Reframing Antiquity: Ways of Knowing and Being

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. The GEEX team reviewed the transcription, but it may contain errors. If you’re able, please refer to the episode audio before quoting this transcript. Email support@geex.glass with any questions.

RAGHVI BHATIA

The context is always there. It’s always in the roots. I think it just depends on different… ways of knowing and being, you know, different areas of thoughts and different schools of thoughts. And in a lot of different schools of thoughts, we’ve kind of been trained to ignore those contexts, especially when the context relates to kind of us or Eurocentric modes of power. You know, it’s like, if I work with a kind of glass that’s produced industrially in North America, and it’s kind of made for — it was developed for the studio glass movement so the different colors are compatible. No one asks me about the context of the material I’m using. Then, if I work with seed beads, everyone’s like, “Oh, wait, why are you working with seed beads?”

DR. MARVIN BOLT

I think that’s a really interesting point.

RAGHVI BHATIA  

Hello, I’m Raghvi Bhatia.

DR. MARVIN BOLT

Hi, I’m Marv Bolt.

EMILY LEACH

I’m Emily Leach, and this is the GEEX Talks Q&A Podcast. I’m one part of the team behind GEEX, the Glass Education Exchange, along with Ben Orozco and Helen Lee.

This year, the GEEX Talks lecture series paired glass-y artists and researchers together based on shared themes in their work. This episode’s guests, Raghvi Bhatia and Dr. Marvin Bolt, have been paired together with the theme “Reframing Antiquity: Ways of Knowing and Being.”

Raghvi Bhatia is a contemporary artist from New Delhi, India. Currently an MFA Candidate at UCLA, Raghvi has developed her artistic practice as a religious sect. With an extensive scholarly background on the history of the telescope, Dr. Marvin Bolt is the curator emeritus of science and technology at the Corning Museum of Glass. Dr. Bolt is currently a Research Fellow at the Technical University of Berlin.

This conversation follows their respective GEEX Talks lectures from April and May 2023. Your questions have shaped this discussion. Later on, I’ll talk a little bit about how you, as a listener, can support public scholarship in glass.

Thanks to Bullseye Glass Co. and HIS Glassworks for sponsoring this episode. You’ll hear more about our sponsors later on.

That’s enough from me — back to the episode.

DR. MARVIN BOLT  

I think one of the things that struck me the most about Raghvi’s talk was this integration of art into broader aspects of her life. It wasn’t just this isolated thing you do on the side. But it infuses everything you do, or it’s infused by everything you do. And by all these different aspects of your life, whether it’s walking down the street and wondering what time it is, or thinking about the bigger questions of who are we? Where do we fit into the cosmos? This is shaped by and shapes your art. And I found that what really came to me — coming from the more scientific side — is that art is many things and one of them is a vision of the world. How do you see the world? And how are you making sense of the universe? And that, of course, resonates strongly with the kinds of things I’ve been doing in my career, which is trying to understand how scientists are seeing the world and making sense of the world. It’s not that art is unsystematic and science is systematic, because as you are describing what you’re doing with calendars, for example, and time: this is something you’ve spent a lot of time and energy looking into these different cycles. How do you structure the world? How do you find a pattern amidst all the blooming buzzing confusion? And where can you find these patterns that can give some order structure pattern predictability amidst all the chaos? And I found that to be very, very interesting. 

RAGHVI BHATIA  

Thank you so much. I think it’s interesting that you brought up the way I work was it the way that scientists or historian work because I think a lot of the times in my own practice, I draw a lot from research and the systems that exist in other fields of study, but I think it was more obvious to me that a lot of the times people in these different fields and people in art, they’re concerned with the same things. The models of working can vary vastly, but you know, some people are concerned with social commentary. Some people are concerned with the pursuit of beauty. Some people are concerned with education or preservation of documentation or provocation. But I think the two sides are kind of interested in the same things but because of many reasons, have ended up almost speaking different languages. So it’s hard to communicate across the different fields but and that ends up requiring the translator or medium of some sort, but it’s… we’re seeing the same things but speaking different languages.

