Tom Burtonwood: Art, Philosophy, Community and Pragstraction

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Hey, Stephanie.

Graham is nosy as.

Hey, friends.

Welcome.

And welcome back to Nosy AF conversations about art, activism and social change.

This is your host, Stephanie, and this week, I am bringing you a live conversation I had just Saturday, Aug. 9, 2025, with artist Tom Burtonwood, and we recorded it at Lumpin Radio here in Chicago, where I am based.

And it was my first time ever at the station by myself.

I was running the board, y'.

All.

I was running the board.

I was doing all the things, and all I had to say was I was feeling very Bonnie Deshong.

Do you guys know who Bonn Chong is?

She was a radio personality here in Chicago.

I feel like she might have moved maybe to, like, another city, maybe Houston.

I.

That.

That could not be true.

I'm not sure where she moved on to, but I do know that she is still doing radio, at least I think so.

But anyway, she's a baddie.

And I was really, like, channeling Bonnie Deshong, you know, host energy.

You know, I was, like, feeling really strong and proud that day.

And I just also have to say shout out to Mario Smith, who is another rad at Lumpin.

But Mario has been doing, like, tons of podcasts, tons of hosting, even, like, live hosting and all this stuff.

And I was so lucky to get to know him at Lumpin and then be able to reach out to him and be like, oh, my God.

Wait, what?

Control again.

And he talks me through all of it.

So, Mario, there's a hero.

I'm just kidding.

Oh, my God.

Can I.

Did I just really just do that?

Anyway, listen, I really appreciate that he was there for me, but here's the thing.

When Tom and I started talking, I realized the conversation was going out live on the air, but I wasn't recording it for the podcast yet.

Oh, my gosh.

So I quickly hit play or record so that it could start recording.

And so the very beginning is missing.

But don't worry, you only missed my intro, the theme music, which I already played for you, and a little bit of setup.

So I'm gonna get you up to speed so that we can jump.

Right.

So Tom is a Chicago multidisciplinary artist, and he's originally from the UK and his installation recurring was on view at 21C Chicago.

Now, I believe this 21C is a series.

Like, it's a hotel chain, like maybe boutique, but.

But they're always doing these, like, really beautiful and ambitious art exhibitions.

And so Tom had his work there from May through July, and it was part of 21C's Elevate series.

So the work that Tom had exhibited was part of his ongoing project.

A cube is a rectangle, and it includes three elements.

It had a massive gridded wall of over 200 of these drawings that Tom call.

And also two large hanging wurfles made from mixed media like hydrocol paint, soil and natural fibers.

And then also a stop frame animation of his unfolding cube motif.

So Tom.

Tom's work, it like, plays with repetition, complexity and transformation in ways that sort of echo the philosopher Deleuze, who I believe is like, from France.

Is he from France?

Let me see where Deleuze is from.

Hold on, y'.

All.

Yeah, he's a French philosopher.

Yeah, Gilles Deleuze.

That's what I think.

That's how I think you're supposed to say it.

But anyway, it's based off of Deleuze's ideas about how nothing ever repeats exactly the same.

Every recurrence brings something new.

So when the audio kicks in, we're going to be mid conversation about how to pronounce werful, and then we go from there.

Okay, you are caught up.

So here's my Lumpin Radio conversation with Tom Burtonwood.

Well, I don't know.

It's a German word.

It's spelled W, U with an umlaut, R, F, E, L. So wurfel or woerfel, I don't know.

It's probably woelfel.

I'm sure folks out there who are German speakers would let us know maybe.

Yeah, that would be nice if they would.

But the show.

Okay, so it had drawings.

It had sculpture, animation.

It had drawings and animation.

Although the animation was my sculpture, the cube unfolding.

And so I make.

It's.

I don't know, I feel like I make complicated things that are hard to describe on the radio.

Basically, it's a cube that unfolds.

There are four wedges.

And I think of it like a flower, really.

You know, a flower unfolding, the petals opening to receive the sun, to share pollen with the bees and the pollinators.

And so these wedges open up.

There are four towers, there are squares.

Each tower is about an eighth of the width of one of the sides of the cube.

So These four towers go all the way up to the top of the cube.

They span the height of the cube and then there's a pyramid in the middle.

And so if you were to subtract the pyramid and these towers from a cube, what you'd be left with are these kind of triangular wedge things.

And so then they unfold at 90 degrees to the pyramid and they sort of unfold once to go flat, and then they unfold again to sort of stand back up again.

And it's this form that I invented back in 1998, something like that.

I was in graduate school at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

Go Salukis.

And I was down in Carbondale doing my graduate studies and that was an awesome time.

And I met a lot of really great people down there.

And I love Carbondale and I miss it, but one of these days I go back and hang out and stuff.

But I was thinking a lot about movement and travel.

I was.

You know, I'm not originally from the United States of America.

I'm originally from England, Northern England, born in Manchester.

And so I was traveling backwards and forwards between the north of England and Southern Illinois from 98 through.

Well, from 98 through today.

I was back in Yorkshire, you know, a couple of weeks ago.

And so, like, movement and travel and the logistics of that and thinking about, you know, things that get put in the hold of an aircraft.

I'm always fascinated at the gate, you know, looking out the windows and seeing the loaders and seeing the luggage and they go onto those little.

Again, those kind of triangular wedge shaped things that go in the hold and you see stuff coming and going.

All of that stuff's fascinating to me.

And so I really kind of reflected upon that and started to think about how I could make my art be more.

Could travel more easily or reflect that experience in some ways.

