The Georgia Tech Library has partnered with former Georgia Tech assistant professor and double-graduate Jacket Tristan Al-Haddad for the second installment of the Artist-In-Residence program. Al-Haddad, who also designed and implemented the Library’s seventh-floor roof terrace Crosland Chroma project, said RAW AIR “seeks to transform the written knowledge stored in the library into large-scale, interpretive drawings across the north façade of the building.”
Listen to Tristan Al-Haddad and Gerry Chen talk about Polycentric Truthes on Lost in the Stacks, the Research Library Rock and Roll Radio Show.
“RAW AIR” Artist-in-Residence Tristan Al-Haddad and PhD student Gerry Chen will begin installation of their massive, robotically fabricated mural installation Polycentric Truthes Monday, Jan. 17 on the first and second floors of Price Gilbert. It will be painted over two months on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and students, faculty and staff are invited to watch the piece coming to life.
Al-Haddad (BSArch and MArch) will kick off his Reading, Arithmetic, and Writing Artist-In-Residence (RAW AIR) student co-created project at noon Friday, Feb. 3 with a lunch in the Scholars Event Network Theater, located on the first floor of Price Gilbert. This free event is open to interested students and includes pizza and a discussion with Al-Haddad about the project.
He will also take part in the Meet the Artist Reception Monday, Feb. 6 from 4 to 5:30 p.m. with artists-in-residence from the schools of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) and Music.
“We are thrilled to welcome Tristan into the Library once again to grace us with his unique artistry and vision,” said Dean Leslie Sharp. “I cannot wait to see his project take shape through the marrying of student creativity with his experience as an artist and teacher.”
For this project, said Al-Haddad, robotically enabled machines will translate the library’s information resources into a sprawling work of art spanning a whole side of the Judge S. Price Gilbert Memorial Library. This work will be co-created by students and executed by the human-style painting robot from by PhD student Gerry Chen.
“The library as a historical typology is the repository of knowledge,” he said. “The majority of that knowledge is codified in the form of text. However, ideas can be expressed in many forms.”
Al-Haddad said as part of the project, students will use two seminal texts – the “Reading, Arithmetic and Writing” portion of RAW AIR -- as “provocations” to get their creativity flowing.
“We will sample bits of Euclid’s Elements as an alchemical precursor and consume in whole cloth Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican as our base alloy,” he said.
Work will continue through the spring and summer, with workshops and classes a planned part of the residency.
Tristan Al-Haddad is a multi-medium designer and visual artist in addition to previously holding the position of assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech. He leads Atlanta-based Formations Studio.
Al-Haddad’s work has been exhibited in venues including the Pompidou Center, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Boston Center for the Arts, The International Contemporary Furniture Fair, and The AIA’s Center for Architecture in New York, as well as being published in print sources including the New York Times, Dwell, Metropolis, Art Papers and The Atlanta Journal Constitution. Al-Haddad was one of seven recipients of the ARTADIA Artist Award in 2009 in addition to being a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria in Valparaiso, Chile. In 2014 Al-Haddad was selected by the US Department of State to represent the United States at the Colombo Art Biennale in Sri Lanka. He has large scale permanent sculptures located throughout the United States.
Gerry Chen is a PhD student at Georgia Tech, where he studies artist-robot collaboration to understand how robots can superpower artists and how art can drive technology. Growing up, Chen had a passion for science and technology and was inspired to pursue a career in robotics by a 2006 documentary about self-driving cars (DARPA grand challenge).
During his undergraduate time at Duke, he double majored in engineering and minored in computer science and math, culminating in breaking two Guinness World Records for vehicle fuel efficiency as a leader of the Duke Electric Vehicles team.
Chen continued his studies at Georgia Tech's Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM) PhD program in the School of Interactive Computing under Professors Frank Dellaert and Seth Hutchinson. He authored several publications in the fields of robot art, optimal control, and agricultural robotics, evidencing that learnings in the field of robot art can readily transfer to other applications. Chen’s thesis on human-robot collaboration in the art domain is a key step in his longer-term ambitions to make personalized robots accessible for everyone.
Through technological innovations, robot literacy, and open discourse, Chen dreams of a world where, instead of feeling fearful of robots stealing jobs, we can all feel empowered by the potential they have to help each and every one of us.
The Georgia Tech Library Artist-in-Residence program enhances and expands the current educational experience through arts-based programming as it relates to STEM fields and Georgia Tech areas of study. A visiting artist engages the Georgia Tech community in an artistic and aesthetic exploration of the role of the libraries in society, and the Artist-in-Residence program supports the mission of the Library through arts-based programming and engagement as a core responsibility of the artist-in-residence.
World-renowned multimedia visionary Deanna Sirlin was the inaugural 2022 Library Artist-in-Residence. Her piece, Watermark, is on display on the ground floor of Crosland Tower.
Watermark addresses the most important issue of the 21st century -- climate change -- through color, transparency and composition, and it is influenced by the exhibition “50 Years of Science Fiction at Georgia Tech.”
