-Art and science are forms of expression and inquiry.

And, actually, the doors into them are pretty similar.

-The relationship between art and technology is so rich and so longstanding.

-In our culture, we like to put things into boxes.

We very much like to say, "This is art, and this is science."

You know, left brain, right brain.

But this is not really the truth.

-My dream is that we will just break down the walls between these classrooms.

-How strange is it of me to like both things that are artistic and scientific?

It's only as an adult that I've had to make a choice.

-Creativity can be mournful, it can be joyful, it can be despairing, it can be celebratory.

Sometimes even all at the same time.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -This little valve at the side will cut off the oxygen or let more oxygen in so you can control the flame.

I'm Zoe Laughlin.

I'm an artist, maker, designer, materials engineer.

Basically, I get up to things with stuff.

We're trying to do many things here at the Institute of Making.

Although we're in an engineering faculty, this isn't for engineers, it's for everyone.

The chef, the chemist, the artist, the designer, the technician.

We're open to all processes, all materials, and all people who also are interested in those things.

Materials and processes are an expression of our humanity and say so much about our civilizations and our creativity and our inventions and about what humans get up to.

-There's a feeling that an awful lot of things begin with "let's."

-Mm-hmm.

-And I think "let's" is a lovely thing.

"Let's."

-No --------, no weapons.

Don't come in here and be a --------.

-Is that over the door?

-Yeah, that's in Latin.

It's one of our key mantras.

This is the materials library.

I'm really interested in when the material steps into the conversation.

So, for example, let's start with the spoons.

I've kept the shape the same and changed the material.

So, then go, "Oh, the material is doing something all along, but I didn't know it."

So, when you eat off a stainless steel spoon, you do taste it, but so much less than you ever would with an iron spoon or a wooden spoon.

The invention of stainless steel was the moment the masses could have their food taste delicious because it wasn't also a bit metallic and a bit rusty.

Material science is about investigating the properties and behavior of stuff.

And when I say materials, I sort of mean everything that is an inanimate blob in the world.

Be it a piece of metal or wood or rubber, chocolate.

Like, this stuff, these materials have properties, and those properties are because of structures inside them.

Pick this one up with one hand.

Right.

Then, with the same hand, that one.

-------- hell.

Sorry.

[ Both chuckle ] -Yeah.

-That's amazing.

What is it?

-That's tungsten, and the other is aluminum.

So, when we're looking at the difference, this has heavier atoms than that.

So much heavier that I struggle to pick it up.

This one was my grandfather's air raid bell.

Put that light out, wander around the streets before the bombers came over.

That was his bell.

-Oh, God.

-And I had this school bell and noticed their similarity in form and thought, actually, could I make out of another material to the same dimensions?

So, bronze, brass, glass.

[ Bells ring ] So, actually, the change in sound is directly attributable to the material and that elasticity and that density.

But then thinking, "Well, let's try lead."

Soft absorbs energy.

-No way.

-But... [ Bell clicks ] -Coming!

-Coming!

But this absorption of -- this is -- that sounds different because it's made of different stuff, and that stuff is now at the party.

I'm a big believer in an idea in the back pocket that you always kind of, "One day -- One day I'll do that."

One is I would love to make a glass cymbal.

The idea is that it has two sounds that the composer could write for it.

One is the sound of it ringing because it will have a resonance and it will make a sound.

But the other is the sound of it smashing.

But this is the power of the idea in the back pocket, right, is that you don't know, but sometimes you throw it out there, and, "Oh, my goodness, there's a chance this could happen."

-Materials are a means to an end.

But they are a fundamental part of the process.

They're also an inspiration.

We humans tend to manipulate anything -- concept, materials, technology -- that comes our way.

♪♪ -Not everything may work in clay.

Not everything may work successfully as a painting.

For me, it's finding the sort of material language that really supports the idea.

When you look at this, it seems very soft and very furry.

But, you know, it's cold, and it's made of wire, and you would never sort of get that if you were sort of at a distance, walking, until you walked up to it.

So, I like this idea of sort of materials that are being sort of shifted.