And so I had this idea for unfolding sculptures.

I was thinking a lot about satellites and kind of devices that go into space.

Holly and I, my partner Holly, we'd gone to an exhibition in San Francisco, I think the Yerba Buena, I think it would have been in again, like 98 or 99.

Yep.

The yerba Buena Art center in San Francisco, I think.

And it was a exhibition of photographs of the moon landings, you know.

Oh, yeah.

And yeah, again, I was just really fascinated by all of that stuff.

And so all of those kind of influences of thinking about travel, thinking about logistics, thinking about movement, thinking about my movement across these different international borders.

And so it all sort of came together and to think about Making sculpture that could unfold a bit like origami, but not completely origami.

Right.

Because that's not really what I'm doing.

I'm super interested kind of in kind of minimal sculpture, minimalist work.

I've done a lot of work in kind of land art and, like, working in the environment.

And so I've always been kind of playing with these kind of Platonic solids, these kind of singular forms, pyramids, cubes, rectangles, et cetera.

Just very simple things.

I like them because they have a lot of friction with kind of their environment and whatever.

And so, yeah, so I've been working with this form now for quite a long time, but on and off and back.

In the summer of 22, Holly and I were about to go on a trip.

So travel once again.

There's a theme.

And I was making these drawings.

And then I just had the idea to start making a series of drawings quite small, like four and a half inches wide by about five and a half inches tall, that were isometric projections of this cube.

So if you think about this cube that I've described, so cube, pyramid on the inside, towers, weird wedge modules that open out, so then looking at it isometrically.

So isometric is like.

If you've ever played Sims, right?

The view of Sims is what's called isometric, right?

And so you're looking.

You imagine the camera looking at the corner of a square and then rotating that camera up about 30 degrees, rotating the.

Bringing the camera up and then rotating it down like 33 degrees or something like that.

And so you're looking down at something, but you're also looking at it parallel, so there's no perspective.

And so it's a very odd way of looking at things because you don't see, like, that kind of naturally, although you kind of do.

I mean, I really quite like isometric, which is why I'm using that.

And so, yeah, so then I started making these drawings of this cube thing and kind of haven't looked back.

But then, I think two years ago now, I decided, wow, it was time to make the cube again.

And so I did that for the exhibition that I had at Material in Roscoe Village.

And then recently, while I had that exhibition, I was like, oh, I could animate this because I started doing an animation where I'd done everything on the computer and then drawn it and stuff and then painted it.

So I had.

I don't know, I do these long, convoluted things.

Um, so I, you know, I animated it on the Computer.

And then I had my robot draw it each frame.

And then I hand painted it in gouache.

And it took forever.

And it was great.

And I love it.

And I'm really happy with that piece.

And I've.

I would love to do more like that.

Yeah.

But I also love working with light and the environment and the land.

You know, I talked about land art earlier and so I. I just.

I don't know, I just had this brainwave that I could use.

Like clear plastic.

Yeah.

That was laser cut for each of the angles as the cube unfolds.

And so I've made two of those now and I.

Well, no, I've made three of those animations now.

And the piece at 21C Museum Hotel from earlier last month was four or five animations that I'd made layered together.

And I wanted the animation for that, for 21C, for the recurring show to feel more like the drawings, which I.

Want to bring to light, that they are very, very bright and colorful.

The drawings.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So for the listener, too, think of like bright, bright colors.

Lots of lilacs and lavenders in pink.

Right?

Lots of pinks.

I love pink.

I like all the pinks.

One of my favorite authors is this chap, Terry Pratchett.

He wrote a whole series of books called Discworld.

And there's like the Color of Magic.

And he describes it as octarine.

So.

O C T A R I N E. I think I might be missing something there.

Octarine, which is like this color between like a very, like.

I don't know, the color of lightning.

You know, like when you see lightning.

Yeah.

It's like this kind of impossibility.

Yeah.

I love that type of color.

And that color is called apterine.

No, but it's.

That was a color that he invented.

Oh.

I mean, I like the idea that, like, what is it?

The.

There's a certain type of shrimp.

I can't remember the name of them, but they see so much color.

It's outside of the range that we can see because they've got more color receptors in their eyes.

I don't know.

I love all that stuff.

You know what I love?

I think my favorite new color is gonna be the color of lightning.

It is a good color.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, it's, you know, don't spend too long looking at it.

Yeah.

No, it's actually similar to the lump and hand kind of color.

It's, you know.

Oh, wow, that's interesting.

You see.

Cause the lump in hand color is blue.

I See, like lightning is like.

Like maybe the color shirt I'm wearing is sort of like a light yellow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But like, I don't know.

It's a weird color to describe because it's almost like white, but it could be like that neon.

You don't really see it for very long.

Yeah, I know, right?

It should stay a little bit longer so we can look at it.

Right.

So I don't know if that was a good.

I mean, that was kind of a wandering description, really, but that is kind of how I go.

But yeah, I mean, so at the 21C show, I had a grid of these drawings.

I've made 330 something of them right now.

And so I had a grid of about 220 of them.

And I'm about to do an install at the School of the Art Institute galleries next week where I think I'm going to install like 250 of them for a faculty exhibition.

It's the faculty sabbatical triennial.

So basically all the faculty who've been on sabbatical for the last three years were given the option to install work.

They didn't have to do it, but they were given the option to install work.

And so I was like, yeah, I'll do that.

Yeah, why not?

Yeah.

So I'm going to show, I think, about 250 of the drawings, the animations, and then I'm working on a new sculpture.

