CS6.1: Interview with Mary Franck: Anatomy of a Creative Practice
Photo: Specimens, Mary Franck
Centuries ago, I was on a dance floor the first night I met Mary Franck when she somehow brought a stillness and quiet to the loud, blinky-lights situation and created an unforgettable moment, asking me an extremely important question: “Do you have a personal creative practice?”
In decades of writing about the work of others, no one had ever asked me that. Or at least, not exactly that way. Lots of people have hinted that my journalism career wasn’t enough, and “do you write fiction” was bandied about. But this felt like a more substantial inquiry. It was about an approach to life instead of work.
What Mary won’t know until she reads this is that she prompted an entirely new trajectory in my life with that question. Which is something she probably very generously does on a regular basis with her own art practice, and through her design collaborations, and in the classes she teaches.
Mary Franck is an artist who wants you to be an artist. And I think she would modestly respond to that observation by saying that a lot of people in this mystical world of creative technology and experience design are also that kind of artist. It’s a community of people who want to share ideas, knowledge and talent.
Image: Specimens, Mary Franck
Which is why we’re talking to Mary about lots of things for CreativeStack in this “Studio Visit” interview. When we spoke, Mary was preparing for Specimens, her first solo show of physical works paired with generative organic animations. The new sculptures are an evolution and continuation of the works she creates for live performance and mega-scale generative projections.
She’d recently returned from Chicago, where she created a wondrous pop-up with Faculty for Puma in partnership with Dua Lipa. Chicago is also where another of Mary’s recent projects, Love Letters by the artist Yuge Zhou, was about to debut in massive scale at Art on the Mart.
So basically, Mary brought the perfect blend of creative practice and design practice for a discussion about how those two things tend to influence each other. And how in the West we tend to create an artificial separation between these types of creative endeavor. Yet it can be rather freeing when you do something practical like make a separate website for your art practice and your design work.
Here is how those beautiful thoughts unveiled themselves in our conversation.
Kirsten Nelson: Asking you a question along the same lines as the one you asked me years ago — how have you maintained a personal creative process while working on big digital monuments for commercial clients?
Mary Franck: I'm a designer. That's my job, my profession. And that's a vocation. It serves a need in the world. It's a real privilege to do this work. I love my job. I love doing it.
I was trained as an artist and later as a designer, but I really started as an artist. And so I've thought a lot about the difference between being an artist and being a designer. Sometimes I'm one, sometimes I'm the other, sometimes I'm both. But they serve really different purposes and they allow for different kinds of work.
Something that I love about being a designer is that I get to do completely different projects. They get to look different. They're for different audiences. Sometimes it's creating video for a gigantic sculpture. Sometimes it's telling stories about patients for healthcare. Sometimes it's about telling stories of researchers for technology companies. It's fascinating, and it's a way to be creative that's very engaged with the world.
For basically stupid reasons, the role of the artist in the West is very limited to the idea of individual authorship. These long-held notions of this very individual and isolated interior practice, the idea that the artist is making this very signature, very personal work — all of those are ideas that shape the way that art is presented, the way that people think about art and talk about art. And it's so different than design.
And so even though I do the same things, for instance, I might be using the same softwares or sketching in pretty similar ways when I'm designing versus when I'm making art, what these things mean is very different. And so when I think about stepping out of my designer role and into my role as an artist, it is this opportunity to be very self-reflective, to make things that are personal, expressive — to try to go deeper into a set of ideas that I have been engaging with for years. And sometimes that feels limiting, but sometimes it also feels like this very special challenge. Like, I’d never get to go that deep with a design project.
Photo: Specimens installation at EV Gallery, Mary Franck - Credit: Stephen Szmed
Right now I'm working on an art show called Specimens. This will be a series of relief sculptures. They're imaginary biological specimens materialized in resin and framed in this way that's reminiscent of a specimen collection. And this is a continuation of work I've done in installation and video performance, where I'm taking the forms and shapes that I create manually — maybe I'm drawing in the computer to create armatures, then populating these armatures with algorithmic animated elements and forms to bring them to life.
It's such a foil to my professional work, because only I can have the answer. There's no way of knowing when it's done. All of these decisions are up to me. It's a great complement to my design practice because it reminds me how challenging it is to really make things. It reminds me to have faith in the creative process because sometimes I sit down and I'm like, Oh, this isn't working. It isn't working. It isn't working. And then something crystallizes and it's my favorite piece that I've made in a while.
Kirsten: As you step out of your role as a designer and into the expansive explorations you get to pursue as an artist, what are the ideas that you're digging into more deeply with Specimens?
Mary: There are things that compel us, right? And that's the other aspect of creative practice:it's this way for you to spend time with the things that just fascinate you or drive you. There's room for this sense of obsession. It's validated in a way it's not in other areas of our lives. And so I have these two long-running obsessions that come together in this project, and in this work generally.