Materials that sort of take on a different sort of persona, personality.

That hand quality is there.

You know, the surfaces are always sort of textural.

And so, you, you know, you just have this desire to want to touch.

I can touch it, but [Chuckles] you could not.

I would say I think the found object is probably my favorite material.

Because it never is purchased with the intent that it will be used as we know it.

♪♪ I am in the world looking for resources, primarily at flea markets, antique malls, you know.

I'll jump on a plane and fly to Washington State, one way ticket.

Rent a cargo van and flea market and antique my way back to Chicago.

That's how I sort of source.

You know, I'm interested in, you know, this surface and sort of thinking about, like, how do these two sort of moments merge together?

I like what it stands for.

But I'm more interested in what it becomes.

I just happened to come across this sort of amazing crazy quilt.

I mean, this is really quite spectacular because there's no two stitches that are the same.

My grandmothers were, like, quilters.

And after dinner, they would go to the the sort of sewing box and pull out the quilt.

And during the evening, that's how they would wind down.

And I would just sort of find that sort of moment to be extremely comforting.

-When I'm presenting a painting, sometimes people feel like they can't judge that painting or that they don't understand it.

They'll say, "Oh, I'm not educated," or "I don't know art."

But you'll never hear people talk that way about quilts.

People feel comfortable with my quilts and they feel comfortable analyzing them and understanding them because they have known fabric their whole life.

I'm working with materials that they know.

If you go to a fabric store, it's separated by dressmaker's fabric, upholstery, and then they sometimes have a small section for the quilters.

These are all dressmakers' fabrics.

Every person who sews, they save their remnants.

My grandmother had fabric remnants from the '70s.

So, even now, if I cut a piece, I'm not going to throw the rest away.

But what are we saving them for, and who is using them?

-The quilts are, like, extraordinary.

The color, the pattern is so intricate and so beautiful in itself.

I mean, it's a work of art in itself, not the finished work, just the process of building.

-First, I start with selecting a photo.

I blow the photo up to whatever size quilt it is that I want to make.

I always use black-and-white photographs because they allow me to be more imaginative with my own color scheme.

I paint with fabric, like a painter uses their glazes.

If I want to show, like, depth of a figure, show that the arm has form and three-dimensionality, I'll use layers of sheer fabrics.

I can't add gloss, I can't add a gel, I can't add water to lighten.

I have to have thinner fabrics.

So, I deliberately obscure whether the person is -- you know they're Black, but you don't know if they're a light brown Black or dark brown black.

The colorists are not allowed to get a bead on it.

I'd rather them have to focus on other aspects of him.

He's a Black boy.

Boom.

Now what?

My artwork, I want people to look at it and feel good and feel whole and feel seen and feel healed.

And not just Black people, but all people.

I believe materials have more than just their physical qualities.

Materials, texture, the ability to touch -- all these things evoke memory and emotion.

♪♪ -Biomimicry is a big influence on my work.

I love exploring the different forces behind the forms in nature.

These are glass sculptures from around 1880, and they made this very beautiful, uh, scientifically correct glass sculptures from all kinds of organisms.

And they were studying these organisms.

And then to understand them better, they would also create them.

I am looking always for a very natural outcome, even though the process might be technical.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Iris van Herpen is amazing.

I love how it's fashion, but it's kinetic sculpture at the same time.

-If I think of my dance background and the movement that I'm creating today, it's so directly related.

It's as if I could bring my teaching of dance and the transformations of my own body into a materiality around my body.

It's that same intuitive language of giving and taking.

It's a similar dialogue that I have with my materials.

Oh, it's infinite research.

I love researching new materials.

So, this is made from the banana leaf fibers.

And it's just that, so it has this very beautiful organic shine to it.

And a little bit of transparency, even though you see the fibers of the banana plant.

I really was focused on craftsmanship, solely.

I did everything by hand.

I didn't even use a sewing machine.

It was a very, um, pure way of working.

But at a certain moment, I really felt I was getting stuck and I felt the limitations of my own hands.

We have people in the studio from fashion but also from engineering to architecture to design.

-This is 3-D, and this is laser-cut.