I don't know if it's going to be finished.

If it isn't, I'll exhibit an old one.

But if it is very exciting, it's.

Showing up and it's showing out.

It is.

It's a new one.

I don't know.

I'm going to keep that up to wraps to see if it actually happens on time.

Is your new.

Is the sculpture that you're making, is it like a cube?

Is that.

It will be a cube.

I'm very.

The nice thing about this body of work for me and the thing that I've really cherished about it is, is that it's giving me a sort of singularity.

Like I'm a person who jumps all over the place.

And I like that, you know, And I'm kind of unapologetically going to do that.

And that doesn't always.

I don't know.

I do think people.

I don't know, I go backwards and forwards, but I am somebody who jumps about a lot, and that's just who I am.

And I'm.

I'm.

I'm cool with that.

You know, but what's nice about this kind of this project, this cube thing is I've got this drawing element which allows me to draw.

I love to draw.

I spent a long time working on the computer, just doing computer stuff.

And I was like, I'm missing that joy of drawing that got me into art in the first place.

The analog of it.

Yeah.

And that immediacy and that just being there and kind of just doing stuff.

And it's like.

I think, you know, I do a lot of digital work.

I think people know me as a digital artist in many ways, particularly in like 3D printing and that kind of area and digital fab stuff.

But, you know, I got, I got my.

I've got two degrees in painting, right.

So both my official, you know, degrees are in sort of painting and kind of like fine art practices.

All of my kind of digital stuff is self taught or taught from YouTube, like a lot of people from the Internet, whatever.

And yeah.

So, you know, so the drawing part's really important to me because I can just, you know, instead of spending time telling the computer how to do it, I can just do it myself.

And I'm.

I have this.

I was talking, I mean, I think when we were chatting last week, I mentioned my.

I have a. I have an art movement that I'm trying to start.

Please tell us about your art movement.

It's called, it's called pragstraction.

Yes, right.

It's a.

And I.

And I was thinking about this and I knew I was gonna be chatting with you on the radio, so I looked up.

So the word is.

It's a portmanteau.

Right.

So that's when you take two or more words, put them to portmanteau.

Yeah, portmanteau.

Port.

P, O, R, T, M, A, N, T, E, A, U. Portmanteau.

Okay.

And it's where you take two or more words and put them together to create a new word.

Right.

Okay.

So I'm taking pragmatism.

So I'm a very pragmatic person.

Right.

Time is limited.

I've only got so much time.

Space is limited, budgets are limited.

So within all these limitations, how do I do the thing that.

How do I get my sort of expression into the world?

And so the drawings are great because they're small.

I frequently draw on the cta on the train.

So if I'm going.

When I'm on the train going to work, I'm drawing.

So every day I go to work, two hours studio time.

It's great.

I love It.

Zoom meetings.

Right.

Right, Yeah.

I mean, zoom meetings all of a sudden became a thing for a lot of people.

I think they're very good.

I think they're a great way to bring people together.

Yes.

And it's almost like in a zoo.

It's almost like it's okay if I'm in this meeting, but I'm also cooking dinner.

Like, nobody's like, hey, hey, hey.

Can you stop that for a second?

No, Nobody does that.

No.

And I think that's important.

I mean, I think, you know.

You know, as I've alluded to, you know, I do travel back and forth across the Atlantic from time to time.

I mean, I only do it usually once a year.

I mean.

I mean, I'm not flying backwards and forwards all the time, but, you know, so a transatlantic flight, I can make four drawings.

Yeah.

I don't have to stop drawing for takeoff and landing, you know.

I mean, it's great.

I mean, it's awesome.

So I'm really.

So those moments when I'm sat down, those are moments when I can draw.

And so I try to take those moments and use them, and the work kind of just takes care of itself.

So that's the kind of pragmatism part.

And then abstraction, you know, that's a much broader term.

I don't know if I'm entirely comfortable with it to describe what I do, because I'm not really seeking to abstract something from the real world in terms of what I'm doing.

Although I do find later on, when I look at individual drawings, they come to represent a certain moment in time or they represent something from my history.

So, for example, I was looking at a drawing recently that's got.

That had a lot of pink stripes in it.

Was it one of your drawings?

Yeah, so it was one of the drawings.

I think it was, like, in the 40s or 50s in terms of when it was made.

Like, in terms of the chronology, not the 1940s, obviously.

Oh, so it wasn't one of your works?

No, it was one of my works.

Sorry, I'm wondering now.

So it was one of my works.

It was made.

So they're numbered from 1 to 334 at the moment or something like that.

And so this particular drawing was, say, number 40 thing in the series.

It wasn't made.

You didn't make it in 1940?

No, I didn't.

No.

No, no, no, no, no, no, That's.

Yeah.

No, because that would, you know, then I would be, like, you know, very old or something.

Yes, that's why I'm like, hold up, we need your dermatologist in here asap.

Right, right.

And so.

And that one, the colors in that reminded me of this TV show from when I was a kid in the UK called Bagpos.

And Bagpos was a cat who lived in what was basically a thrift store.

This was an animation.

And so Bagpos had this kind of Cheshire cat, kind of pink and white stripe business going on.

And so I was like, oh, yeah, maybe that's where the pinks come from.

Maybe that's where all the colors come from.

And that got me thinking about other childhood TV from the uk, so things like the Clangers.

There was a show called Trumpton, which is.

I don't know, given the first part of that word.

I don't know.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And then there was Mr. Ben, which is.

Okay.