DR. MARVIN BOLT  

I’ve been looking at my role as a scientist or historian and seeing that those activities are in many ways very similar, right? We look for patterns, we find evidence, we come up with some suggestion or hypothesis. And we look for evidence that supports it, and the task of a historian and scientist. While they’re not identical, obviously, they have a lot in common. And as I was listening to your presentation, you know, you have to throw in the arts, into the same mixture of trying to make sense of the world, even if it’s very different methods. Apparently, they do have an awful lot in common. And it’s no surprise, right? We’re all people. We have similar sorts of needs, and wants and desires, basic, basic things that we want to find in our lives and develop in our lives. And it takes very interesting forms. But beneath it all, we’re still trying to make sense of the universe and find our way in it.

RAGHVI BHATIA

Even though the pursuits may be similar or different, and the methods may be similar or different. I think something that’s common across all of these fields is the idea of success or failure. Like I feel like an all across all of these fields. successes and failures are never clear cut. They’re never objective. I think we’re kind of moving away from ideas of objective truths, even in fields of history or science. And, you know, artists have always had their unique definitions of successes and failures aren’t clear gut, they’re not objective. They don’t fit neatly into any of these categories. And I think artists, historians and scientists forever have had on Most like personal or individualized concepts of successes and thrillers that evolve over time. So I guess from you, how do you define success and failure, historically or scientifically?

DR. MARVIN BOLT  

So I follow sports, which may seem like a total digression.  I the last few days, a basketball player from the Milwaukee Bucks went viral because someone asked him: “Well, don’t you consider this season a failure?” And he gave a very eloquent discussion of “success takes time.” What does it mean to succeed? What does it mean to fail? Here, I think we have to really think carefully of what this supposedly binary success failure really means. And we have to think, success In what respect failure In what respect, sometimes you look for a pattern and there isn’t one, or the one that you find isn’t really quite the one that you thought. And I’ll give you an example of this from biology. Alright, so in 1867, someone discovered what a lichen is and it’s a combination of an algae and algae and a fungus. So for 150 years, biologists have been looking at lichens as this symbiosis of two different creatures. Well, in 2016, a homeschooled kid with not much formal training but an incredible wealth of hands-on experience looking at lichens in the forests of Montana discovered, in fact, “Huh! It’s not two creatures, it’s three.” There was an algae and there’s two different kinds of fungi. And it had been stared at by thousands — hundreds of thousands — of scientists and students and they all failed to see that there were three different creatures, three different kinds of things. So in 1867, was this guy a failure for having found this pattern of two? Is suddenly this newcomer on the block a success because he’s found three? Well, again, success and failure: in what way? It takes new eyes to find a new pattern.

RAGHVI BHATIA

For me, in my practice, conceptually and materially, I think it aligns with what you just said. Artists are always working with material, and they’re always working with the will of material. There’s always certain rules that you have to follow when you’re working with the material. Usually, the rules relate to laws of physics. If you’re making a structure, you have to deal with how gravity works. If you’re… even if you’re layering paint, the way different kinds of paints dry, you’re always working with the will of the material or you’re working against it for a specific reason. But the physical properties of material are always there. For me, I think a success is if what you’re doing kind of aligns with your goals. The goals don’t have to be specific to that piece. They can be related to like a broader pursuit of your life or your practice, you know! The failures can serve as learning moments, the failures can serve as moments of inspiration. And they can become successes, but just by virtue of the fact that the failures caused something to happen that align with different goals. You brought up the idea of binaries, and you brought up the idea of pattern. And that’s something that in my practice is kind of… It flows through everything that I do where I think that binaries don’t exist, but it’s more, everything can be everything. If you’re talking about, you know, the idea of successes and failures: a failure can be a success and a success can be a failure. Something that’s ordered and organized. It can be seen as something that can create pattern. If something that’s ordered is restrictive, and something that’s disordered is chaotic, the chaos can create patterns, the chaos is unlimited, the disorder is unlimited. And that’s kind of the foundation of pattern: the infinity, the repetition.

DR. MARVIN BOLT  

Yeah, I think we talked a little bit about the physics of a material and “how can you make it bend to your will?” And sometimes you can bend the will of the material and other times the material bends your will. And in fact, it’s this really subtle choreography. You’re both bending to the will of the other. And at what point does one have a limitation of how far can it go? I see art or science in that way as you’re trying to find order and sometimes you aren’t able to make that happen. And that’s okay.

