ITP Part 1: Leif Krinkle
Of all the things I have encountered in my newspaper work covering the arts, my absolute favorite is the New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program — or ITP. This is a graduate program that, as their Web site puts it , offers students a chance to “explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives.”
The program also likes to call itself the “Center for the Recently Possible.”
In other words, it’s a gathering of mad scientists, coming up with crazy and wonderful contraptions that sometimes help you in unexpected ways, other times make you think unexpected thoughts, and still others just give you a good giggle.
A number of these folks have had shows at the nearby Greylock Arts, a gallery in Adams, MA (helmed by former Shuffleboil contributor Marianne Petit and her very good buddy Matthew Belanger) and I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to and writing articles on several of them. I’m putting up the interviews in order to give people a chance to really get to know what goes on at ITP and what sorts of cool folks are doing it.
I’m starting with Leif Krinkle, a man of astonishing energy and imagination, with an eye towards sustainability.
SB: The Krinkl-O-Tron expands the notion of collaboration to include the audience.
LK: It came more from a theoretical perspective, when I first created it, I started making, when I came to ITP, the first question I had was ‘I make these big interactive installations and performance pieces, what kind of space do you have?’ ‘None.’ For about a year and a half, I made really small prototypes. With the Krinkl-O-Tron, even with these small propotypes I had been making with scan imagery and large multi screen displays, so I wanted to make an installation that was able to not only create but display these large format medias in real time and in doing so create some sort of physical interaction with them. That’s what the carousel was and I realized that I was trying to push the boundaries of what new media and electronic media had to offer and I thought that one of the boundaries is obviously power consumption, so I thought ‘Well, let’s see if we can figure out some way to offset the consumption of power or at least bring that to discussion. That’s where the sustainable aspect of this came in.
Different crowds interact differently, it’s more of the culture that you display it in. Interactive art is pretty new and people don’t really come to a gallery or an art show thinking that they’re going to interact or break a sweat or do something in order to fully experience the art.
Coming from a burning man background, where there are no spectators, you all have to participate, a lot of the people I’m around influenced me and inspired me to create things that require effort and group participation, so around here, there’s definitely a lot of people who hop on and start going. Marianne can’t keep off the thing. In Greylock, they’re around Mass MoCA and I imagine the east coast is a little more progressive on the coast than where I grew up in Michigan, so I found it. There was a 90 year old woman jumping on it and kids love it — kids use it way better than adults. I think adults are more concrete in their ideas of what is proper to do in a group of people and riding around on scooters doesn’t figure as one of them, so I think the adults take a little more coaxing.
SB: Adults get far too hung up on naming something art instead of just this cool thing.
LK: I think it’s the context that you put it in. I’ve never really considered myself an artist, so I think of it more as a carnival ride or just a kitschy thing. My background’s in record production and I do all this tech back-up to a lot of more traditional art, so I’ve never really considered myself an artist. As far as what adults would think . . . I’m still riding the fringe of what really is mainstream, galleries are a venue, but I see it more at festivals. It’s almost like a sideshow attraction. I think that’s just me and my concrete thing, because in galleries there are a lot of proper things and etiquette and bureaucracy and, again, this question of is it art or is it not, and I really just forgo those.
I have a limited discography of independent releases that nobody has ever heard of. I always felt shown up by visual artists. I really feel like I experience the world through my ears, I’m very conscious of sound, so there’s always a sound aspect that I go back to. Visual art, I’ve always felt very shown up by, and having some physical tangible thing. I think people saw music as much more of ear candy or something to fill the air, whereas real art is something you can hold or something you can feel.
SB: What has your trajectory in creative endeavors been?
LK: I’m a farmer. I grew up in Michigan on a peach orchard and my dad died when I was five. My mom was an emergency physician, she was on call 24 hours a day. I ran the farm from when I was 8 years old. Before my dad died, he planted the farm and built the house and it was all based around sustainable practices and energy efficiency and things like that. We have a greenhouse and solar panels and geothermal heating and a lot of things that were really ahead of their time when my dad was building the house in the late 70s. I always grew up working around tractors and having this idea that we are using non sustainable resources and we have to use them sparingly, we can’t pollute the world. That got lost on me when I was like ‘I’ve got to get out of this small town, there are too many rednecks and jocks around me.’ I went to med school for a year but dropped out and traveled around Europe for a year, moved to Chicago and that’s where I started producing. Well, I had already started producing, I had been in punk rock bands, that’s probably one of the reasons I left med school. So I used to produce punk rock and country music in Michigan, then I moved to Chicago and started producing techno and hip hop and house and was mildly successful there. I went to college and worked in a few studios and actually had my own production company. Around 2001, that all fell apart and I had to refigure what I was doing. The same software that I was making music with also allowed me to hook up sensors and make out rhythmic and infinitely variable music. It also gave me the power to control video, so there was this whole idea of creating interactive environments, controlling all your senses and having user interaction with them, giving everyone the sense that they had some input or some responsibility in creating the experience.