I mean, I think if people go and watch Mr. Ben, they're gonna see that, you know, it was definitely made in the 1970s in the UK, but there were elements of it that, I don't know that were interesting.

So.

Yeah, so I don't know.

So I do think the drawings take on those things, those bits of memory, those bits of me.

I mean, I think they have to.

And part of the reason I make them is because there is something in my head.

Right.

There's this thing in my head, this brain, this consciousness that.

Oh, no, I don't fully have any.

You know, I don't have a full grasp of.

And it's not something that's entirely.

It's not something we entirely access through language.

And there's a lot about who we are as people that's entirely non verbal.

That it's entirely a motif, like consciousness is a very difficult thing to wrap our heads around.

And I think, for me, I'm making my drawings.

I don't know what a drawing is gonna look like.

I don't have a preconceived idea of what one of the drawings is going to be.

To me, the drawings are like puzzles.

You know, begin a drawing.

I use all kinds of strategies for sort of getting outside of my logical brain, you know, to get into sort of a less logical space with the drawing.

Sometimes even though they look very logical and then see where they go.

And I'm a great believer in the work telling me what it wants to do.

Sure.

You know, and so then just following where the work takes me.

And so.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

A question about travel.

Yeah.

Is it expensive going back and forth.

Like that all the time it is.

But family's worth it, you know.

Yeah, no, of course, of course.

It depends.

I mean, sometimes, you know, a travel.

Account, a travel savings account or something.

What?

Yeah, that's a good idea.

Yeah.

I mean, I. I mean, sometimes, you know, I've been able to use.

I've racked up our miles, you know.

Yeah, but that's once in a blue moon.

I mean, I do, you know.

You know, I do.

You know, one of the things that's good is to be able to sort of combine family trips with work trips.

And.

So, like, for example, this last trip, we were in Finland for two weeks working on a project, and then we were in.

And then we went to see my family for two weeks in the uk.

So.

But, yeah, no, it is expensive.

It's.

I'm trying to remember what we paid.

Several thousand dollars.

Yeah.

You know, pockets and forwards.

When I usually.

When I.

When folks travel a lot, they always tell me it's through points sometimes.

I know.

Yeah.

Like, they're always like, oh, yeah, well, if you have this card, this and that, it's like, you know, listener, if you're out there and you are, like, plugged with, like, how to travel with these cards and stuff, please let us know.

Cause it's just like.

Yeah, I see.

When I ask people about that, like, oh, how do you afford to do that?

You know, I.

Well, I mean, saving, honestly, savings and credit cards.

I mean, it's, you know, it's.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, I spent a lot of money traveling.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I like it.

I dig it.

I like traveling.

It's good.

Yeah.

So, like, it seems like you, like, see your practice as sort of like some sort of philosophy.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

So I was talking with a friend the other week, and I was saying to them that I was thinking about renaming the project to be, like, an operating system and to actually use those words, operating system.

And I think I might do that.

And.

Yeah, I suppose for me.

And this is the thing about philosophy.

I don't know that I would.

I hesitate to say that my philosophy is something that other people should do or follow.

Right.

Yeah.

Because who am I to tell anybody what they should do, right?

But for me, yeah, I mean, I think there is a philosophical element to it.

I mean, I don't read as much philosophy as I used to because most of the time I'm sat down, I'm drawing.

You know, it's like I've read so many less books since I started this drawing project.

It's Scary.

I don't know.

It's bad in a way.

But, yeah, no, I do view as a philosophy, and so that's why I sort of came up with that kind of pragstraction idea.

And, yeah, I mean, it's a vehicle, right, for me to sort of express through these kind of like symbolic metaphors or symbolic representations, like where I'm.

I guess, where I'm coming from, which is a real privilege.

Right.

And it's like, you know, it's a real blessing to be able to do that, you know, and just sort of live through this poetry almost.

I mean, it's kind of wild, really.

So, like, if someone came up to you and they were obsessed with something as simple as a square or a triangle, what kind of advice would you give them about exploring that shape deeply?

Right.

Variation, difference, repetition, systems.

Like, what are the systems that you can develop to explore it?

Pattern.

Like, I'm looking at hexagons behind you right now, and hexagons are cubes.

You know, I think that.

I mean, I suppose the thing.

The question, you know, is, you know, the person that has this obsession, are they coming at this from an artistic point of view, from a design point of view, from a scientific point of view, from a medical point of view, like, you know, because, like, we all have these kind of obsessions, you know.

And so where does your research lead you?

I suppose that would be a question because, you know, I mean, for example, like a triangle, you know, very strong, you know, in terms of what they can do.

Three points make a plane.

So, you know, the beginning of surface, you know, as a.

In a sort of Euclidean sense, in terms of volumetric geometry, kind of can begin as a triangle.

I mean, I don't know.

I go backwards and forwards about triangles.

Squares are.

The nice thing about squares is, I mean, if you go small enough, right, and you're thinking about a surface at a certain resolution, then a square is a much more.

Is a surface that could be much better optimized.

Triangles tend to be much more chaotic.

But triangles can often describe a surface with much more fidelity because, yeah, you've got many more points that you can play from.

I'm wondering now again, I guess going back to your question, I would just say coming up with systems for how you would explore it and trying to exhaust all possibilities and when you've exhausted them.

And this is something that we were talking about before, but this idea of boredom, when you reach a point of boredom with the thing that you're doing, that's great.

Sit with that thing for a while.

Be bored.

Right.

Don't be expecting that it's gonna entertain you or give you the answers every time.