RAGHVI BHATIA

But I think even when… Even the first scenario that you described where you are trying to impose your will on the material or the material is trying to impose its will on you, I think it’s always more of a conversation. I think it’s never in opposition to each other. It’s always one informing the other, reorienting maybe your goals, reorienting your understanding of the success and failure, and all this kind of creating a pattern in a different way, whether it’s through order or disorder.

DR. MARVIN BOLT  

Whether we’re dealing with people or objects or whatever: if it’s a monologue, instead of a conversation, there’s going to be trouble ahead.

DR MARVIN BOLT

So one of the things as a historian I do is to look at how people in the past have either created or invented or discovered or unleashed some sort of process for which they are known. And in my talk, I looked at an example from about 300 years ago, someone by the name of Tschirnhaus who was involved in looking at glass and ceramics and invented something that we now call Meissen porcelain. And one of my collaborators is looking at reinvestigating and recreating this invention. And I think one of the questions that I get sometimes is “well, why do you spend so much time looking at these old discoveries? I mean, what’s the point? They discovered it, you move on.” aside from just the question of well, it’s interesting in and of itself, to understand what people were doing then. But as I look at it as our collaborators looking at it, we’re also trying to figure out: what actually were they doing? And how did they write about it? How did they describe it? How was it understood? How was it interpreted? And this helps us understand the process of invention and discovery and of sharing, and also sheds light on how these same sorts of inventions are talked about today. How can we better understand how a new technology or a new process can impact us in ways that we might not understand? How do we… I wouldn’t say “control it better”, but how can we be more aware of a new technology and what its impact might be? And that, I think, is an important feature of looking at some of these old discoveries. In this case, that it can also have a really interesting impact on current artistic practice: how can we take this energy intensive practice of glassmaking, and maybe do it in a greener, more stewardly way?

RAGHVI BHATIA 

The way I approach reinvestigating, or recreating historical processes of craft processes, you know, the formation of religion, that’s kind of a historic process that I’m engaging in the recreation of to an extent is, I have kind of a framework that I use to think of recreating processes is and that’s draws from linguistics is the idea of a loan word. So loan words are words that are adopted from a foreign language, and they’re kind of seamlessly incorporated into another language with little to no modification. Loan words exist because of many reasons, not limited to globalization, or migration, or imperialism. But I think this idea of seamlessly incorporating something that you adopt from somewhere else is helpful to the way I think of my work. And I don’t do it with words, but I do it with patterns or the glass bead. I think if it as a loan craft object, and this is kind of a model that the organized religions have. The five world religions that I look at, they all have this aspect in common. They all seamlessly incorporated different aspects from a lot of indigenous religions or folk religions. And they kind of incorporate that into their practice, usually, so that it’s easy to proselytize, yeah. But this is something that they do. But it also… It’s not just related to imperialism, it also does kind of add to the canon. Like there’s this library of information that exists and I think everything that we do, somehow, refers back to that. Like, everything is iterative to some extent. When we talk about the computers, we describe it in terms of anatomy. Like, the CPU is the brain of the computer, you know, the camera is the eyes of the computer. It’s, you know, with AI and stuff, the way the language we’re still using to talk about all new technology is kind of adopting things from either other knowledge disciplines, or previously existing streams of information and seamlessly incorporating it.

DR. MARVIN BOLT

I really enjoy how you how you brought up the loanwords in taking a concept from one context into another one. And sometimes it enriches and enhances and other times you really mangled it, I’m thinking in this case of an example that is brought up often in medicine, or biology, which is Amazonian rainforest knowledge. And the way that I encountered at first way too many years ago, was that there’s this all these intricate relationships or connections between plants and animals. And it was looking at these animals and plants as chemical factories, and how there’s chemical warfare. One plant develops this, an animal develops this in response, and there’s this evolutionary chemical warfare happening. But when you take that, and then import it whole hog into 20th, or 21st century factories, you’re just focusing on the chemical aspect of it. Whereas in the rainforest: it’s about relationships, it’s about connectivity, it’s about networks. And if you miss that, you’ve really missed an important part of what that indigenous knowledge is and how it’s been developed. And by taking it apart and abstracting it, you’ve lost something really valuable and precious. Those connectivities, those contexts are really important — in and of themselves — but also if we’re trying to draw out some moral lesson or transfer of knowledge or whatever it is you want to do with this, you have to have some better contextual understanding because it’s in those contexts that you might actually discover what’s key.