But this disappears under there, actually.

-It's just a beautiful ecosystem of different disciplines working on the textiles.

We work with a lot of organic materials and also recycled materials.

But then, some of the pieces are made through 3-D printing and laser cutting, heat molding, or even hand molding.

So, it's really a combination of techniques.

When you look at the material, there is a materiality to it.

But when you look at it in movement, it's really only the light reflection that you're really grasping, and you forget about the materiality itself.

-Materials can guide you towards a deeper understanding of the world.

Makers are usually open to new ways of making.

They're curious.

And when that firewall breaks, it's boom!

An explosion.

♪♪ ♪♪ -I'm Tod Machover.

I'm a composer, do a lot of work in technology.

And I'm a professor at the MIT Media Lab.

All of these diverse interests, you know, instruments, technology, expression, engagement in the world, imagination, composing was the activity that I found that combined all of those things.

One of the things that inspires me and keeps me going in composing is when I have a pretty strong feeling of what it's going to be like, but I also have a strong feeling that I don't know exactly how it's going to end up.

So, the projects that I've been happiest about are ones, indeed, that develop in a way that I didn't exactly expect.

-So, Tod, I have had for many years this kind of dream to make a glass cymbal.

My sort of dream scenario is to make an object where you have the potential to give a composer two potential sounds that you could score, one being the sound that the cymbal makes when you play it normally, and the other being the sound -- a one-off sound of smashing it.

-Zoe Laughlin had this vision of making a cymbal out of glass, and I would make a piece out of it.

And I immediately realized, you know, what a genius she is with materials and what an unusual idea she has about what objects mean, and I just had an intuition that there was something there that we could discover.

The material could vary in thickness, and it could vary in texture on the top.

-If you can optimize it for glass, maybe we need a very different dome that's not -- it's not as flat.

-Might there be a gradation of these or more than one?

We could break a lot?

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We could really start to look even at something like sandblasting an area to create a different opacity as well.

-No, I-I think that sounds fantastic.

-So, you're coming to London, Tod?

Brilliant.

-I am.

-Tod's coming over to play.

Let me get some of my toys out.

What we need to do first is just play and explore and think.

"That's interesting," "Oh, I like that," and that kind of thing.

Oh, it's like a sweet shop.

Ah!

Cymbals!

-You wanna give that one a try?

-Yeah.

Like, this one looks like it's got a higher copper content.

So, that redder color.

-Want to give it a try?

-Copper is sort of denser, so it might lower the tone.

She says with a great big high, bright one.

-How about this funny one?

It's funny, they're the same pitch, but different resonance.

There's that beautiful sound at the edge.

Oh, I really like that.

I love that.

-One thing I hadn't even thought about as a variable is roundness, but why not?

-Why not?

-There's texture, there's hole, and on the spectrum of texture, we've got from the smooth to, like, the total dimple.

And then dimple breaks through into hole.

In making one out of glass, you then show actually what's so brilliant about brass at the same time.

Like, you're showing why this material is perfect for cymbals.

It has this resonance.

And that's kind of amazing, that this one is so good at it and it's no wonder entire sections of orchestras use this stuff.

♪♪ This is a selection, obviously, of glass objects.

And I suppose this is a chance to explore what glass sounds like and then maybe what it sounds like when we break it so we can push things to their limits.

And clearly the shape will affect the sound.

Like, the same material, different shape.

Give it a bang.

There we go.

♪♪ Mm.

-Oh, my gosh.

Listen to this.

-[ Laughs ] -Hmm.

♪♪ That's quite nice, actually.

-Let's break one.

-Yeah.

-Nice.

-Where's the next one?

I like that!

-Have you got a taste for it now?

Here, let's try one of the shapes that's more cymbal-like.

♪♪ Yes!

-Ha!

♪♪ -Can I do one?

-Yeah.

♪♪ -You see what I mean about that's the moment that's more dangerous.

It's gone in my hair.

Really nice.

Really nice.

-Yeah.

-'Cause what strikes me -- -Glass on glass is really exciting.

-Well, that's the sort of discovery of the day, really.

