Yago De Quay: Technology & Creativity
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Marianna
We chatted a bit about what it takes to foster creativity. Do you have a routine or ritual for entering into a creative headspace?
Yago
I use the Pomodoro technique habitually for getting in the right headspace. It's the one where you spend around 25 minutes focusing on a task and then five minutes with a diffused mind doing something else that's very alive. And repeat. Doing that consecutively throughout the day. I heard that Salvador Dali would use it. One thing that Dali would do, which is a legend, is that he would sit on a chair and he would have a little ball, like a bearing metal ball in his hand and a metal plate on the floor. And so he would sit on this chair and slowly nod off in between his works, and when he got really sleepy, his hand would accidentally open and the ball would fall on the plate.
It startled him awake with the noise. And he would do that constantly because in that sublime period of in-between being awake and asleep, surrealist ideas would pop up into his mind. And it's in that zone of being focused and having a dispersed mind, where sometimes you can find new ideas.
Marianna
I love that you bring up the Pomodoro technique. I'm a firm believer that peak performance, performance training, and productivity techniques affect anyone who works in creative spaces. Having boundaries set in place creates a space for more invention and more creation.
Generally, creating pockets of time is very useful. There are artists you talk with which say something along the lines of “boundaries on my time hold me back and feel constricting. They are harmful to my process. I need to have openness. I need to have space.”
But with boundaries, these kinds of restraints and constraints actually create a fertile space for creativity. At least, I feel that way - love that you said that it’s also a motivation for you.
Yago
Right? Because there are small rewards that you give yourself to have these little breaks - because art is sometimes mundane. It can be tasks that you need to do before having fun. Sometimes that means the work is the means to a bigger outcome. And so these small rewards that you give yourself in between these Pomodoro moments are a way to keep you motivated.
Marianna
Hour after hour, day after day, week after week. You have to break it down and see each step come to fruition. Do you have any habits you've built for yourself to foster creativity and inventiveness?
Yago
Yes. When I'm presented with either a grant or a commission to do artwork, sometimes a creative project... I start by doing literature reviews. So reading books about the subject, reading art books related to the subject as well. I also do internet research into other people's work around that area. For example, I'm doing a project with Intel now on little apps that allow people to become superstar artists at events where they can collaborate with each other and become instant artists. And so for that, I spent a decent amount of time looking at other apps that perhaps have the same idea, to get inspiration and see what worked and what hasn't worked. So that's the way to gather information.
Another thing that I do is create storyboards. Especially with an installation sometimes with apps as well I’ll design the different scenes and different attractions that people can have with the artwork. I would work a lot with interactive pieces, which people are expecting to interact with. I draw little storyboards that can help me put myself in the user's shoes, and relate with the participants. And through that I start understanding, okay, this is what happens. And then new ideas can come out of that. Sometimes I can start eliminating ideas that are not going to work out.
Once I have those ideas, the next step is to start analyzing them and finding ways to thin down and filter those ideas to finally start executing. I create a lot of diagrams, conceptual diagrams, mind maps, affinity diagrams where I have ideas as little small post its...either physically or digitally. And then I connect them around and I group them into clusters. That's the way I start making sense of chaos.
Aside from that, visual mood boards. Post-its again with storyboards or with ideas. I make sure that I have them around me all the time so that I'm enveloped by these ideas.
Marianna
Do you have them placed on your doors, in physical spaces around your apartment or studio?
Yago
Yes, on the doors, on the walls, on little notebooks that I have. For the same reason, I have physical books because I want to be, in a way, accosted by ideas. I don't want to have to marry them. I don't want to have to search for them. I want them to find me and remind me.
Marianna
That's great. I imagine that it’s partially because you build experience as part of your art.
Yago
Having everything digital is just not a good way for you to be surprised.
Marianna
Digital platforms are good for writing long-form pieces and having all your bibliography organized. But I wonder whether that's the way to inspire creativity. I feel the same way as you do, that you need a physical piece around versus a giant excel spreadsheet storing and organizing all of your information.
Yago
Having things in the digital domain is helpful for retrieval when you know what you want to find. But sometimes you don't know what you want to find, or you forget what you want to find and since it's not visible since it's not calling out for you, like a book left on the desk, it creates difficulty. Lastly, I go for walks. That for me is super important. It’s the last stage and it's normally not to generate ideas as much as to consolidate a bunch of ideas into things that will make the cut.
Marianna
Once you have everything germinating in your brain already. When you storyboard, what method do you use?
Yago
I typically use a pen and paper.
Marianna
Anything digital?
Yago
I do use one. When I want to share stuff with other people, I use Miro. It's just a white canvas online where you can just put stuff and share it with anybody.