Sit with the thing and spend some time with it.

Work through the boredom until you kind of doing stuff, you're fascinated again, you know?

Right.

Yeah.

Because if you give up too soon, you might, you know, you could have discovered something that you might never.

Because you've given up or, you know, you've gotten bored and now you wanna switch up.

Right.

But I guess the other thing I would say is, I mean, to me, this very simple form that I'm playing with, it is simple, Right.

And there's a sort of friction with all the sort of chaotic elements and the random elements and the organic elements.

And so I'm interested in using these forms, this pyramid, this cube, which don't really exist in a sense.

Right.

You go out into the natural world, you're walking in the woods, you don't bump into those things too readily.

Right.

That's true.

I've never seen, like a triangular log or something.

Right.

But then you look really close at things and you see structures that do have these geometries.

Yeah.

And so I think.

Yeah, I don't know.

You know, I think we're going to take a break in a little bit here.

But I think something that's coming up for me is who would win in a street fight?

A triangle or a cube?

Oh, I would say a triangle for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because you're always going to be able to pierce the cube.

Yeah, that's true.

You could just spin around, right.

And just like, puncture it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would put my money on the triangle.

Yeah, no doubt.

Now, if we had a sphere.

Oh, snap.

The sphere would win every time.

Yeah.

Cause it could just roll.

Come out of, like, nowhere.

Right.

And just like Indiana Jones and that boulder came out of nowhere and it's like, oh, my gosh.

Like, who saw that coming?

Right, Right.

Oh, my gosh.

I would love to, like, maybe that could be my obsession of Sphere, but.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, we'll be right back.

We're gonna think about this and we're gonna take a break.

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That's the ad.

Thank you so much.

I'm so excited to hear what you think and.

Yeah.

Okay, let's get back to the conversation with Tom.

All right, WLP, NLP Chicago, 105.5 FM Lumpin radio.

We are back and we have Tom Burton Wood in the building.

And we have a new movement, Prag abstraction.

Pragstraction, I think.

Pragstraction.

Pragstraction, Yes, I think so.

Then pragstractionists.

So pragstractionists are artists who are using whatever free time they have to make their work that's sort of non objective.

Non objective artworks that would typically fall within the spectrum of what we might consider to be abstract art.

I love it.

Yeah.

It might be a bit of a work in progress, but we're getting there.

Yeah.

And it's a work in progress, right?

Yeah.

At some point I'll make a pitch to an organization somewhere in Chicago that has an exhibition space and I will curate some artists together in a show like that and then it will become a real thing.

Yeah.

And you're really good at stuff like that about like being in like groups with others, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I feel like.

I mean, I know it's.

I mean, we're sat here at Copro.

So like it's, you know, this is a great example of diy.

Community supported, community built.

Our project was sat in the radio station, talking outside in the window.

There's the exhibition space and there's everything that this community represents with Lumpen and with all of the various bits and bobs.

But in a much broader sense, you think about.

I think one of the things that's really valuable about Chicago and one of the reasons why I settled here essentially is just this sense of, you know, diy.

You've just kind of got to do it.

I mean, back in Carbondale we were doing that too.

And like, I really, I think the thing that really one of the things I really took away from my graduate program was this.

Just this energy, this sense of you've got to get your work out there and you've got to create platforms for other people to do that too.

And that's the way that you build community and that's the way that you have a life in art.

And I think that competition.

I don't know, I go backwards and forwards on that.

I think competition is useful, I guess.

I mean, it does drive us to sort of be ambitious, maybe, and to sort of push us along.

But I think community and cooperation and collectivism is much more important than competition.

Yeah.

And where we work together to help each other out, to achieve our goals and to sort of get things done, I think we often are much more successful.

And.

Yeah.

So, I mean, the first project that I was involved with in Chicago was a gallery called Garden Fresh.

And we began as a garden apartment gallery in Ukrainian Village.

And that was a project that I did with my friends, Andrew Rigsby, Jeremiah Kettner, Holly Holmes, Michael Hofer.

Trying to think who else was on that.

Alan park, who now has a comic shop up north called how pages.

Y' all did, like, over 20 exhibitions.

Oh, we did.

Or even maybe more than that.

We did a lot.

I mean, Garden fresh ran from 02 to 09.

And we had.

We.

We.

We were in Ukrainian Village.

We're in Lincoln.

Where were we?

We were sort of not.

We were South Boystown for a minute.

We were in.

On Bloomingdale.

Like, we bounced around a lot.

We did the nomadic thing quite a bit.

And then after that, wrapped up in 09, Holly and I started a space called what It Is.

It was at our house in Oak park, and it was, you know.

You know, it was.

It's what it is, you know.

How'd you come up with the name?

I love how all these different, like, art projects in Chicago.

I love all the different names.

Well, it was kind of.

Again, it was just basically a joke.

I mean, you know.

I mean.

And again, this goes back to the idea of pragmatism.

Yeah.

Right.

So, you know, Holly and I had.

We're living in a house in Oak Park.

We're still living there today.

Our front porch was kind of a white cube or a white rectangle.

And so we painted it white and started hosting artists there.

And it is what it is, you know.

So you say to an artist, you know, here's the space you've got.

This is what it is.

And so, you know, it's sort of.

That frames their possibility.

Right.

I mean, we extended it quite rapidly.

I mean, we did an exhibition of colleagues of Holly's from the Art Institute when she was doing her mfa, and they did exhibition.

They did projects all over the house in all the different rooms of the house.

We had an artist who was based in Chicago, Sarah Schnacht.