Which is that glass on glass is better than thing on glass.

-I think.

-This is something I've been thinking about for a long time.

And the singular thought in my head for years, suddenly it's now exploded out, and there's 35 ways in which this could now go, and all of them could have their own value, and we'll just alight upon one that will be the one we choose.

-I think we'll find the best one.

-Okay, brilliant.

Well, I'm up for it.

-That's what we're going to make and break.

♪♪ -Generally speaking, if I know what the piece is going to look like, I won't make it.

I want to be surprised.

I want the piece to teach me something along the way.

Sometimes I'll make a piece and I'll see it at the end, and I'll think, "Oh, that's great."

And it's not, like, a prideful or boastful thing.

I'm just like, "Look what happened."

Art has that ability to shift.

You know, it can change you.

You get to see this thing and then you get to feel a certain way because of it.

Like, I can take a piece of paper, I can fold it, and then I can give you an emotion from it.

That's a wild idea.

♪♪ Paper is an interesting material for a number of reasons, first of which is that it's super ubiquitous.

You can get a piece of paper anywhere.

Everybody's handled paper.

It's not precious.

So, you can just take a sheet, start folding it.

You don't have to worry about messing something up.

I like that it's a material that has a memory.

If you fold it a certain way and you unfold it, it wants to go back to that certain place, and so you can almost program it.

I will change materials, depending on what it is I'm making.

This paper is actually for color pastels.

So, it's not necessarily meant for what I'm using it for.

So, this is me figuring out -- and my my daughter's drawing as well in here -- me figuring out how these shapes are going to come together.

I gave a talk at the Museum of Mathematics, and I was in front of a room of people, and I was showing my work.

And I was like, "I'm not really a math person."

They all yelled, like, "You are a math person!

You don't -- You don't know it!"

Did you know that a three-dimensional object has a two-dimensional shadow?

Right?

A four-dimensional object has a three-dimensional shadow.

I'm just saying, that's...fascinating.

♪♪ Okay, let me put this together.

You know, as an artist, you're not a scientist, right?

You don't have a hypothesis.

You're not trying to prove something.

So, as an artist, like, if you're working towards this one goal, and this other thing that's more interesting starts to happen over here, you can go, "Well, let's go over here for a little bit and see what develops."

-So, do you remember these?

-Yeah, yeah.

When I first started working with scientists, I was really worried that they would be results driven and not interested in the play aspect of creativity and of design.

And I found the opposite to be the case.

-This is good for 400 degrees, plus.

-So I met Max Shtein at one of the very first talks I gave at the university.

A lot of the scientists showed up, like, wearing, like, khakis and, like, a button-down, and Max was just like, maybe just got off a bicycle or something, and he was wearing, like, a biking -- like, he was just like, "Are you scientist?

Like, what's your deal, man?

-And now the person moves around, and it picks up the shoulder movement.

You remember?

Okay, you made so many things you don't remember what you made.

-I remember this.

-Okay, so here's the thing, right?

-Okay.

Can I tell you this?

I remember making this and you said to me, "This is good.

I don't know what to do with it."

Do you know what to do with it?

-We know what to do with it.

-Alright, tell me.

-Well, there are many things that we could do with this.

So, here is, essentially, a tiny plastic analog of this.

-Yep.

-Do you remember Soloflex?

There used to be this home gym, Soloflex, where you would pull on rubber bands and exercise.

So, it turns out you can train young heart cells, young cardiac cells, to turn into little micro-scale cardiac tissues by giving them a little gym to work out in.

-Science and cutting-edge science is incredibly curious.

It's the same questions I'm asking, but to a different extent, right?

-Once my hands, you know, touch it and I play with it and I see how it works, then my mind starts thinking through the problem a lot more effectively.

It's like it's an aid.

It's a thinking aid for me to now start applying physics to these structures or imagining what's going to happen if I use a different material, you know, or modify any of these structures.

So, make more.

[ Chuckles ] -Okay, I'll make more, sure.

That's fine.

The reason I make my work is because I don't understand it.

And making it is the way that I come to understanding the piece.

