You either have JavaScript turned off or have an old version of the Adobe Flash Player. To view this video you
need to get the latest Flash player.
If your browser allows only "trusted sites" to execute Javascript, you should add the "googleapis.com" domain to your whitelist to allow our Flash detection to work properly.
Share on Facebook
Share on digg
Share on Delicious
Share on Reddit
Share on StumbleUpon
Share on Blogger
Share on MySpace
Email This
Favorite
Download
Audio
- Audio downloads are not yet available
Video
- Download video to desktop (MP4)
- This link downloads a video file directly to your computer or iPhone. Right-click (or option-click on a Mac) to ensure download.
- Download video to iTunes (MP4)
- This link launches iTunes on your computer, and adds a video file into your iTunes library.
- Watch high-res video (MP4)
- This link lets you watch a higher-quality version of this video. Right-click (or option-click on a Mac) to ensure download.
Discuss this Talk
Loading Comments... 
About this talk
TED visits Tom Shannon in his Manhattan studio for an intimate look at his science-inspired art. An eye-opening, personal conversation with John Hockenberry reveals how nature's forces -- and the onset of Parkinson's tremors -- interact in his life and craft.
About Tom Shannon
Tom Shannon's mixed-material sculpture seems to levitate -- often it actually does -- thanks to powerful magnets and clever arrangements of suspension wire. He designed the TED Prize trophy. Full bio and more links
Interactive Transcript
Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
John Hockenberry: It's great to be here with you Tom. And I want to start with a question that has just been consuming me since I first became familiar with your work. In your work there is always this kind of hybrid quality -- a natural force in some sort of interplay with the creative force. Are they ever in equilibrium in the way that you see your work?
Tom Shannon: Yeah, the subject matter that I'm looking for, it's usually to solve a question like, I had the question popped into my head, "What does the cone that connects the Sun and the Earth look like, if you could connect the two spheres? And in proportion, what would the size of the sphere, and the length and what would the taper be to the Earth?" And so, I went about and made that sculpture turning it out of solid bronze. And I did one that was about 35 feet long. The sun end was about four inches in diameter, and it tapered over about 35 feet to about a millimeter at the Earth end. And so, for me, it was really exciting just to see what it looks like if you could step outside and into a larger context, as though you were an astronaut, and see these two things as an object. Because they are so intimately bound, one is meaningless without the other.
JH: Is there a relief in playing with these forces? And I'm wondering how much of a sense of discovery there is in playing with these forces.
TS: Yeah, well like the magnetically levitated objects, like that silver one there. That was the result of hundreds of experiments with magnets, trying to find a way to make something float, with the least possible connection to the ground. So, I got it down to just one tether to be able to support it.
JH: Now is this electromagnetic here? Or are these static, permanent magnets? Because if the power went out it would just be a big noise. (Laughter)
TS: It's really, it's unsatisfactory having plug-in art. (Laughter) And the magnetic works are a combination of gravity and magnetism. So, it's like a mixture of these ambient forces that influence everything. The Sun has a tremendous field that extends way beyond the planets. And the Earth's magnetic field protects us from the Sun. So there is this huge kind of invisible shape structures that magnetism takes in the universe. But with the pendulum it allows me to manifest these invisible forces that are holding the magnets up. My sculptures are normally very simplified. I try to refine them down to very simple forms. But the paintings become very complex, because I think the fields that are supporting them, they're billowing, and they're interpenetrating and they are interference patterns.
JH: And they are nondeterministic. I mean, you don't know necessarily where you're headed when you begin, even though the forces can be calculated. So, the evolution of this, I gather this isn't your first pendulum. No.
TS: No. The first one I did was in the late '70s. And I just had a simple cone with a spigot at the bottom of it. I threw it into an orbit and it only had one color. And when it got to the center, the paint kept running out. So, I had to run in there, didn't have any control over the spigot remotely. So, that told me right away I needed a remote control device. Then I started dreaming of having six colors. I sort of think about it as the DNA. These colors, the red, blue, yellow, the primary colors, and white, and black, and if you put them together in different combinations, just like printing, in a sense, like how a magazine color is printed, and put them under certain forces, which is orbiting them, or passing them back and forth, or drawing with them, these amazing things started appearing.
JH: So, the valves at the bottom of those tubes there are like radio-control airplane valves.
TS: Yes, they are servos with cams that pinch these rubber tubes. And they can pinch them very tight and stop it, or you can have them wide open. And all of the colors come out one central port at the bottom. You can always be changing colors, put aluminum paint, or I could put anything into this. It could be, you know, tomato sauce, or anything could be dispensed, sand, powders or anything like that.
JH: So many forces there. You've got gravity. You've got the centripetal force. You've got the fluid dynamics.
TS: As it turns out, this device comes in handy, because I don't have to have the the fine motor skills to do, but I can operate slide switches. And it's more of a mental process. I'm looking at it and making decisions. It needs more red. It needs more blue. It need a different shape. And so I make these creative decisions and can execute them in a much simpler way. I mean I got the symptoms. I guess Parkinson's kind of creeps up over the years. But at a certain point you start seeing they symptoms. And in my case, my left hand has a significant tremor, and my left leg also.