Sarah had been doing these pieces called Network Intervention, I think where she was taking yellow.

It wasn't intervention.

It was network something.

I can't remember right now, but she was taking this yellow nylon thread and creating these kind of network maps that were often referencing, like, flights, the planes take, or referencing the Internet and information.

And at each site where these webs.

So imagine like kind of spider webs, a bright neon.

And wherever these webs would meet, she would then put mirrors on the wall.

And so then these kind of termination points or these lines coming together, they would then explode into the wall.

Oh, I'm sorry.

No, it's okay.

Sound good now?

Yeah.

They would create these kind of explosions in the walls.

So a bit like Godamata Clark, you know, she was sort of opening up the walls through the use of mirrors as a sort of symbolic way.

So we invited Sarah to do a piece.

And Sarah came to the house.

She watched Holly and I move around the house and doing our day to day.

Figured out where we walked, figured out where we sat, figured out where I sat when I was playing on the Xbox, and then made this sculpture, this kind of weaving of these lines around us.

And we lived with this piece for about a month, and it was really fun.

And we made a book.

We were making a lot of books at the time because we were trying to.

Because another thing that happens with DIY spaces is you have the opening, you do the show.

It maybe lives on a website for a while.

The website eventually goes away, and then it's a memory.

And so we were trying to produce books for every show.

Wow.

Yeah.

So we were using, like, blurb, you know, I don't know.

Blurb's a thing still.

I think it might be.

Still.

Yeah.

So we would print like, you know, five or 10 of them, and then people could buy them off the website.

So that went pretty well.

And that gave me experience in, like, layout design and publishing design, which I hadn't got previously.

So we did what it is.

And we did that from, I want to say, 2010 till about 2013 or 14.

And then I got completely sidetracked by 3D printing.

Okay.

And Holly and I set up a retail shop here in Chicago with another friend of ours.

And that went okay.

It sort of ended badly.

Probably shouldn't talk about it too much.

Let's get out of it.

Don't go there.

Don't go there.

And then.

Yeah, and then I sort of ended up back in teaching.

And I, you know, and so I was teaching full time, but yeah, it's a community, you know, in different groups.

And now I'm part of a group called Video Cafe and we're a collective that's based primarily, I would say we're based primarily in Finland, in a city called Turku.

And Holly and I were brought into the group, I think, in 2018, and we were a collective of artists.

There's about 10 artists in the group, I think we meet.

We were meeting on Zoom.

Well, we were meeting on Discord and using Discord video before these Zoom meeting things were a thing.

We're doing this thing.

We do this thing called Screen Breach, which is really wild when it works.

It's hard to do.

We did it here at Copro for a project, I think, in 2019, shortly before the pandemic.

Basically, you take two or more video projectors and two or more webcams and you point them.

You point a webcam at a wall and you point a video projector at the wall, and then somebody else somewhere else in the world does the same thing.

And so they stream their wall via the webcam and then they project the other person's wall using the projector.

So if somebody's in their studio in Tuku working on something, then that person can be projected on the wall in Chicago.

Oh, cool.

And the audio is more or less in real time and the image is more or less in real time.

So you have these representations of working in their studios in your studio.

And so obviously it's a two dimensional representation.

It's not volumetric.

I mean, we have done versions of it where we've projected down onto a tabletop.

And so we did a thing for an arts festival in Queens, in New York, where we played rock paper scissors across the ocean that way.

And so there was a bit of a delay.

Finland had a slight edge on us, but it was a lot of fun.

It was kind of cool.

The other thing that's really wild and when this works, it's magical and it is hard to do.

But one of the group of Sami, who's based in Toku, and their partner Yanu, they go by Trivial Zero as their collect.

It's like that as a duo.

They make art together.

And Sami and Yenu had come up with this kind of Arduino based thing.

So Arduino is a open source microprocessor computer, physical computing thing where you can use light sensors, for example.

So is there light, yes or no?

It's kind of a binary switch.

You can modulate it between.

Yes, there's a little bit of Light.

And no, there's no light at all.

So they came up with this system using a light sensor, programmed it in Arduino, and used like a solenoid, I think.

What's a solenoid?

I think it's a solenoid.

Or is it a relay?

No, it was a relay.

So it's basically a switch so you can turn something on or off.

And so you could put your light sensor, this light sensor that Sami had developed on the wall of your studio.

Right.

And connect it to something else that, like, has a motor.

So you might connect this light sensor to a motor that spins.

Right.

It could be as simple.

As simple as that.

And then you attach something to the motor, like a piece of paper.

So when that sensor receives light, it sends a signal to the motor, and the motor rotates.

And so then the piece of paper rotates.

Just something very simple like that.

So when somebody in Tulku has this sensor on the wall, if I wave my hand in Chicago, and so my shadow that's sent via video to Toku creates the shadow of my hand on the wall.

So the wall is.

So the projector is not projecting white light anymore.

It's projecting gray light or brown or black light.

Right.

Well, that's enough to trigger the sensor.

So you can turn something on or off from Chicago in Finland.

It's wild.

And it works.

Yeah.

That's so great.

Like my friend Sebastian, who's another member of VideoCafe, and he was kind of the founder of VideoCafe, he would set his up so that he's got an air compressor, and the air compressor blows up a balloon.

So when his system's running, this air compressor's blowing up balloons.

Well, then his balloons then move in front of the light sensor on his wall.

So then you're starting to create these feedback loops where something that's happening in Chicago is triggering these different events happening in Tokyo.

It's hard to get it to work.