♪♪ -You can see, intestine, large intestine.

There's nothing quite like discovery and there's still so much to discover.

It's a great feeling, at the end of the day, to walk away and think you know something that maybe no one else in the world knows.

-I'm Kristin Engevik.

-I'm Amy Engevik.

-And I'm Mindy Engevik.

-And we study the gut.

-I didn't say it.

[ Laughter ] Creativity between doing science and art, I would say very much on the same vein.

I wouldn't say there's too much distinguishment between the two.

Immunofluorescence is the ability to visualize antibodies in tissue or in cells.

-It allows you to visualize whether or not it's under -- in, like, a normal, healthy state or if it's in disease.

You add a fluorophore that is in a certain range and you use a light source to excite that fluorophore and that is what is captured by the microscope, the color.

-Yeah, that looks good.

-Yeah, that looks way better.

-And then afterwards, we can take the pre-designed colors and go ahead and make them any color that we want.

♪♪ -We think of it as truly art.

We frame it, we put it around our labs.

It's also telling a story.

And I feel like all art is about telling a story and taking you on a journey, and we feel like our science is doing that same thing.

-When I look through the microscope, a lot of times I think this looks like a mosaic or this looks like something I would see in a church where I can see the stained glass, and it has the same kind of patterns and the same colors.

-I think the idea of a scientist is shifting now, as I'm a scientist myself.

I got to participate in an art exhibit in Bordeaux, and I get to have canvases of what I consider art in my office that I create.

I get to go into realms that I never would have thought of.

-I think when nothing is known, anything is possible.

If you don't know what you're doing, if you have a vague idea, it can go anywhere.

When you don't know what you're doing, that's a great place to start.

It's terrifying, but I think that's where really good stuff comes from.

-Hi, Michael.

Nice to meet you.

-Hi.

Nice to meet you, too.

Fill me in on some of your equipment and the capabilities.

Like, what are you set up to do?

-Our sort of real foray into what we're calling digital glass came through glass printing.

And it works by extruding molten glass through a ceramic nozzle at around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Glass has, I would say, as a material, I feel like it has a lot of opinions.

It has a really strong will.

-The ultimate goal of it being broken is the easiest part, right?

The hardest bit is the playing it before it breaks.

-What's going on here is there are three sheets of glass, a single thickness, a double thickness and a triple thickness.

So, this is one layer of water-jetted sandwiched between two solid layers.

-There are shifts.

There are definitely shifts, aren't there?

You know, single thickness could be clear.

Double thickness can be the lines.

-The only problem with that is that it's starting to look so cool, you could never want to break that.

Oh, my God.

-That's what makes it better because it's like, "No!"

-So, the first phase was developing these swatches, understanding some of the acoustics of those, and then taking all that knowledge and turning it into a half-scale model.

So, this is a really sort of pretty catastrophic failure.

We learned that with more detail comes even more delicacy.

Glass is a real humbling material.

It isn't something where you force it into doing something.

It's something where you accommodate it, and then you have to sort of act as a detective if something has gone wrong to figure out what went wrong and how to do it better.

♪♪ -So, this came with you on the plane this morning?

-This came with me on the plane.

-Oh, my God.

Look at that.

-So, that's the half-scale cymbal.

-It looks like the drawing.

-It does.

So, that's the amorphous one.

-Oh, my God, it's beautiful.

Look at it in the light.

It feels like it'd be pretty hard to break.

Don't you think?

-I think it's going to take a smash.

I think you're right.

Hi, Zoe.

-Hey, Zoe.

How are you?

-Very good, thanks.

-We have some glass cymbals to show you and then listen to.

And so, here's the amorphous one.

-This is towards the center.

The bubbles really don't give us anything.

Same with the ridges.

The ridges, um... ...you get the same bounce, the same grit.

We're all remarking how solid they feel, so... -Yeah.

-The object with the stick, it feels harder to break than kind of any of the things that we tried in London, I mean... -Interesting.

-Definitely doesn't feel like it's on the edge or something.

-I think one of the interesting things will be that as we scale up the proportional thickness, it's going to get thinner by proportion.