RAGHVI BHATIA 

I think the contexts’ always there. Going back to the idea of loan words: if one country colonizes another country, and then the indigenous or local languages of that country, the colonizers… Like in Indian languages, you see this all the time. There’s so many words that just are kind of lost because native speakers of the language — people who don’t speak any other language — don’t know specific words because they only know those words in English. Everyone in India uses the word “train.” No one uses the words that exist. And the variety! Like over one hundred different languages, no one uses those words. Everyone uses the word “train.” So those words are kind of lost. And there’s a reason those are lost. And that context is always kind of underlying. Like, the context is always there. It’s always in the roots. I think it just depends on different… ways of knowing and being, you know, different areas of thoughts and different schools of thoughts. And in a lot of different schools of thoughts, we’ve kind of been trained to ignore those contexts, especially when the context relates to kind of us or Eurocentric modes of power. You know, it’s like, if I work with a kind of glass that’s produced industrially in North America, and it’s kind of made for — it was developed for the studio glass movement so the different colors are compatible. No one asks me about the context of the material I’m using. Then, if I work with seed beads, everyone’s like, “Oh, wait, why are you working with seed beads? What’s the reason for that? What’s the context of that?” Even with something like, again, painting, if you’re working in oil painting, everyone’s like, “oh, this person is a painter.” But if you’re making your own pigment, and you’re actually trying to bring more of the context, there’s more questions asked of you. Whereas oil painting: “Oh, it’s like, that’s what we do.”

DAN SCHWOERER

There’s only one Bullseye factory. I’m Dan Schwoerer, one of the owners and founders of the company, which we started in 1974. Yeah, the factory really is a mixture of everything from 17th century glassmaking processes to 21st century electronic controls. But the basic forming of the glass is done the way it was done hundreds of years ago by simply ladeling a gob of glass onto a rolling mill and rolling it into a sheet. So that hand individual attention is what really makes our glass what it is. It’s not machine-made. It’s hand-crafted.

EMILY LEACH

Bullseye’s mission involves learning as much as possible about kiln-glass and then giving that knowledge away for the empowerment of artists and makers everywhere. Artist residencies at Bullseye Resource Centers and their Portland factory have afforded the opportunity to collaborate, experiment, ask questions, and push the boundaries of the material.

Check out the Learning section on bullseyeglass.com to study an extensive archive of videos and articles about kiln-glass techniques and processes. To learn more about Bullseye Glass, visit their website: bullseyeglass.com.

RAGHVI BHATIA

Speaking of, you know, context that we can disregard, sometimes can you talk a little bit more about the history of the telescope outside of the US and what happened when the telescope was introduced to other cultures and communities.

RAGHVI BHATIA

And another way where the idea of kind of reinvestigating or repurposing historical processes enters my practice is through the idea of mimicry or repetition. Mimicry is inherently related to repetition. Repetition is related to ritual, and ritual is related to ideas of like a liminal space. Liminal spaces and ritual are definitely intertwined. And, I mean, liminal spaces are seen, as you know, as particularly conducive to ritual practices. The way I define liminal space would be a sort of ambiguous state between a ritual between a rite before some sort of passage. When you have kind of let go of the identity or the status you had before you started that passage or that rite, or that ritual, where you haven’t fully transitioned to the next state. They exist between two states, they exist as a threshold, maybe between inside and outside, between night and day, between different transformative experience. They’re they’re always a passage between one state to another. And I think it’s a really interesting way to think about glass as a liminal space or manifestation of the material of glass as a threshold. I think glass inherently is almost a manifestation of a lot of these dichotomies, whether it’s, you know, looking at versus looking through, public vs. private.