SB: What brought you to NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program?
LK: Getting into big group interaction was always interesting, so I was always looking around for programs or for people who were doing this and one of the only places that had this diverse focus was ITP. When I went there I fell in love with it and that really changed what I thought I was capable of, what I though was possible. I had never done any electrical engineering, I had only done minor computer programming and that really opened my eyes that everything is malleable, whether it’s sound or video or photography, some sort of digital or analog input into the computer, you can create or manipulate just about anything, even your reality if you get intense with the media enough. That’s what I was going for with a few of these projects, recontextualizing the dimension that we experience reality in, whether it’s time and space or how we physically interact with that, building physical interfaces for digital media and doing all that.
SB: You went to Burning Man and did work there.
LK: I had never seen it, I had no expectations, I had no idea what it was going to be like, I thought it was much more Mad Max because I had a lot of old burner friends who don’t go anymore who went in the beginning when it was guns and crazy explosions and destruction. It’s really changed a lot, it’s much more communally based, it’s much more happy go lucky, it’s a really friendly place and an amazing venue for extremely large art that you’d never see anywhere else. The people who go there are so brilliant and smart, you see things with so much thought put behind them, they’re executed so well – not to mention, they’re very conscioius of the land that they are on and leaving no trace. It’s a great place to practice sustainable living because there’s nothing out there, you have to make use of everything that you bring. The sun is incredible – solar power out there, I don’t understand why they’d need anything else, it’s so intense that you can power anything with a solar panel.
After going to Burning Man and seeing that everybody has to participate, how you have to take into consideration the harsh conditions and design your art accordingly. ITP taught me a lot of things, like one-off prototypes that only last to show them once and they either break or wind up in the trash or fall apart.
I wanted to design something that was able to withstand those sorts of conditions and also put into practice some of the participatory and sustainable aspects that Burning Man extols. Not that the Krinkl-O-Tron made it out to Burning Man this year, it’s a little under designed for Burning Man, much better in a gallery space. I did bring another piece out there – an LED display that was all solar powered.
The first version of it is the Luscious Electric Delight, it’s a red display. The one that is one the ITP site is ten percent of the size of what the new one is, four by three feet and it’s 2100 red LED that read out these psychedelic algorhythmic, mathematical equations, and they mostly cycle through like crazy, very weird patterns, asymmetrical, very beautiful, organic patterns. The fact that I was able to power it with one solar panel that diverted power to the LED display and my computer for a week with no problems, 10 hours a day, that was pretty good.
SB: How do you see your work progressing? Any plans?
LK: I have still have a 50 acre farm. I’ve been going to places like the Oni Sculptural Park, the Socrates Sculpture Garden, an art farm in Putnam Valley, and then going to Western Massachusetts, it’s nice to see all these fringe communities that are making it really nice to go and spend a period of time and create some art or have access to facilities and do things like that.
SB: Rural communities are really more open to weird art scenes than ever before.
LK: Back in my hometown that used to be filled with rednecks and hicks, it’s really changed. It’s really close to Ann Arbor. The property values have gone through the roof, all the farms have been sold and all the affluent artists and intellectuals from the school are migrating towards Chelsea, where I grew up, and Jeff Daniels opened a theater there and there’s a four star, five star restaurant, so what used to be farmer feed stores and hardware and five and dimes are turning into fancy modern art galleries and things like that, so it’s a much different place from what I grew up in and the art scene is getting very big there, as well as the organic subscription farming. One of these days, I see going back there and setting up a residency and doing intensive organic farming and having classes in art and sustainable practices and organic farming and canning and knitting and whatever we can do to create and promote sustainable living practices on this 50 acre farm and have a sort of art farm. It’s a far off idea, but it’s definitely very valid and it could be very successful out there.
SB: Do you still do any work on the farm?
LK: I go back a few times every year to open it up for the spring and then I hay the fields in the late summer and then I go back in the late fall and close it all up.
The world is so much smaller than it was and we’re all connected. My mom has better high speed internet connection than I do in the city, she has beamed in through a satellite, so . . . the fact that everyone goes out to the desert once a year and brings everything with them and creates the second largest city in Nevada, I think people are looking for space, anything, because there’s nothing here in NY. The people I work with here in New York used to throw big warehouse parties and when I was back in Chicago, that’s what I did, and the same thing in Detroit, and that’s just not available anymore. With the political climate it makes it a little sketchier to think how long we can last in these huge megatropolises.
