival for children.
Q2 What was your best experience in designing?
For me it is always the moment when I realise that it will actually work. The excitement and energy that comes from that is enormous. |
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Q6 Would you tell us the work you enjoyed the most so far?
I think it would be Laser Tag that I worked on with the Graffiti Research Lab. The system allows you to write graffiti across the face of buildings with a laser pointer. Seeing it first working was an amazing experience – there was definitely a sort of 'Eureka!' moment. It is also really fun to setup for people to use. We have traveled all over the world and every city we see stuff that surprises us and makes us laugh. |
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Q7 What is the concept behind your work?
I wouldn't say there is any one concept to my projects. I think I have just got to a point where I really enjoy taking a crazy idea in my head and seeing if I can make it a reality. I think I also like giving people an excuse to play. Children are very good at this because it is a big part of what they spend their time doing, but a lot of adults sort of unlearn or suppress this skill. The beauty of interactive projects, unlike passive ones, is they require people to get involved and this gives them a reason to play and to learn and hopefully reconnect to that child inside them who is not self conscious, but full of wonder and excitement.
Q8 Where do you go for inspiration?
I think without really being conscious of it I have always been looking to Science and Nature for inspiration. I am fascinated by this world and the beauty of nature, especially at the largest and the smallest scales. These are the scales you don't normally see and I think there is a lot of magic going on there. |
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Q12 What is your favorite guilty meal? Any good restaurants?
Amsterdam doesn't have as many good restaurants as New York but they have this amazing steak place that is the best steak I have ever had. It is called Café Loetje and it is always packed. In New York one of my favorite places is Café Moto. It is in a strange location but it has really good food and an amazing atmosphere. |
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Q13 Music to live by
At the moment it is still Grime (UK) and Italo Disco. These two strange combinations of music get me through many nights of programming.
Q14 If you can go anywhere in the world, where would you go?
Definitely Japan again, I was only there for a week but I had a great time! Also I have been meaning to visit Berlin for a while now it sounds like an amazing city with lots of young people doing interesting work.
Q15 What's coming up in 2008? Any plans for next year?
The Laser Tag project will be shown in the Museum of Modern Art in New York which is quite exciting. It will also be shown as a part of the Sundance festival in January 2008. Also Zachary Lieberman and I will be publicly releasing openFrameworks which is a set of tools for making creative projects with code. Currently it is in private testing and we already have more than 1000 people using it worldwide. |
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BrandTheodore Watson enjoys transforming the physical space around us into a new interface for seemingly impossible interactive experience. Theodore's work range from creating new tools for artistic expression, experimental musical systems, to immersive, interactive environments with fully-body interaction. Each of his projects call for a unique approach and so this requires him to work as both an artist and an engineer; developing code and custom hardware to realise and achive his vision. Theodore Watson is well know for his work on the open source laser graffitti system Laser Tag which has been shown all over the world an will be featured in anupcoming exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The system allows graffitti writers, activists and members of public to write their 'tags' and messages across the face og huge buildings, walls and bridges from up to a kilometer away. Recently Theodore worked with the acclaimed director Michel Gondry on designing interactive installations for the gallery exhibition of Gondry's latest feature length film "The Science of Sleep". The pieces were designed to break the boundary between the viewer and the exhibition, inviting people to touch, play and explore the fantastical world of the film. |
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Q3 What's a highlight of your recent design career?
I think it must be working on the Funky Forest project with my wife Emily Gobeille. We wanted to create an interactive ecosystem that children could play with but to have their actions directly affect the environment around them. After two weeks of non-stop work the project was ready to debut at the Cinekid festival in Amsterdam and it was pretty much exactly as we had first sketched it out. Seeing more than 20 kids playing with it at any one time and having parents tell us that their kids have come back three days in a row just to play with the Funky Forest was incredibly satisfying to hear. We knew we had designed a good system as the children were finding their own ways to play with it that we hadn't even thought of. For example: one day we came in and all the children had taken their jumpers and had used them to control exactly the flow of water across the space! An Interesting note: One of the inspirations for the project was from the Japanese film "Funky Forest: The first contact" and so the title is a homage to this amazing film. |
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Q4 What one word is the best describes your designs?
Well the first word that popped into my head was 'magic' but I would also say 'experiment' because the process has a lot to do with discovery and experimentation.
Q5 What are you trying to express through your work?
A lot probably. Mainly my interest in the relationship between nature, light and sound. |
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Q9 Tell us about a project that you are working on right now
Hmm wow. Well there are too many hmm. Okay. Here are a couple. A massive multi-projector, interactive light installation for an opening of a green energy plant in Amsterdam, A GRL TV box that you can plug into the backs of TVs in public space to display your message instead of what advertisers want you to watch and a new version of Laser Tag which will allow you to archive and share the tags created as open data to build a massive open data bank of graffiti tags around the world. And there is more which I can't talk about :)
Q10 Who is your favorite designer (or an artist)?
Wow – that is hard to say. I don't think I have one. I owe a lot to Zachary Lieberman and in turn Golan Levin, who without I would not be doing this work. They have been doing interactive projects for a while now and they make incredibly smart installations and performances. In 2006 they had a retrospective at the ICC museum in Tokyo. |
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Q11 What do you see about Japan? (fashion, life style, food, etc)
Well I am a big fan of Takeshi Kitano's early gangster movies. They are some of my favorite films I have ever seen. I have a lot of respect for him because he doesn't just limit himself to one field – he pushes himself to try a lot of different things. In terms of food, I love ramen and okonomiyaki - I really wish there was a good ramen bar in Amsterdam – in New York there is Rai Rai Ken - super good ramen! |
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Q16 What is your vision in your future?
My goal is to never stop learning, to stay curious and to keep making crazy stuff. I am really enjoying the work I do and I think I want to keep pushing it to a higher and higher level. I look forward to working on projects on the urban planning level where I can make this sort of work more integrated with our surrounding architecture. |
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