One is an obsession with natural forms. And this comes from spending my childhood outside. I have always been fascinated by landscapes and flora, and that's something that continues to be something that I can just spend an enormous amount of time on. Complexity and form as the result of a process is something that's always very beautiful and poetic to me. And to be able to examine that — I’ll pick up seed pods or things like that, and just look at them very closely.
Just observing the natural world is a preoccupation. Going scuba diving and being like, I'm going to spend 45 minutes breathing underwater and looking at these strange creatures that move with a logic that is totally foreign to what I would see on land. It's almost a meditation — this way of appreciating the complexity and nuance of the world.
And then, complementary to that is this obsession that I have with the process of computational geometry. I excelled at geometry in school, but didn't really understand any applications for it. But as soon as I got into computer graphics, I was like, Oh, okay, this is it. I can describe, through a sequence of steps, the way that a pattern should spiral around a branch, and then split, and then open. And in a way that fits the complexity that I admire so much. I can describe that complexity in a way that I never could with a brush — at least it would never satisfy me the way that I could paint something. So doing these three-dimensional works, it's almost like an homage to these beautiful structures that I admire so much.
This aspect of using algorithms as an expressive medium is a departure from the way that algorithmic work has been contextualized within the art world for decades. When I was studying art at the Conceptual and Information Art Program at San Francisco State University, at the time, algorithmic art was really contextualized within the field of Sol LeWitt, of Fluxus, of artists who were using things like Chance Operations and procedures in a way to get away from authorship and to present art as a conceptual product.
There's been this long-running thread within more technologically oriented art to have art be conceptual, impersonal and not expressive. And I think in some ways that also kind of continues certain modernist ideals of universal art or platonic, more impersonal approaches. So this aspect of using technological processes or algorithms in a way that feels expressive and personal, is an intentional choice and an intentional departure from these traditions. For every piece, I'm trying to imbue them with something that's expressive of my own personality and my own aesthetic.
Kirsten: Your imagination. Like, taking all those seed pods, and in your head, you grab all that data analysis and then you're reformulating it into a new kind of specimen.
Mary: Yeah, exactly. There’s a J.G. Ballard poem, “I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world.” In relation to geometry, geometry is this way that humanity first described, and now shapes the world. Geometry as a practice actually originates in the ancient world, in Egypt, where they had to redraw property lines after the Nile River flooded every year. And so the practice of basically surveying, of triangulation, of geometry comes from property and ownership. Capitalism, once again. But we can also think of it as a practice of trying to interpret the natural world into something that's sensible within human systems.
And so from this practice of being able to apply abstract ideas around property lines to this wild and unpredictable landscape. To go from that to where we are today with the practice of geometry, which is, of course, the built environment–is insane. But we're also using geometry, the same practices, the same mathematics, to create completely alternative realities that are totally fictionalized.
Part of what I see as the relevance of Specimens, the art show that I'm working on right now, is to look at the ways in which the worlds that we're interpreting, or recreating, or basically imagining. They imitate the world that exists, but they're also overwriting it with these other conventions or ideas. There's a discrepancy at every step. If you look at these image generators that are so fun to play with, like Midjourney, etc., there is the sense where they can generate and imitate, but there's always a difference. There's something a little bit weird or uncanny and disingenuous. And I think that the show is also engaging with this moment that we're having in an indirect way and through sculpture. That's part of the meaning I want to layer into the work.
Kirsten: Yeah, you can always see one little nuance of it that you're like, No, that's not human generated. But yeah, it's funny, when you were describing the sequence of steps, I thought of Sol LeWitt, too, and how he just sold sets of instructions. And I was thinking that too when I interviewed Akiko Yamashita for an article, she was talking about selling the kit of projection or display with the work. So basically you're selling the optimized presentation of the work as well. The way she ended up describing it reminded me of Sol LeWitt, too. It's funny how often his stuff is coming into our conversations.
Mary: His work is such a landmark. It foreshadows, or retroactively makes sense of a lot of work that is algorithmically generated.
There's this real challenge around selling or collecting some of the work that we love to make. I love to make generative video art. But then, do I sell someone a giant computer that is eventually going to break down? How do I actually hand that over to an audience?
So this show will actually be my first solo gallery show. I've shown in galleries, but I've never made salable work before, I've always done performances or installations. This is a set of sculptures and videos that accompany them. It's very discrete, finite work, which is a real departure for me. But I wanted to be able to make work that people could actually have, and make this a series and an interrelated set, rather than making one big piece, like I usually do.
In some of my past work, video and physical form come together. I love those pieces because I’m making an object that's impermanent and changing over time — with the luminosity of the projection or the screen light — while at the same time giving a physical presence and materiality to the digital piece, the video or the real-time algorithm.