DR. MARVIN BOLT

Glass is a perfect illustration and manifestation of what you’re talking about, because glass starts off with grains of sand, or rocks have different material and minerals. And then with heat, they’re melted together into this liquid. And then there’s this really subtle dance that happens is this liquid becomes a solid. And glass is sometimes considered to be a liquid, sometimes it’s thought to be a solid. In some cases, people have said: “well, it’s another state of matter.” And these are some of the leading glass theorists who disagree with each other on on what exactly this is. And the answer, of course, is “yeah, it’s all of these and none of them, because the categories that we think of don’t quite really work for this in between this.” Right? It’s this frozen liquid which has a very, very slow movement to it on the order of time that’s greater than the history of the universe. But it sort of flows at that level of time. Well, this is a perfect material, then, for illustrating the sorts of transitions that you’re talking about and capturing the not quite this and not quite that-ness. A moment ago, we were talking about mimicry and imitating. And the idea of mimicry in glass history goes back to the very beginning, right, where we’re making glass look like something else. It has similarities in some ways, it has differences in other ways. And the the contemporary engineering and technology of imitating nature really is a powerful one. It’s using solutions that already been found, and then applying them in slightly different contexts, whether it’s birds, giving rise to fighter jet designs or there’s a new tape called “gecko tape”, which uses the way the little gecko feet are suction cups. It’s one thing but it’s also another. It’s not quite this, and it’s not quite that, but it’s a combination of those things. Krista Israel is a glass artist who is throwing ceramic pots with clay and frit, right? It’s a whole new genre because it’s not quite this, it’s not quite that, but it’s a combination. And you can do things now that you couldn’t do otherwise with either ceramics or with glass. But it’s a way of doing both.

RAGHVI BHATIA

For me personally, this idea of inbetween-ness and this importance placed on inbetween-ness is central to my practice. When you take away your point of origin and your destination, and they’re stuck kind of in “the in-between”, I think it kind of foregrounds your own agency. It brings together your thoughts and brings together your experiences. It, to an extent, dissolves some markers of identity or categories that are easily accessible or more easily accessible. And it can be disorienting but I think it’s kind of central to the possibility of new patterns, of new perspectives. A lot of people have kind of written about liminal spaces and liminality say that liminal spaces must eventually dissolve and you need the structures and the hierarchies of society for liminal spaces to exist. But, I think, if the liminal space is this kind of space or state of intensity, I think I’m interested in what happens if that kind of becomes the structure. The structure is no structure, you know? The structure is disorientation. And that disorientation can lead to pattern.

DR. MARVIN BOLT

I think you’re describing sort of the history of art and music post-1900, right? You have these classical structures, and then all of a sudden, you get these, these atonal… Schoenberg and whatnot… I confess: my daughter is a professional cellist. And we always debate whether or not certain pieces that she plays in orchestras, what makes this apparently, a tonal, more random kind of music better than when I’m just sitting around creating noise. And, as you say, there’s pattern there that unless you have some training is really hard to understand. It’s hard to understand the genius of some of this music because you’re not attuned to the kinds of conversations that it’s having with itself and with other other works that have gone before it. And that’s true with the visual arts, as well. So your comment about breaking out of a particular set of rules, and creating new ones: there’s always going to be resistance, because we know what those previous rules and setups are, and we’re comfortable with them. And all of a sudden, the rules aren’t there anymore. How do you make sense of it? And not to go too politically but, you know, we’re seeing that in all sorts of different aspects in current political life, you know. What are the categories of this? Well, we’re learning that those categories don’t really embrace everybody. And it’s threatening, it’s scary. And yet, it’s important that we understand that we’ve done this before, many, many times. Relax. The world’s not falling apart. But our categories: they aren’t always adequate. And we have to realize how to do that effectively, politely, and in a way that’s functional rather than dysfunctional.

RAGHVI BHATIA 

And I think while keeping a sort of radical uncertainty of knowledge, you know, that at the core of all of these things that there is no objective truths. It’s not that the idea of truth isn’t a fixed concept, it kind of the idea of truth constantly changes based on your political or social or cultural or economic position in the world. All of these aspects of you are inseparable from your ideas of truth, or the meaning you’re making, or the art you’re making.