-And I think clearly the thinner it is, the more -- the more it's going to resonate and probably the more variety there is.

-What's happened is we've killed its natural resonance through these layers and through these amendments and perhaps returning to that, the most pure one we can do might suddenly come alive in a whole other way.

Like, I look at the cymbal, and it looks amazing, right?

And I see these regions, and they sound sort of indiscernibly similar, like, whoa, they sound almost the same.

Like, why have you got those regions then?

And just is it the single layer that will be, like, the ultimate expression, almost, of the glass?

Like, if it were a single sheet, it would resonate more.

-It would.

-I mean, I think that...

I think that feels like it takes all the variety out and sort of maximizes resonance.

-We haven't got variety, anyway.

This is my point.

-But don't we have a little bit?

-We don't have variety, anyway.

Then should we not go for the ultimate ringing?

Like, what variety are we really playing with?

Another option would be to instead of making any 26-inch cymbals, to just make an array of 14-inch cymbals, to take more risk, come up with more of these.

-I bet the larger ones are going to be more interesting.

I just think they're going to resonate more and have more varieties.

That's my guess.

And I think these are just too dead.

-Yeah, I agree.

I like it.

We'll just stew on it a bit and see how we're feeling.

-Alright, great.

-And good luck.

-Great.

-Sounds good.

-Since we don't -- we don't, you know, we don't have a lot of experience trying to draw sound out of glass... ...maybe thinking that it behaves just like a cymbal isn't the right way of thinking about it.

And we have to resonate it in a different way and break it in a different way.

So, that's what we'll do.

If that doesn't work, we can always serve cheese on it.

♪♪ -If you're creating a normal -- a normal sculpture, it's kind of a linear progression.

Maybe you're starting from a bunch of clay, a block of wood, block of marble, and it's gradually taking its form until you decide it's done.

But I think for these pieces, it's not linear at all.

I mean, you could be working for a year and not see anything, and then when you turn it on, suddenly comes to life.

♪♪ ♪♪ Other artists, if they're lucky, maybe they can paint.

That's super simple.

But for some reason, my creativity lies in this intersection of very complicated tools and programming and electronics.

But those are the tools that I find most inspirational, and my creativity lies there.

Perhaps you're thinking about beauty and color and composition.

But what you have to think about is numbers and algorithms and mechanisms.

Most people who know my art recognize me from my series of pieces called "Mechanical Mirrors."

And my "Mechanical Mirrors" started in the year 1999 by me creating a kinetic interactive piece from wooden tiles.

Over the past 20-something years, I've really dug a bit deep into that in terms of materials that I love using.

♪♪ Here I have a piece made out of pom-poms.

These fur puffs, synthetic fur.

So, no animals were harmed in the making of this piece.

I took pairs of Trolls, back to back like this, and they spun, so like this.

They spin back and forth.

The penguins are natural pixels.

They have a black back and a white tummy.

This is a prototype of it connected to a motor.

Me kind of thinking, so you get one of them to work, and then you make a thousand of them work.

Once you start seeing pixels, you see pixels everywhere.

In trash, in dolls, in people.

And now my latest thing is I'm seeing it in a growing plant itself.

So, I'm hoping that maybe even a living plant can become pixelated or maybe just be an image-creation vehicle.

The piece that's made of chopsticks, I didn't immediately know which kind of chopsticks I wanted.

So, I ordered many, many types of chopsticks to try.

And these are the ones you get in a restaurant that you snap in two.

And then the next step is to try and think about how you can actually mechanize them.

So, for a few weeks, you become kind of an expert in all the chopsticks that are available in the world.

And then you forget.

I already forgot about them.

But at the time, I knew everything about them.

It's really important to me that they're very beautiful.

However, they are not complete until the viewer stands in front of them and interacts with them.

And then that whole circle is complete.

But the art will always be different for every one of these viewers.

If you come and see one of my pieces today versus tomorrow, it'll be different because of you.

When I think about how I experience myself internally versus how people see me from the outside, there's a huge gap there.

And that gap is changing over the years and probably becoming more and more.