Marianna
So where do you think ideas come from?
Yago
One obvious source is exposure. Previous exposure, stuff that you've seen in the past, it's very hard to come up with ideas ex nihilo. For example, I did a show for America's Got Talent and I build for them this big pop up book. The whole stage was a pop-up book instead of having a set as you do in Broadway. I had the whole set inside the pop-up book that you would open and then the set would pop out and then you would turn the page and then the new set would pop up. And so the whole set was enclosed in this massive book.
Marianna
That’s great! How big was the book?
Yago
Our original plan was 20 feet by 20 feet each page. But it turned out to be much smaller. It became 10 feet by five feet because of budget constraints.
Marianna
Still, that’s giant! [laughter]
Yago
Still, we had the whole all this stuff inside the book and it was really cool because we're always asking ‘what is going to be the next page?’. That didn't come from out of thin air. I had been touring some studios in New York to meet collaborators. There was one studio, CoLab Studio in Lower East Side, and they were showing me a projection mapping project they did, which was on a book. It was a pop-up book that had this temple. It was a big book, maybe four feet by four feet. And I didn't think much about it until months later I got this call by America's Got Talent, and somehow that came back to mind and I asked myself how could I do something like that, but even bigger?
Marianna
And how did you manage to turn the pages?
Yago
The dancers would literally move the pages [laughter]. Another place where I ideas come from... outside of extensions of what you've seen before... is the collision of different ideas in your mind. The intersection of different ideas that you've experienced in the past. There’s a piece I did called BioMediation in 2018 where I combined brain waves with interactive music to create a performance where the performer was controlling the music using thoughts.
And that happened because I was next to the cognitive sciences research lab often. I would pass through it and I had friends working in that area. So exposure to that and then my part, which was the music side. I decided to join the two pieces together.
Marianna
Incredible. Ideas coming from the proximity and collision of all those different inspirations and space… when do your best ideas hit you?
Yago
Deliberately, it’s when I’m walking. Spending time walking, I get some of the best ideas...But there's another thing. I'm a slow thinker. I'm a slow creator. I don't tend to have epiphanies. For me, things work slowly, deliberately. Jackson Pollock would look at an empty canvas for days and it would be empty and empty and empty and empty and then a spark of inspiration would hit him and he would just attack that canvas.
The idea of creating deliberately reminds me of this study Arnie Dietrich. In 2004, Dietrich wrote a paper that talked about four sources of creativity and is categorized into this grid: a cognitive source, the emotional source, the spontaneous source, and the deliberate source. This is important because artists tend to fall into different boxes within these areas. For example, Thomas Edison was a deliberate and cognitive creator who would attack a problem by taking his time and slowly solving the problem, one step at a time. Then you have jazz musicians who, playing live, are spontaneous and emotional.
I tend to be more of a cognitive and deliberate creator. I'm not that spontaneous. Ultimately I really think hard about the final project and the small steps needed to get there.
Marianna
Agreed, and it’s developing systems so that makes complete sense.
Yago
Yes, I also think of projects as systems. I tend to think like a director. A director is not very spontaneous. They need to have a plan and a vision beforehand. I have the same restraints. I have a time limit and I have a budget limit and I have all these creatives that I manage and a project that needs to be shown at a gallery or on stage. It's a system that I need to cognitively, deliberately create.
Marianna
I love this chart, they are different ways of thinking, but they all do connect inside of building the system though there is that need for quick pivoting and flexibility. So that's also part of that creative process.
Yago
Yeah. The need for quickness. It’s quick, but not as quick as improv [laughter].
Marianna
This all ties back into your process for creating and executing ideas. What are the unexpected turns your life has taken to lead you to where you are today?
Yago
Yes. One unexpected thing was that I turned out to not be that good of a jazz guitarist. When I graduated from the College of Music in Boston, partially because I fell out of love with guitar when I graduated, I found myself in a bind. I decided that I didn't want to give up on music, but I didn't want to play any traditional instruments anymore. I decided I was going to invent my own instrument. This pivot of me inventing my own instruments moved me into studying engineering, my engineering masters, and eventually receiving my Ph.D. It took me in this scientific direction that completely altered the way I make music and the way I make visuals.
Another unexpected moment happened while I was traveling and visiting UT Austin in 2012. A friend took me to visit this really weird band, this rock band that plays music using Tesla coils. They had this massive Tesla coil that shot a lightning bolt. And the modulation of the lightning bolt was the speaker. So the ZAP is the speaker. I thought ‘okay, I've got to talk to these guys’. The band is called Arc Attack, they’re brothers, like mad scientists [laughter]. And so unexpectedly I ended up touring the country with them in appearing on National, Portuguese and Spanish television to do a bunch of shows!
