Tala Schlossberg

0:11Hello everybody. My name is Tala. Um, this is the first time I've ever given a talk on my art. So, it's so awesome to be here. I've been practicing this a lot um for my lamps, but they don't laugh at my jokes. So, I'm hoping this goes a little bit better. So, today I want to talk to you all about the last year of my life that I had. I'm calling it my year of time. Um, I got a little bit of unanimous feedback on this presentation. People said it would be helpful to start with some kind of introduction or some kind of uh overview. For anyone that's not familiar with my work to hear a little bit more about what I do, except I think like a lot of other interdisciplinary creative people can relate to, this is kind of

0:47the hardest part. So, I panicked. I totally panicked and I called my dad and I was like, "Dad, I do something right. What do I do?" and he um answered me so eloquently that I thought maybe he could just do this part. You do digital animation, you paint, you draw, you do photography, you write plays, you make music.

1:11Um yeah, you do things with word play, you do things um with paid clients. Your career, professional career started as a digital animator with the New York Times. You designed a whole store and campaign for Herman Miller. You um make music videos for professional musicians. Her Hermes shoes [singing] [music] and you like to play and there's a lot of play and quirky and silliness in addition to just trying to find different ways to represent uh beauty in the world. Something like that. That was really nice.

2:07So, thank you to my dad for summing it up so nicely. I like to think of my practice as being at the intersection of sounds, pictures, and words. Pretty much everything I do explores some combination of the of these three things and then the way that they interact with time. This is an example of a picture, word, time combo that I made pretty much exactly a year ago, aka a video.

2:30Today is actually a really exciting day in my life because basically exactly a year ago, I decided to set off on a giant adventure through the great unknown. As in, I decided to leave my apartment and start a whole new chapter. And I wanted to make a video in my last week of being in my apartment because I found this day that I loved to have that I wanted to remember it just in case I never got to have a day that good again. Chapter 2: Daily rituals and routine I start my day in the mornings by getting [music] out of bed.

3:14If my day doesn't start by getting out of bed in the morning, that means I'm sad [music] or a snake bit me and paralyzed me from the waist down, which has never happened, thankfully. [music] On the mornings that I shower, I sing a lot. to get myself through being all wet and covered [music] in soap. If I shower at the right time, the water sparkles like those little handlebar streamers on the girls bikes [music] growing up. Do they still make girls bikes?

3:40Typing do they still make into a Google search reveals a list of other items that have not crossed my mind in an equivalent amount of time such as $2 bills, iPods, [music] water beds, phone books, pennies, Blackberry phones, tang [music] dollar coins, choco tacos. [music] I like to stand on the fire escape and watch the people down below. It's cool that the shadows and people take up equal [music] amounts of space.

4:12Shadows are just about as fair as it gets. Billionaires get as much shadow as a trash can. The sample menu for the little scholars child care [music] center even gets a shadow of its own. Shadows for all. I wonder if life feels more fun for my shadow double since she gets to do all the same things as me, but [music] can walk through lamp poles and never has to worry about falling over.

4:35In the afternoons, I like to go on an outing. Lots of times [music] I walk to Prospect Park, but sometimes I'll go to a new park or take the ferry if I really need something to make me feel better. I always bring my notebook, my pen, and my camera so that I can document things [music] like signs, cones, trash, green spaces trapped behind fences, birds, [music] airplanes, and other things that fly in the sky.

5:06In the evening, I light the candles [music] and arrange my miscellaneous items into groupings by size and activity. I clean my face and alternate between working on a little video project, writing new ideas for funny things, rolling around on the floor, and staring at the old man looking at me from the underside [music] of my shelf.

5:24My day ends by brushing my teeth, [music] which is absolutely mandatory according to my internal rule book of what actually matters. Other things that actually matter are saying thank you, being truthful, and having [music] enough socks that you don't have to go looking for clean ones every morning, but not too many socks that you [music] don't know which ones to wear.

5:44Every night I fall asleep. If I don't fall asleep at night, that means I'm sad or [music] someone stopped time and I'm frozen in awake mode. That'd be okay. I don't think it would be too tiring anyways because of not being able to move. The only [music] sad part would mean then I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. and get to do it all over again.

6:13[applause] Chapter 3: Moving to the desert Really, what I found in this day that I like to have was a creative practice. And I didn't feel like I had to live this day in just in just New York City. So, I decided to pack all of my creative essentials into a backpack and get rid of pretty much everything else and leave my apartment. And I gave myself a year to basically do whatever I wanted in the world and just to see what happened. And this is what happened.