And that tension between what you feel from the inside, how you experience your being from the inside versus how you appear externally, a mirror negotiates that, and that's really important to me and profound for me.

♪♪ -I make figures of myself.

They're soft sculptures that are life-sized, that look like me.

I'm, like, a very rare sight to see walking up and down the yarn aisles.

And I think that that's part of the work for me, right?

It's like this juxtaposition of masculine men doing feminine crafts and working with feminine medium, or at least what's been largely considered to be feminine.

A lot of it has to do with memories that I have of growing up, my relationship to my dad, my uncles, my brother.

Trying to understand the cultural context of masculinity and how it functions.

Like, I say that I crochet because I use a crochet hook and I use yarn.

But I don't really know how to crochet.

I only know how to manipulate the yarn the way that I've sort of understood how to manipulate the yarn, the way I've taught myself how to do it.

The way that it works for me in my head is I think of math.

It's algebra.

And algebra is, like, the most fundamental thing.

Like, I can understand algebra, I can do more complex ideas.

And so for me, it's getting a basic understanding for how a material functions, how it reacts, and then understanding it well enough to manipulate it to do whatever I want it to do.

My wife will wrap me in Saran wrap and tape.

Once she cuts me out of the figure, I am left with this sort of mummified skin.

I don't really like to learn the conventional ways of how things work because you get stuck in a box.

You get stuck in a box where, like, this is how you do X, Y, and Z.

And if I just go in there and play, I'm able to just sort of come up with my own way of having a conversation with the material.

Right now, since the tape is cut open, it kind of is more forgiving with how it flops.

But once it's taped back together, then it will get back to what it was.

I'll stuff it with foam.

It'll inflate back up.

I'll put clothes and the crocheted skins on them, and voila.

I hate how long it takes, you know?

But I think that that also for me adds a lot of the value to it, right?

It can't be replicated by a machine.

Whenever you approach a piece of crochet work, you know that there's an author behind it.

You know that there's a real person that's behind that work.

I'm getting old.

my weight changes.

My hairstyle changes.

Eventually, I'll change the character.

It's something that I've thought about a lot.

When that character changes, what will it look like and what will it be?

♪♪ ♪♪ -Wow.

So, we're scaling up from the 14-inch ones that we brought here today to 26-inch cymbal scale for the final performance.

Scaling up to 26 inches both is exciting and scary.

The challenge of doing it goes up.

The stakes is bigger.

And here we're using MIT's big OMAX.

It's a much larger format machine to get us that size.

It can get through steel that's, like, that thick.

It's pretty amazing.

-Really?

Yeah.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Laughter ] ♪♪ -This is so cool.

-Yeah, it's a really cool machine.

-Oh, my God.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -There's already so much -- I mean, it vibrates and -- -Yeah, you can -- -It's much more varied, too.

-Yeah, it's gonna be -- -Oh, my God.

It's so much more delicate.

-Yeah.

-That's really good.

-So, this is a glass fusing, three layers, that as we were taking it out of the kiln, fractured spectacularly.

It really represented one of the more discouraging failures of the project because at this point we've gotten to our full scale.

We only have a few samples that we can work with, and this was one of them.

So, this is the 26-inch complex cymbal into the slumping mold... ...where it's going to relax over temperature at 1400 degrees and settle into the cymbal shape.

And this is a sort of nervous-making moment because we've broken some stuff already.

We're running out of time.

We really need this to work.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Brilliant.

[ Laughs ] I can't wait to see it in person.

This is very exciting.

♪♪ ♪♪ -We have our first scale cymbal out of the mold.

Really exciting because this is the first time we've gotten one out without a crack in it.

♪♪ Look at that.

♪♪ -When you said come to my barn, I was thinking, like, a shed.

This is a house.

-Well, it's a barn.

It's actually -- It's funny.

It's called an English barn.

I don't know what they call them, but it's -- It's got three floors, so it's quite tall.

But now... ...it's got cymbals!

-Oh, my word.

Look at them.

They're so tantalizing.

-They are amazing.

They really are.

So, this one, as you can see, is the single layer, and this is my favorite, this one.

