November 2003

LN: For example, Picasso studied as a classical artist before he ever went into Cubism. He wouldn’t be able to do that with any kind of proficiency if he didn’t have the grounding of being steeped in art history.

JSB: Absolutely. Being steeped in the past is critical, but so too is being steeped in the mastery of the current, and then to have a passion to go beyond. That ability to go beyond, to re-frame and to invent is guided by your own internal aesthetic. And no one in the research field has ever talked explicitly about a research aesthetic. So, one of the kinds of things that I’m really striving for, is to bring good avante-garde artists and real researchers together around this issue.

LN: You’ve just described what I would call the ‘ideal’ as a researcher, but in reality, they’re not really like that, right?

JSB: Right

LN: Did you decide this ideal fits with the character of an artist? Is that what made you decide to bring artists into the mix of scientists?

JSB: Yes. And so it just struck me this may be an opportunity to bring a certain class of artists who may excel in this capability and become a role model, but it has to be a form of role model where both people are working closely together. It can’t just be some abstract role model. It can’t just be reading about or seeing an artist in the hallways.

LN: Do you mean they were sitting next to each other at the computer?

JSB: Well, I mean they would find a joint project to work on. Now this is where the game gets really interesting and this is where Rich Gold enters the scene, because I already hired Rich to come to PARC. Rich is the father of the PARC Artists in Residence Program, the PAIR program, as we call it.

LN: So this is actually a person and not a metaphor for extracting the gold — you’ve created this alchemical mix and you’ve got “rich gold,” which is a great metaphor.

JSB: Yes, the person is real but he also became the alchemist that enabled this very rich mixture to produce gold. He is an artist, a computer scientist, and a musician. I mean a computer musician, and I had discovered him down at Mattel, as a toy designer.

It was Rich who proposed building the formal program for the PARC Artists and Residence Program, PAIR. The challenge was how to build a new kind of institutional mechanism: How do you find the artists, how do you create a jury, how do you match up the artists’ interests with the researchers’ interests, how do you find the right pairing, how do you pair an artist with a scientist so that it is a natural chemistry? If it is isn't there, you don’t do it at all. So there’s a whole set of interesting institutional mechanisms that underlie making this work. He designed and drove the whole program for a three or four year period.

LN: How did you get permission from your boss to actually do this?

JSB: Well, first of all, I am the boss.

LN: Okay, well that helps.

JSB: I mean, I was the director of the whole operation out here.

LN: You didn’t have to answer to the CEO of Xerox then?

JSB: No, I informed him we were doing this, but I never asked him for permission.

LN: In your PAIR program, do the artists and scientists also look at marketplace applications relative to what they’re experimenting with, or inventing? Or that doesn’t come into the conversation.

JSB: That doesn’t come into the conversation very much. Again, we expect our researchers to be incredibly familiar with the marketplace of whatever they happen to be doing. Our purpose is not to design products; our purpose is to create almost new waves of looking at the world, new industries, and so on. We were also striving to create a knowledge ecology within Xerox.

LN: So it’s an opportunity to carve out space and time for pure art, creativity and invention without worrying about consequences at that point.

JSB: Right. Although, it’s coupled with technical and scientific work at the same time. I mean we don’t just sit there and build anything. We don’t build sandboxes. Xerox, being the document company, is our rallying flag. What we were doing here was experimenting for example, with fundamentally new genres. What might the newspaper of the future actually look like? What might be the way television and newspapers morph together? What would be both the artistic and human experience? How might you go about thinking about this fundamentally new type of media? What might it look like? What might be the way people experience it? What would you do with it? That’s just one example, but it was a very interesting consequence of the interplay between a couple of artists and some computer scientists.

Continued...

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