6:44So, the first thing that happened is I bought my friend's car in Wyoming and I decided to drive south. I ended up in the tiny town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Truth or Consequences was the most beautiful place I had ever been. The air was quiet and weirdly smelled good. And the sun set for like 3 hours every single night. And the whole sky turned the most magnificent shade of purple. And the people were so friendly.

7:08I made friends almost instantly. And truth or consequences, on Saturday, everyone volunteers at the donkey farm. So naturally, they invited me to come with them. And that was where I met Tracy. This is not Tracy. This is Burrito and Taco. Tracy runs the donkey farm called Donkey Magic. And she came up to me and introduced herself and asked if I was staying around town. I told her that I loved it there except that I was leaving the next day because I didn't really have a place to stay. And then excitedly, Tracy says, "Well, we're looking for someone right now, right across the street." So, we walk across the street and she shows me over to this tin box on the side of the hill.

7:49We go inside and the whole thing is covered in wood panled cabinets. And the best part was the view from the deck looked like this. I told Tracy that I needed a minute to think about it. But then upon thinking about it, I realized that when the world gives you the chance to live on a tin box in the desert across the street from the donkey farm, you probably say yes. So I did. And that is where I made pretty much all of the things that I made this year.

8:18The first thing that I had to ask myself upon settling into my box was, well, what do I do now with all my time? So, I decided to make a chart for myself. I made five different columns. It was music, writing, drawing, moving my body, Chapter 4: Developing creative habits and sharing my artwork. Music, writing, drawing, moving my body, and sharing my artwork. These were the five things that I like to do most in every single day.

8:42So I figured, okay, if all my time is up to me, then I guess I just want to prioritize doing the things I love every single day. So my structure was simple. It could be a big thing or a small thing, but I wanted to put a check in every single column every single day. That was it. What started was I started creating new creative warm-up activities for myself.

9:04So this is from a project that I made called book of mistakes. So I created a simple booklet. Then I went through and I made a mistake on each page and then I went through with a pen and I turned it into a new story. This is an activity I invented called precision typing where I drew little pictures and then fed them through my typewriter and I tried to get the words into the spaces that I had created for myself.

9:30And I even started inventing participatory versions of my activities for the community to play with also. Even the donkeys started making it into my artwork. Then I started getting more interested in sound and motion and the link between the two. This is a piece that I made called Crescent Moon Theory.

9:50[music] And also all these pieces are made to loop indefinitely. So if you watch them on the internet, you can wash them for forever if you would like. Um, I made Crescent Moon Theory because I stepped onto my deck one night and the moon looked like this. And that gave me the idea for a three- tiered sky kind of system. This is a piece I made called Heads or Tails as a practice of creating entirely from my imagination. And I made all the sound design for these pieces as well as a part of my music practice.

10:36[music] Chapter 5: Sound and motion design This next piece is called Moon Guitar. I was a little bit late one night on my mandatory body movement and the sun was setting. So, I decided to go on a walk and I'm walking down the street and I look up at the sky and the moon is there and so are the electrical wires. So, I started moving my head back and forth and just making little noises with my mouth as the moon crossed each wire just going.

11:05And it looked like the moon was playing the guitar. So, I immediately ran back to my box to try to make this happen. When I got back to my box, the faucet was dripping. So, I thought, perfect. That will be the sound that the moon makes. And I figured out that if I put a bowl with different amounts of water under the faucet, I could get different dripping noises.

11:42So, that ended up being the sound design for the piece. Then, my experiments even started going in reverse. This is an activity I invented for myself called the sound challenge. Welcome to the sound challenge where I make a sound and then invent a new thing that could plausibly be making that sound. I started at my bathroom sink since that's where I thought of this idea.

12:10In dissecting the sound, we can see that it's made of four components. Two identical hits, the wh of the Advil bottle being raised, and the final impact, which includes the double sound of the bottle and the pills hitting the counter. I listened to this with my eyes closed for several minutes and decided it could be some kind of chopping machine. I started by sketching out the design on paper. I needed to find a way for the apple to get on the cutting platform that also produced the noise, then a way for the blade to drop and finally come in contact with the apple. All with one simple lever.

12:46I moved my designs to the computer so I could start playing with the motion and the links between objects. This was extremely frustrating and I almost gave up many times, but in the end it works. The apple rolls onto the platform and returns to center by a counterwe on the back end. When the lever is pulled, the central bar lowers to chop the apple and simultaneously releases another apple from the pile. And while this machine doesn't actually exist, if it did, it would probably sound something like this. Chapter 6: Professional opportunities The interesting thing that started happening was I was sharing these experiments I was making and they started to get a lot of traction online.