JH: What's great to hear you say, because I see this in the work, is these -- one could be deluded into thinking this is a very accidental kind of contraption, where it is all aleatoric, you just sort of wind it up and let it go. But, in fact, the forms that are created are very intentional. And the intent that creates these distinct, highly resolved forms, is the mystery.
TS: It's sort of like realism, in a sense, because I'm obedient to the proportions that nature is giving. I really try to keep everything as accurate as possible. So, in a way, it's a kind of chance operation, because I'm not deliberately, from my subconscious, designing this form. This is a form that is a given form. But something that I haven't seen realized. So, that's part of what I do is try to manifest things that don't exist that I would like to see exist, or that other people would, also, in some way.
JH: Each of these beautiful paintings, are they images in and of themselves, or are they records of a physical event called the pendulum approaching the canvas?
TS: Well, this painting here it was -- I wanted to do something very simple, a simple iconic image of two ripples interfering. So, the one on the right was done first, and then the one on the left was done over it. And I left gaps so you could see the one that was done before. And then, when I did the second one, it really disturbed the piece. these big blue lines crashing through the center of it, so it created a kind of a tension and an overlap. There are lines in front of the one on the right. And there are lines behind the one on the left. So, it takes it into different planes. It's also about just the little events, the events of the interpenetration of --
TS: Yeah, two things that happen, there is an interference pattern, and then a third thing happens. There are shapes that come about just by the marriage of two events that are happening. And I'm very interested in that. like the occurrence of Moiré patterns. Like this green one, this is a painting I did about 10 years ago. But it has some, you see in the upper third there are these moirés and interference patterns that are radial kind of imagery. And that's something that, in painting, I've never seen done. I've never seen a representation of kind of a radial interference patterns, which are so ubiquitous, and such an important part of our lives.
JH: Is that a literal part of the image, or is my eye making that interference patter? Is my eye completing that interference pattern?
TS: It is, the paint actually makes it real. it's really manifested there. If I throw a very concentric circle, or concentric ellipse, it just dutifully makes these evenly spaces lines which get closer and closer together, which describes how gravity works. There is something very appealing about the exactitude of science that I really enjoy. And I love the shapes that I see in scientific observations and apparatus, especially astronomical forms, and the idea of the vastness of it, the scale, is very interesting to me.
My focus in recent years has kind of shifted more toward biology. Some of these paintings, when you look at them very close, there are odd things appear that really look like horses or fishes or birds or crocodiles, elephants. There are lots of things that appear when you look into it. It's sort of like looking at cloud patterns. But sometimes they are very mottled, and highly rendered. And then there are all these forms that we don't know what they are, But they are equally well resolved and complex. So, I think, conceivably those could be predictive, because since it has the ability to make forms that look like forms that we're familiar with in biology, It's also making other forms that we're not familiar with. And maybe it's the kind of forms that we'll discover underneath the surface of Mars, where there are probably lakes with fish swimming under the surface.
JH: Oh, let's hope so. Oh my god, let's. Oh please, yes. Oh, I'm so there. So, you're not a gatekeeper for these forces. you don't think of yourself as the master of these forces. You think of yourself as the servant of them.
TS: Nature, well it's a godsend. It just has so much in it. And I think nature wants to express itself in the sense that we are nature. Humans are of the universe. The universe is in our mind, and our minds are in the universe. And we are expressions of the universe. Basically as humans, ultimately being part of the universe, we are kind of the spokespeople or the observer part of the constituency of the universe. And to interface with it, with a device that lets these forces that are everywhere, act and show what they can do, giving them pigment and paint, just like an artist, you know, it's a good ally. It's a terrific studio assistant.
JH: Well, I love the idea that somewhere within this idea of fine motion and control, with the traditional skills that you have with your hand, some sort of more elemental force gets revealed. And that's, I think, the beauty here. Tom, thanks so much. It's been really really great.
What to watch next
-

-
TED2003
Tom Shannon's anti-gravity sculpture11:55 Posted: May 2009
Rated:
Beautiful Ingenious Fascina...
Other talks from "The Creative Spark"
-
-
Stuart Brown says play is more than fun
26:42 Posted: Mar 2009
-
-
Jeff Skoll makes movies that matter
15:31 Posted: Aug 2007
-
-
Steve Jurvetson on model rocketry
03:22 Posted: Feb 2008
-
-
Rives on 4 a.m.
09:12 Posted: Jul 2007
-
-
John Gerzema: The post-crisis consumer
16:34 Posted: Oct 2009
-
-
Michael Moschen juggles rhythm and motion
37:02 Posted: May 2008
Subscribe to TED
New talks are released daily. Be the first to know!
- Video RSS:
-
Additional RSS Options
Related themes
Related tags
We want to share our Talks! Just follow the guidelines outlined under our Creative Commons license.