DR. MARVIN BOLT  

Now, I think, I think the idea of, of our values and realities, having so much connection to local context is a really, really disturbing one. And I think is one of the most fundamental aspects of being a historian is recognizing to what extent the way we see the world is contextual. I’m still a bit of a Platonist in that I still think there are some things that are sacrosanct, but that’s taking a beating lately. Let’s just suppose that there is objective reality in some traditional standard sense. The way we understand those objective realities is so culturally and context-dependent that it requires us to have a little bit more humility about what those objective realities might be. And that is where I think the artist has a valuable special and key role. Because it can be so explicit, you know, in a work of art, whether it’s visual or audio, that the way this artist sees the world is not the way I see it, for me… it can be frustrating, it can be disturbing, but it also can be liberating, because it’s so visceral when an artist creates something that is disorienting or is insightful and often it’s same time that it is such an obvious reminder that there are different ways of seeing the world.

RAGHVI BHATIA  

I think there’s kind of a prevailing belief that a lot of people in STEM are intimidated or discouraged because they believe that art is an innate talent, as opposed to something that can be actively developed. Do you have any thoughts on this mindset?

DR. MARVIN BOLT  

I feel that myself. I have felt that since I was a child, because my cousins were brilliant artists and I could never even color in the lines, much less create the sorts of things that they did. So I have felt this my entire life. There’s something about these artistic people that, you know, they’re just a different breed, they’ve got the genes to do this, they’ve got the inevitability. And there’s certainly some aspect to that, right? I’ll never be an Olympic athlete. And not just because I’m too old to be one, but because that’s just not something that I was blessed with certain physical processes. But I’ll continue the sports analogy just just a little bit more. For example, someone like Michael Jordan, or Steph Curry, or Connor McDavid in Hockey, or Shohei Ohtani in baseball: I mean, these people are otherworldly, transcendent, ridiculously capable, you know, quantum levels above the rest. And what we don’t see is the incredible amount of work that they’ve put into this. I mean, they’re certainly the best at what they do. But they also work far harder than most of us. I had a student ask me a couple of years ago, how long did it take you to write this museum label? And I said, “Well, I hate to tell you, because that took me about 15-20 minutes.” And they said: “I worked on this for hours.” And I said, “Well, yeah, it took me 15 minutes and 15 years, because you’ve put all that time into it.” So while the STEM student, and I’ll just say, let’s say it’s a physicist or an astronomer, they’ve taken three or four years of high school math, a year of physics. In college, they’ve taken half a dozen math courses, a dozen physics and astronomy courses in grad school, they’ve taken another dozen courses. And for each of these courses, they’ve spent tens, if not hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours in laboratories. Now, while you were in your physics lab, the artist was in their lab, working with materials. So there are certainly some aspects of, you know, some people are never going to be a physicist or an astronomer, some people aren’t going to be an artist. But for the rest of us in between, we’ve decided that this activity is something we want to put our time and effort into. And we are developing those skills and talents. So demystifying that there is something unattainable is an important part in, in our understanding of both scientists, artists, or any discipline. That’s not to say that there is no innate ability, anywhere, but there is an awful lot of time, effort, talent training, free time thinking. Do I think about how to mix oil paints in my spare time? Sadly, no. But do I read up on random articles about lichens in the Montana forest? Yeah, that’s what I do, because that’s the sort of thing I’m interested in. So I would say that one has to have a better understanding of their own expertise and the amount of time and effort they put into their own expertise, to realize that that’s what other people are doing as well to develop their capacities.