Living in New York, you forget really quickly that people live outside of New York.
I’m a city boy when I’m in the country and I’m totally the hick when I’m in the city. I never feel real comfortable, but I can find things that can relate to both of those.
SB: Technology has become another form of creative expression.
LK: It’s the new medium. If I were living in the 19th century, paints and canvasses and inks would be great, the printing press. It’s just what we have access to — and the fact that the technology in everyday life gives the ability to modify that and make it personalized and make it artistic, it makes it so much more easy now, you’re not stuck with the one aspect thing.
SB: The Krinkl-O-Tron is a whimsical applicatioin of technology, but it also serves as an example of what can be done with the technology.
LK: It strikes up a conversation. In my research, I found a place in Africa using human powered carousels, little merry go rounds to pump water from the ground and holding clean water.
A company that I’ve already pitched the idea to as far as the carousel design are designing sustainable health clinics for Rwanda and Sudan that have to be very cheap and have to generate their own clean water and their . . . be available to be manufactured on site with local resources, so we are desigining these things and taking into consideration what’s accessible in those countries and sending them the plans. The carousel design, that’s one of the things that one of the physicians we’re talking to in Rwanda is saying ‘Well, we don’t have enough money for solar cells, we don’t have time for the adults to be cranking generator pumps or whatever, we don’t have the money or the mechanics to have a diesel generator,’ and we’re like ‘Well, you have these children, right?’ Make a whole playground of electricity and water pumping play toys, things that could be made easily from whatever scrap material is around.
They have a man in the field out there who’s going to come back in a month or two and he’ll report back on the logistics and feasibility of certain design plans. One of the original attempts sent a bunch of students from MIT and they had a plethora of ideas and had all these things in their brain, the logistics and feasibility of these, and they came back with one idea that would cost a million dollars per clinic. So they sent them over there and they totally botched it, they didn’t understand what was going on, so as soon as they saw the Krinkl-O-Tron, they were like okay.
The Krinkl-O-Tron is basically made out of found material – the Krinkl-O-Tron itself cost a couple hundred dollars to build and most of that was to buy the scooters, which were $150 bucks. Most of that was scrap material that we scrounged around the shop or off the street.
SB: The idea of Third World communities using it to pump what is very Gilligan’s Island in the best possible sense.
LK: It’s good to use what you have. One of the guys that I work with who taught me to weld was one of the featured team heads for Junkyard Wars. That’s what they do – this is Madagascar Institute that I’m talking about. Now Madagascar does a lot of things, big contraptions that they can’t ship around, so they usually just drop into a festival or into wherever they’re supposed to do an installation, find the nearest junkyard and just start grabbing and are able to construct anything out of anything. That’s just a really resourceful mentality to have.
SB: You’re also the managing director at Lemur.
LK: We fabricate musical robots, which are basically brand new instruments which aren’t conventional in any manner, but they’re not trying to be like robots playing instruments, they’re brand new instruments that are robotic, that you can control using a computer, which makes them interactive. We do performances and installations with those.
SB: The robots have performed with They Might Be Giants.
LK: We did a whole concert with TMBG. All the performers came and composed brand new pieces, TMBG played ukelele and accordion with a backing of robots. That was a trip, that was a really good and successful concert series, I think that’s the most successful that Three Legged Dog has done. We’ve also done Mally McBeak, which is a piece that was written at the turn of the century for a 16 player piano in the hopes that player would one day be able to synchronise their pianos, which never came about the early ’80s when Disclavier came with controllable keyboards. 100 years later, they finally had keyboards which were syncable, so you had those, but they had humans playing the percussion, but the piece was written too fast for them to keep up, so they actually had to slow down the piece for that. Then a composer translated the piece into MIDI then translated that for our robots and then we had that for about three months in the National Gallery in Washington, DC – that had four robotic xylophones, three robotic bass drums, plane propeller engines, alarms, and 16 Disclavier pianos.
SB: How important do you think humor is to the sort of work you do?
LK: I used to be much more serious, but coming to ITP, I felt very humbled by the brilliance of the people I’m with. It’s a way to get through all the headaches and chaos of trying to get this technology to do what you want, if you’re trying to do something fun or something funny or not super serious. I think that’s what separates ITP from MIT or Carnegie Mellon, those take themselves way too seriously and, in doing so, cut their focus way down.
Just having humor is so inspiring and such a connecting point for everybody to appreciate the work.
We have to keep joking, otherwise we get so bogged down at being pissed off at electricity.
SB: Are you filled with boundless energy? Do you ever stop?
LK: It’s funny because I feel really tired and slightly lazy compared to a lot of my peers. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever had to find a job.
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