The importance of experiencing visual feedback while creating gestures for music was critical to my growth and future work. For context, I wore a metal suit while I was touring with Arc Attack and looked like a medieval warrior because standing between the Tesla coils gesturing and controlling the sparks, I could get shocked by all those volts. We had chicken wire on the floor, and metal to ground the electricity, and we’re talking big venues. I would wear my metal suit and stand between the Tessa coils and then use gestures to make the coils come to life.
That visual spark really helped me understand how audiences were processing the connection between the technology I was creating, the Sidekick wristbands which I built with Intel, and the visual and the sound. The visual helped the audience understand how the wristbands I had were, in fact, controlling the spark from the coils. The visual feedback became crucial. After that experience, all my work has had visual feedback in some way, whether it's some kind of projection or LED screens.
Marianna
I’m shocked you were never seriously shocked!
Yago
I definitely was shocked a few times and screamed on stage, but people were far away so they couldn’t hear it. [laughter]
Marianna
How has working at the intersection of being an artist, a technologist, and a musician affected your work? Has your thinking in one space led to a breakthrough in another?
Yago
Working at the intersection of engineering and the arts makes collaborations much easier. I can put on my engineering hat and talk shop with engineers, and then switch over and delve into a more conceptual look with artists to figure out the goal of a particular piece. It helps create a bigger picture of both ends of the spectrum. The art world pushes you to be more conceptual and think about the purpose of technology. On the other hand, being a technologist or an engineer helps you think on a larger scale because you see all these new technologies as interconnected and as tools that you can use to make larger art.
That's one of the most exciting transitions from being a guitarist to being a new media artist. I don't have to just think about being on stage and playing witness - I can now explore different media to implement in one show and different people that I can incorporate into that piece. The scope increases and your view expands, and you suddenly have an even bigger canvas to work off.
Some artists are truly technical and they can spend so much time developing software or a particular system that creates a specific sound. Thinking as an abstract artist, you really think in terms of ‘I need to make a big system so I can't spend too much time just engineering’. As an engineer, you also know you can't spend too much time focusing on a particular visual aspect of the piece. You need to think about systems in general. For both sides, you need to abstract yourself and work with collaborators to make something that's bigger than yourself. Technology has helped me see art as a means for other people to make art.
I’ve been working with companies like Life X and Intel on creating creative platforms for other people to use. At Intel, we’re building WeSketch, which is a collaborative art-making and game sharing tool for live events. At Life X, I worked with them to create a broadcasting tool to share games, live shows on an online cloud platform. I see art and systems as platforms not just for yourself, but for others.
Marianna
Developing creative platforms and collaborative art-making tools sounds like an experimental process and initiative. Art as a sharing platform for others to access and harness the tools is incredibly exciting. Do you have any stories of experimentation in your own work, where you either succeeded or failed, and what you learned in the process? This makes me think of your time as an Artist in Residence at Nokia Bell Labs.
Yago
While I was an Artist in Residence at Nokia Bell Labs, we had the goal to create a climate change stimulator with an artistic aesthetic. A VR experience seemed like the most scalable version - we would be able to move it around and not be dependent on a physical space. Our gamified simulator took you through different worlds, and, by interacting with objects, you could make the environment better or worse. We treated this as a large experiment. it turned out that it was too didactic, and felt too much like a lesson for the viewers.
We ended up pivoting to create a mixed reality room that allowed people to interact with each other and the installation. That worked much better. Sometimes I do big experiments and pivot. Generally, however, I'm more deliberate and cautious about the development and creation of new artwork. I find myself making small adjustments to my trajectory and iterating quickly over time. I like to create small experiments and constantly collect feedback from a variety of sources, just to test my alignment.
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About Yago De Quay:
Dr. Yago de Quay is a guitarist-turned-engineer that advises tech companies on how to develop creative products. He’s a published author, artist, and scientist with multiple European and American scientific grants to develop motion capture technologies.
Recently, de Quay was featured in the show “America’s Greatest Makers” and is invited regularly to give talks about creativity and emerging technologies. He created the opening and closing acts for Intel’s keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show that won the Ex Award for the best production of an event. While at Live X, he brought to market two cloud-based streaming platforms that earned him a spot at the National Association of Broadcasters.
De Quay has been an Artist in Residence at Nokia Bell Labs. Currently, de Quay is the product designer for Intel’s WeSketch app. Additionally, he’s an adviser for the Brooklyn Arts Council’s Innovation Award and a mentor at the New Inc incubator.