There's a lot of banging the head on the wall, and there's a lot of sounds.

Really cool, though.

It's a lot of stress, but when it does work, it's great.

And I think we're gonna try for another video performance.

Cause we've got a show coming up in Bremen in Germany, and I think we're gonna try to do a screen breach at some point in September when that show is on.

So, fingers crossed.

It works and it happens.

Yeah.

So there's a bunch of artists.

There's Mark Andreas.

He's in Connecticut.

And Mark was the Connection for Holly and I to VideoCafe.

He'd been a member of videocafe for quite a while, I think, from the beginning.

And we knew Mark from the old art fair stuff.

So back when I used to do artfur stuff here in Chicago, Mark had participated in a show that I helped organize at a hotel in Boystown.

And they'd come across, and they were an exhibitor in the show with the gallery.

There was a Brooklyn space, I think they were called Dam Stohlrager.

And that's how we met Mark and how these connections continue.

And so, again, it's like when we think about how we build these communities and how we build these kind of projects and how all these things happen.

Yeah, there's just these long connections over time and a lot of kind of randomness almost.

I mean, I bumped into Mark at the Armory Show, I think, in 2016, and we'd lost touch.

I hadn't seen him for a long time.

And that's when he said to me, oh, yeah, do this thing in Finland, these video cafe.

You should join, blah, blah, blah.

And then, you know, a couple years after that, that happened.

So I guess the message to.

I don't know if there's a message or a lesson, but, I don't know.

Stay connected, folks.

Yeah, I was gonna say be out there, be in the mix.

Yeah.

Be open to stuff.

But, like, going back to this idea of pragmatic.

Are you disciplined?

Like, okay, so you have this project that you've done for, like, you have, like, with the three.

Are you, like, a disciplined person?

Yes, I think I am.

I think so.

Yeah.

I don't.

But what I don't do is draw every day, and I don't try and draw one every day.

And I've been doing them since 2022, and so I've been doing them about three years, and I'm up to about 334 or whatever.

Maybe it might be actually 300.

I don't remember.

It's in the sort of mid-330s at the moment.

So that's about 100 a year.

That's not bad.

You know, like I said, they happen in flurries, and I don't feel pressured.

I mean, this is one of the things that's a real blessing for me for a long time.

So there's two things.

First of all, I always felt like I was searching for form.

I always felt like I was searching for the thing that was kind of this thing to sort of this vehicle for expression.

And, like, now I've.

I Feel like, well, for better or worse, I've found that now I know what I'm doing with that.

And then the other thing's just doubt.

You know, it's like, doubt's such a hard thing.

And for years, I felt a lot of doubt.

And I think I came out of that at the end of graduate school.

And I think that's one of the other things I took away from graduate school was just feeling confidence.

And I think that's so important.

Yeah, I like that you don't put pressure on yourself because you feel like, as an artist, when you're not making something, like, I should be making something.

But it's like, no, you don't.

No, no.

I mean.

And that's the thing.

I've made 330 of these drawings.

If I don't make another one, which hopefully I'll make many more, but if I don't, I don't feel like I've, you know, I'm not gonna feel like, you know, that I haven't reached a certain point with them.

I mean, I do have.

I have this idea for animation that, you know, I'm like, I need to get this animation made.

And I do think.

I mean, I was thinking about this.

You know, I guess I'm gonna walk back what I just said.

I mean, I do feel an urgency, but I don't feel like I have to be making all the time.

Yeah, like, I'm sat talking to you right now, and I'm not drawing.

And that's something else that I learned.

I mean, the first year I was drawing, I would sit with friends and draw.

And I had this good friend of mine in England, this guy James.

And, you know, he was just like, what are you doing?

Are you talking to me or are you drawing?

And I was like, I'm talking to you.

He's like, right, we'll talk to me then.

And that was fair.

I mean, I think that was fair.

Cause I mean, I was like.

It was kind of rude, you know, sitting there.

So I am mindful of that.

So, you know, with your animation and experience with this video work, can you just sort of, like, give us rundown what kind of programs?

Cause I know a listener might be like, ooh, okay, you do this.

Like, can you just give, like, a little, like, bucket of programs that you use?

The only program I use for my animation work at the moment is.

Well, no, that's not true.

I use two programs right now for my animation work.

I use Adobe Premiere to do the actual animating work.

And I Use Rhino, or what's known as Rhinoceros, for doing the CAD work, the Computer Aided Design part.

So the cube.

The cube lives as a CAD file on the computer.

And so the way that I do the animation is it's start frame animation.

I make a physical model and then I animate the physical model by taking photographs successively, sequentially, rather.

So I have these stands that are laser cut acrylic, and each of the stands are 10 degree movement.

So if the cube is closed, there's no stands.

If the Cube is open 10 degrees, there are four stands that go around the cube and they are at 80 degrees and then 70 degrees, 60 degrees, 50 degrees, et cetera.

So the cube opens.

So there are, I think nine of those go from 90 degrees to zero and then it opens again.

Right.

So that earlier when I was talking about opening the petal, opening the flower, there's a different set of stands to raise the cube up, to raise the petal up, raise the wedge up.

And so there's another nine of those, eight of those.

There's 19 movements in total to go from the cube being closed to the cube being open using 10 degree increments.

Obviously, if I did 5 degree increments, you'd have 38 movements or positions, et cetera, et cetera.

And I chose 10 degrees because that seemed realistic.

Yeah, because taking 19 photographs, each photograph, you know, each setup is about five to 10 minutes.