This is not exactly that work. This is easier to make.
But I wanted to keep the conceptual thread that these objects are not solid. The story that I have about these is that the sculptural forms are the ossified remains of this living specimen. When you think of finding a sand dollar, it's a beautiful pattern, it's a beautiful object. But if you've seen a living one, they have all these wavy cilia and they're these incredible organisms. And so the videos tell the story or reveal these additional aspects of the specimens that are no longer alive or have not have not been included in the sculptural form. So it's more of a story-based relationship between the video and the sculpture.
Photo: Love Letters by Yuge Zhou - Credit: Viktor Gerasimovski
Kirsten: Which somehow makes me think about how in the past you have talked about your work on digital monuments, and how you're making these spaces into something that people want to return to by adding an extra layer of meaning that makes it feel more contemporary. Which in turn makes me think of how our friend Güvenç Özel talks about how architecture will be melded with the digital sooner rather than later, and not just in an AR sense.
Mary: Yeah, I really feel like that's what was so exciting to me about working with ESI Design, and before that when I got started as an experience designer, doing giant projection mapping pieces with Obscura Digital when they were active. For one, I got hooked really early on making gigantic video pieces. It’s hard to go back from that. And then, two, understanding the way that media could be architectural, and how different it is when it's 30 feet tall, 90 feet tall, or 200 feet tall.
That is something that also continues to fascinate me. If we think about these fascinations that we keep returning to in our work, whether it's professional work or artistic work, that's definitely something that really drives me and inspires me over and over.
I wanted to work at ESI because I really do believe in bringing digital expression and digital culture into the physical environment in a way that feels intentional. And I think that it is a very different format for expression than making digital content for phones or for a headset. It requires a different sensitivity. It has different opportunities. It can be more cultural, more civic. It can be placemaking. It can be site-specific in a way that these other forms of digital video inherently are not. And I think that the most successful projects in this arena really lean into that.
I do want to continue doing work in that area because I think it's a huge opportunity. It's a huge miss if we don't incorporate the digital aspect of our lives and our society into our shared civic spaces. It might lead to our built physical civic spaces being diminished and being less relevant and less active. And if we can bring people together in both of these layers of our reality, I think we'll be able to do more interesting and important things culturally and civically.
Maybe the theme of this episode, Compromise, can be brought into this part of the conversation.
There's a lot of tension for me between having an artistic practice and a design practice, because sometimes they are at odds. And actually it was a big breakthrough for me when I made separate websites for each of them. I was tired of trying to tell a unifying story for these things when it was so much clearer to me and everyone else if I tell it as separate stories. But there is a certain amount of compromise there. In each instance, I'm not telling the whole story of myself. I'm creating clarity for someone else, but important things are missing in each story.
Kirsten: But recently you had a chance to see how much more of your artist self you’re able to bring to projects… what was that story about the “can you make it more psychedelic” request?
Mary: So I'm at this moment where I have stepped back into working independently, working as a freelancer. It's really fun. It's great to be in a position to articulate more of my point of view as a designer, and I'm excited to go on that journey. It's exciting to be working with new talented people and in different verticals. I was within this very specific vertical of architectural media installations for four years. And even within that very specific field I was focused primarily on doing branded experiences.
For that audience, the real estate field, the clients are very serious. The work needs to be timeless pieces that enhance city skylines, and stately lobbies. There's a certain dignity and seriousness to all of the work that I was doing, which was great. I really appreciated being entrusted with those decisions.
It has been fun to step back into more light-hearted work, like event work and pop-ups. And in this case, I was doing a pop-up with Faculty for Puma in partnership with Dua Lipa. Faculty has been a great agency to work with. So yeah, we were making this generative projection that used Dua Lipa's signature butterfly logo in a cloud of particles. I made the design, projection mapped it — these were generative, interactive visuals, which I still love to do.
I like working with people who want to pull out all the stops. Maximalism has its appeal. We did the client review and the client said, 'You know, I like it. It's great, but could you make it more psychedelic?' And I thought, Oh my God, I have not gotten this note in SO long. And I was like, ‘Absolutely! We will now turn it up to 11.’ It was a fun project.
KN: It’s interesting how once you touch that edge of what you're allowed to do, it informs everything in all your work.
MF: Yes it does. I'm in this moment of growth and reflection where it's great to partner with these different creative studios and creative practitioners. I think there's a good chance that I'll go back to architecture. That field offers the opportunity to make things that have long-term meaning, and the civic aspect fascinates me. But it has been fun to get hands-on again and do things that allow for immediate creativity.
Maybe that's one of the real privileges of having a creative practice is that it's there. You can put it on the shelf, you can come back to it and it will still be there.