No, it is, it's really -- you'll see it's really special.

-Well, no, but this -- this is, for me, the archetype.

Like, this is what had always been in my imagination.

You know what I mean?

Like, there's a purity.

-Yeah.

-And it's simply about the material and the form.

This is going to be something special because this can't happen again, and it's going to have a very particular kind of experience, which will be a live one for the people in the room.

But you're going to have a particular experience with it, which again, I'm, like, incredibly envious of, but really very touched.

And it's going to be so brilliant to actually watch you break them.

-I think breaking this is... -The end.

-It's, like, heartbreaking.

You know, it's...

I mean, I look forward to it because it'll be powerful, but I wish I didn't have to do that in some way.

I didn't realize I would -- -This is so good.

You're like, "I don't want to break it."

I'm like, "You have to break it."

-I know.

-But this is the perfect -- -It is.

-This is what it's about.

-I think we got to the point where it means something.

This has been one hell of a ride, actually, because... there's been something about... ...the becoming real of something that's existed in my head for over a decade.

I think about tomorrow's performance.

I think for me... ...that's the moment the cymbal's really going to live its best life.

Like, I'm ready to see it do its thing.

Yeah, I'm ready.

-It was a little over a year ago that Zoe and I were introduced, and Zoe did indeed have this dream that she'd been thinking of for a while of making cymbals out of glass.

And when I got to know Zoe and then Michael after that, and we started thinking about, well, how do you actually make these things?

What does it mean?

What does it mean to have an object that's usually percussive and strong that's actually quite fragile?

And especially when we got the final cymbals, which we're going to share with you in a minute, it became obvious that there's just something... ...really special about this.

So, Zoe, why don't you say a little bit about what they are.

-Yeah.

So, materials perform.

You know, this floor is doing something in order for us not to just sink straight through it, right?

And I think this is a piece of work that's about glass getting up to something.

It has a conversation with us, whether we like it or not.

And when you try and interact with it in the form of playing it, it's having another conversation.

So, Tod is going to be performing, and the relationship between performer and object, I think will be really special tonight.

-So, here's... this little piece, performance, experience, whatever we want to call it.

I did give it a name this afternoon, which is "The Edge of Every Thing."

And that's not everything.

It's every thing.

[ Applause ] [ Applause ] I think for me, this project, it really caused me to think about the limits of things.

I'm not 20 years old anymore, so you think of the limits of a human life and of a body and of a...

But, you know, that's what this glass is.

It's so present, you know?

Everything about it is both beautiful and, you know, created.

And we've made these things, and we imagined this, and it sounds beautiful.

But its limit is there every second.

So, I think that idea of limits being everywhere all the time and being both frightening and also inspiring and part of the whole picture is deeply important.

-You knew it had a very short lifespan, and it's like certain things come into the world knowing that they're going to leave the world quite early, and there's a tragedy in that.

But you enjoy the moment it's with you.

-When a work is finished, it used to be depressing, but not anymore.

I've sort of have worked through that.

We've spent months, years in the development, and then the high is one three-hour evening, and then it is over.

And then I never see it again.

Isn't that wild?

To think that I never see it again.

-I usually see the things that still need to evolve or I think could have been better.

And it's specifically that energy, I think, that also keeps me going.

-Once the work is done and leaves my studio, it's not mine anymore.

It's not for me.

It's for everybody else.

My hands will never touch it again.

I did what the work told me it needed to be.

And once it's gone, it's gone.

It's like I did my job.

Yeah, it's nice.

It's liberating.

-But this for me is very much about glass behaves in a certain way, and often we ignore it.

We literally look through it.

You know, you're watching potentially this program through a screen that's very well made from glass.

Like, it's all around us.

And if this is an opportunity to have a moment to then, like, look at the window in your house and think, "Oh yeah, glass.

I forgot about you," you know, that would be great.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -This program is made possible by the Priem Family Foundation.

Since 1999, dedicated to fostering education and innovation, striving to spur research, technology, and creativity and helping to empower students to achieve bigger dreams for themselves and the world.

♪♪ ♪♪