RAGHVI BHATIA  

I agree with you. And I would take it a little further and say that I don’t think there’s an innate ability. I think there’s innate characteristics that we all have, you know, based on genetics or culture, you know, nature nurture. So I think we all have innate characteristics that inform the choices we make that inform what we’re doing and what we’re good at. I think it’s, you know, if I had been training in a sport since like: do I think I could have been an Olympic athlete? At this point, probably not because I spent all of the time trying to be an artist, but I think it’s… to take it a step even further. There’s… I don’t want to say “what is art?”, but I think there’s artistic gestures. There’s artistic gestures and I think, a lot of the time, people in other fields are doing the same gestures. They may call it art, they may not call it art, sometimes there’s people in the field of art who are doing art, but people may call it like physics, you know, in another field. Like there’s so many artists who are actively working to kind of create new materials, like the person who’s working with ceramic and frit, you know? It’s kind of like… if someone does it in a science lab and measures, you know, that measures what artists can feel like when they’re working with materials, you’ll call it, you’ll call it something else. But if someone’s, like, feeling it and kind of recording their findings in the same way, you call it art, I think, I mean, I think there’s more parallels to both of these and like to all of these fields than we think. And it’s just, again — because of so many reasons — some kinds of some fields of knowledge are discounted more. Like if you think of the way scientists, material scientists specifically, work with material. And the way craftspeople work with material. Craftspeople may not talk about it in the same way, but they still have this embodied knowledge that they know about the material as much as a scientist like a craftsperson. There were scientists who were thinking for the longest time that glass moves, that’s why the stained glass windows glass is thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top because glass is always moving. But if you talk to craftspeople, well, if you talk to a craftsperson, they can tell you that when they made the panel glass, part of it was thicker on one side, part of it was thinner on the other side and structurally, it made more sense to have the thicker part at the bottom to provide more stability. So I think a lot of the time the pursuits are the same, the knowledge that they have is the same but it’s — just like I said earlier — speaking different languages.

DR. MARVIN BOLT  

There’s growing awareness in the history of science, at least, that knowledge is embodied in the activity of producing things. And that is a kind of knowledge that’s been sort of dismissed in the past. But just how important that is, is finally being recognized. I just wanted to come back to something you had mentioned about the distinction of innate ability or innate characteristics, I think that’s a helpful distinction. Again, I’m still a Platonist that I think they’re you know, there’s still some… some of that going on. But I also want to pick up on the contextual aspect, because I have a personal story of this that really hit me. Our son was diagnosed with cancer some years ago, and was being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York. And for various reasons, he was an adult and married, but it was pediatric cancer. So fortunately, we were able to get him housed in the Ronald McDonald House. And what was so fascinating, this was a United Nations of kids from literally around the world. And looking at how parents from different countries raised their children was absolutely eye opening. And the one example that really just jumped out at me, and again — I apologize if this seems stereotypical — but a Chinese mother and her child were playing and they both had a ping pong paddle and a ping pong ball. And that’s what they were playing. And it jumped out at me because I could remember playing with my son years earlier, and we weren’t doing that with ping pong paddles. We were using miniature hockey sticks and pucks. You have similar notions, playing with your kids, but you pick up the culturally dominant sport and that’s how you engage. And it was… It was just striking. I never would have thought about giving my two year old kid a ping pong battle and playing with a ping pong ball. I mean, that was just not something that I would have done. So as my kids were getting older, their innate ability or innate characteristic, which is probably a better term, that would have found an expression playing hockey and that’s why my kids play hockey. This is also how we encourage our scientific or our artistic pursuits. What is happening in that family setting or that community setting? What sorts of activities and approaches are being cultivated? And so, when I see what you’re doing, I’m really curious what happened In your own background, that motivated you, inspired you, guided you, just sort of suggested that this was the way you were going to express your ideas and yourself?