So then you're talking in three hours to shoot what could be a second of animation.

And I think there are probably animators listening to this conversation going, I spend all day shooting one second of animation.

I think the thing that's fascinating about animation is the way in which you compress time and you take the time that it takes to make the thing.

Could be days, but the thing you're producing could be like a second, two seconds.

I mean, that stuff I love.

I think that's just fascinating.

So, yeah, so I photograph.

I set up usually multiple cameras.

I usually have three or four DSLRs.

I've started using synchronized shutters, so they all fire at the same time.

Wow.

Seriously?

Yeah.

Oh, no, 100%.

I mean, I love this stuff.

Not that it wouldn't be, but I'm like, this is not a game over here.

I usually set up like a couple of stop frames.

Time lapse cameras, what are often referred to, I guess is like a witness cam.

So there's a camera that's either watching the production or a camera that's just kind of like taking in B roll or whatever.

And Some of those make their way into the final animations.

They can be kind of good.

I always have the sculpture set on a mirror, so the cube is opening.

So we're seeing a reflection of the mirror of the cube as it opens.

I particularly love the mirrors because they bring the sky into the piece and they also bring whatever's in the surrounding area.

I love doing the animations outside.

I prefer to do them outside.

I want to do an animation soon on a lake, on a body of water, or in a river so that the water's moving in real time.

How are you gonna get it out there?

I don't know yet.

I'm gonna figure that out.

I'm gonna figure it out.

Okay.

I mean, what I was thinking I would do is I'd have like a table, like some kind of table with adjustable legs and sandbags that sits so that the surface of the sculpture where the animation.

The animation.

The surface of the animation plane is just below the meniscus, you know, just below the water level.

Yeah.

And then I would put the mirror right at the water level and then make a sculpture that was either water resistant or waterproof.

You know what they have those boats.

Yeah.

You know how you can like borrow the boats like you could take into the lake?

Right.

They have em.

Like you can like rent them for like an hour.

Right.

Maybe one of those.

And then you could take it out there.

That could work.

Yeah.

So I did a residency at the Roger Brown Study House in New Buffalo, Michigan last fall.

And that was through the School of the Art Institute.

And that was a real blessing because what I was able to do is just set up my animation equipment in the grounds of this house, which is kind of.

It's not really rural, but it's on the lake in New Buffalo.

It's kind of wildish.

I mean, it's kind of woodland.

I mean, it's not like woodland woodland, but it's kind of semi woodish.

And yeah, I was just having the wind, the grass, the trees, nature.

And I always.

What I've started doing with the animations is doing field recordings of the sound.

And so I'm doing.

Recording the birds and recording all the ambient sounds when I'm doing the animations and then using that to make the audio track.

And what I really enjoyed about the animation that I made for 21c, the recurring piece is then I started messing around with echoes in the sound production by running the audio through a PA and then having a microphone that was connected to that PA and pointing it at the speakers.

To then create a feedback loop and try to sustain an echo through the loop.

And so if you point the microphone.

You get like, oh, no.

But if you do it just right, you can really optimize the sound.

So it's more of like a whistle.

And when you start tapping on things and creating kind of drum patterns, then they echo through the system and you can kind of create a sound that's constant.

You can take like a.

And then it's going through that system continuously.

Yeah.

And that's just beautiful because that's just like.

That's the kind of like idea around pattern and entropy and things dissolving and it all happening in real time.

And it's all very analog, you know.

And so.

So that's been a real blessing.

And one thing I don't know I've alluded to, I teach saic.

And so one of the things that I've learned to teach is sound.

I had no experience in sound.

And so teaching is a thing that really has brought new things into my practice.

And that's one of the things that I really value about it.

Yeah.

Would you host workshops on your own, you think?

Oh, 100%.

I have done.

I did an animation workshop at the start of the year for teachers in Oak park at one of the middle schools in Oak park.

And that was huge fun.

Yeah, we did wild stuff.

Okay, so.

Well, we're gonna have to host some type of workshop because I think that this is all very interesting and exciting and like.

Yeah, animation is really, really rad, so.

Oh, it is.

And it's all like.

Yeah, it's just like particularly working in animation, kind of stop frame.

What's nice about it is you sort of really are linking into like the early history of cinema.

Yeah.

And like, for all of the doubt that like CGI and kind of like computer graphics, like the sort of high end, sort of high visual effects does, working with the materiality of the thing, I think puts your face back in the system a bit.

Tom, thanks so much for being here with us today.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

This has been a really great conversation.

Where can we help find more information about you?

My website is tomburtonwood.com I'm on Instagram omburtonwood.

I gave up on Twitter.

I gave up on Bluesky.

Find me in Oak park somewhere, maybe watering my garden.

What do I have coming up?

There's the show.

See me around.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

And thank you, listener, for checking us out today on Nosy AF live on Lassin Radio.

Yeah.

Check out Tom's work.

Look out for, you know, potential workshops, because all that Tom is doing is really great.

And also join the Prague activism.

Pragstraction.

Prague Pragstraction.

I'm Pragstraction.

Keep an eye out.

It's gonna happen.

Awesome.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

This has been another episode of Nosy af.

I'm your host, Stephanie Graham.

What did you think about today's conversation?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Head over to the Nosy AF website for all the show notes related to this episode.

You can also find me on Instagram.

Tefanie Graham, what would you know?

Or online@missgraham.com where you can sign up for my newsletter, where I share exclusive updates about my studio practice, as well as this podcast.

Until next time, y' all stay curious and take care.

Bye.