13:33The one that I made with Moon Guitar got re-shared by the Instagram Instagram account and something like 60 million people have seen that video which is crazy. So, I was also getting all of these job requests and people wanting me to do commissions, but most of the things I just wasn't even interested in because like I was doing the sound challenge, you know, that's the best.

13:55You really couldn't pay me to do anything else. And then I got an email from the Harry Styles team [laughter] and that one felt kind of I I was kind of like, okay, maybe I'll take a little bit of a break from the sound challenge. It was a dilemma though, you know, because yeah, that's a whole other conversation. But they wanted me to do a piece for the together together show. I don't know how many togethers there are. Um, and they wanted me to do a piece, animated piece that was basically teeing up watermelon sugar.

14:29So, they came to me with a crazy request. They were like, "Okay, so it's like a hand. It takes the sun out of the sky. It puts it on a picnic blanket. It takes a knife. It chops the watermelon. It chops the sun. Inside there's a watermelon. And I was like, you know what? Perfect. I'm definitely the woman for this job. So, this is me in the middle of the desert um with a watermelon that I got from the grocery store animating for the Hairy Styles show.

15:10So, this video has been played all over the world on insanely giant screens and all from that watermelon on that dirt road. This project, the Harry Styles project, ultimately led me to come back to New York for a bit because I had to be sending like these 30 gigabyte files and the the desert wi, you know, it was like three months for upload. So, I had to um steer the ship in a slightly different direction. And that led to me spending the month of June making a new audio visual machine inspired by my sound design challenges. Um, and this is called the apology keyboard. It's a sound visuals machine designed to make Chapter 7: Launching Play Music Theory

15:51apologizing a little bit easier and so we can all practice. Feel I feel sorry about that. very so very I am very very sorry. I am so very sorry about that. So the apology keyboard then led to my most recent project, Play Music Theory. Does anyone has anyone played Play Music Theory? A couple people. Okay. I just wanted to cheer for Play Music Theory because I'm so proud of it. Um, Play Music Theory I just launched like a week and a half ago, two weeks ago now. Um, it's an app and it's a sound motion app and it's really been the culmination of my sound and motion exploration. I wanted to create something that I could

16:49draw and listen to the sound of at the same time. Um, and play music theory works like this. [music] The whole canvas is set to a pentatonic scale, so every note that you play goes together. [music] And you can compose songs. [music] There's ways to add beats now and to add your own background. [music] And the coolest thing about playing music theory is that I had no idea that it was going to take off in the way that [music] it did. I wanted to create something that I wanted to play with non-stop and a way that I could use my phone to be more creative instead of it sucking all my [music] attention away.

17:40So, that was really the motivation for designing Play Music Theory. And upon [music] launching it into the world, it pretty much took off like a wildfire. This morning I woke up and the browser version of this has now surpassed 1 million users in the past two days which is crazy. And it is also now Thank you.

18:04Play Music Theory is also as of yesterday evening number one in music in the app store. So that's really cool. And the coolest thing is people are making these amazing pieces of artwork and it's just so special to create something and then put it out into the world and see the way that other people bring their own creative brains and creative energies to this thing that you know you just made because you wanted to play with it. In conclusion, it has been I didn't actually write a conclusion because I was like I think I'll know what to say when the time has come, right? That's how conclusions work. you know what to conclude with.

18:49Um, but really what I want to leave you all with is it is so amazing to see what can happen in a year just by spending my Chapter 8: Conclusion and gratitude time doing the things that I really love to do the most. You know, I didn't set out to make any of these things. I just set out and I wanted to see what would happen. And this is what happened. Um, and the coolest part of all of this is that I realized that even though my year, my official year has technically come to a close, literally today, September 15th is like in my notebooks as the day the year ends. So, it feels also really fitting to get to share all this with you. Um, but I've realized that the coolest thing is is that I get to keep having this day for forever and

19:31I get to keep prioritizing my time with the things I like doing most. And I guess we'll see what happens next. [applause] So, thank you all. Thank you so much to the It's Nice That team for having me on the stage and for creating events like this where we get to come together and talk about art because that's the best.

19:55And thank you all for being here and spending your Tuesday night talking about art because that's the best. And thank you also to the other speakers for making projects that make the world way way way cooler. Um, and then the last thing I want to say is thank you so much to all of my friends in the desert in truth or consequences. Thank you to Tracy and thank you to JL and thank you to Tara and to Reed and to June and to Daisy and to Calvin and there's just been so many inspiring artists in truth or consequences that have unlocked my creativity in a way that I I I I didn't I didn't even know could exist. So, thank you. You all have changed my life.