RAGHVI BHATIA  

I’m gonna focus on the example of ping pong for a second to answer that question. You basically brought up the whole idea of nature versus nurture. And there’s… there’s a genetic makeup of people, which has something to do with their innate abilities, you know, like, everyone’s brains work differently because of the chemicals in their brain. So there’s that part of it. And then there’s the culture and the socio socio economic setting and the political setting that you grew up in that informs you. And it’s your family’s setting, but it’s, so you can say that, Oh, a Chinese family was playing ping pong. But, again, we’re not questioning why the Chinese family was playing ping pong in the beginning, in the beginning, you know, you said it might be stereotypical, but why is this sport that originated in Victorian England, associated with China? Again, going back to kind of how much of the cultural context you engage in? And I think, for me, religion is everywhere. I think a lot of the times in my practice, I place myself, you know, again, talking about the idea of inbetweeners inside the religion outside the religion as someone who’s part of it, making it as someone who’s an outsider looking in, you know, I always get asked this question about whether people can join, or if I have followers, or if I’m interested in the idea of having followers, because if I have followers of this religion, then they will also have this kind of inside approach. But I think it’s not about my religion, specifically. I think everyone has that inside approach, because I think, like we all have an insider’s perspective, because all of our lives have been shaped so much by organized religion, and the framework of organized religion. People can engage with it in capacities, people can reject it, people can believe it, people can not believe it, you know, there’s tears and there’s atheists, but I think we’re all religious, whether theists or atheists. So I think I don’t… I actively disregard my personal experiences, a lot of the time. I grew up as a Hindu, I still am Hindu. And if have to check a checkbox on the forms, that’s the box that I check, because that’s the truth. I celebrate the festivals. Yeah, so that’s, that’s my cultural history growing up. I think that I do actually reject it because I think what I’m more interested in is the framework of the religion, not necessarily specific beliefs, or my specific experiences, or my favorite festivals, or my favorite celebrations, or rituals, or my least favorite rituals, the things that I don’t like about the religion that I grew up in, I think all of us, all of us have to engage with religion. And I think it’s one of those contexts that we just kind of we forget to talk about, we ignore the context of the context. And so I think in that way, it’s, I’m an insider and everyone’s an insight into my religion, and my religion specifically is about my experiences as much as it is about yours.

DR. MARVIN BOLT

Thank you. I’m curious how how glass became the, the material manifestation that you you work with. I mean, I think I can see from previous parts of our discussion where this might go. But I’m curious as to how how glass became the expression.

RAGHVI BHATIA 

In making the tenets of my religion, I draw from things that are common across the five world religions. So if I’m interested in something, but it’s not common across the five, I tend not to use it. And the reason for that is because of what I just said, I don’t want it to be mine. I don’t want it to be yours. I want it to be a collective kind of insider approach because no matter where you live, your life has been influenced by one of these five world religions. You know, the one of these specifically five, anthropologists kind of are more loose about what they consider to be the world religions, but you know, you could be in Iran and practice the behind faith, but Islam will influence your religion, you could be practicing indigenous religion in South Asia and Hinduism and Buddhism will influence your religion, you could be an indigenous person in North America and Christianity will influence your religion and your life. Something that’s common across all these five world religions is the idea of purity and light, symbolizing purity. And in the context of glass, there’s a lot of artists that have called Glass the material manifestation of light. So that’s how I started working with glass. But the more I worked with it, you know, thinking of it as a threshold, thinking of it as a material manifestation of the liminal space, or The Inbetweeners that I’m interested in. So glass, skin and water are the three main reified deities already is of the religion, and they all kind of exist as liminal materials. That’s how that’s how glass came into the picture.

MARK BOLICK

Welcome back to the HIS Glassworks Cold Shop. We often get a question of: “What’s the best process for my glass?” “Where should I start?” “What’s the best grit to start with?” “What’s the best progression to take from a rough grind to a final polish?” Now the faster diamond diss go, the more efficient they are. They’ll grind things faster, and they’ll work faster. If you’re not used to a diamond disk yet, you may want to slow it down a little. So, let’s give this a try. (sounds of disk grinding) Now, that worked down pretty quickly. As a start, this is great! It didn’t take long, it flattened out the surface evenly.

EMILY LEACH

Working with HIS Glassworks means working with experienced and knowledgeable glass artists. Their team has well over three decades of coldworking experience.

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DR. MARVIN BOLT

So a little background, then, on the history of astronomy, and I’ll try to resist the temptation to talk about this too long. But that was one of my former academic lives is history of astronomy. And what you find is just about every culture that we know of, around the world, and throughout time, has looked to the sky for border cycles that are predictable. The migrating patterns of birds or mammals is more or less predictable. But the predictability of the sun rising and setting, you know, the moon’s orbit, and of the stars appearance in the sky at different times the year, those are, well they’re run like clockwork, or clockwork runs like the sky. And so there’s a, there’s a natural way to tie into those regular cycles and patterns. And we find that in, in every culture, and so you have different ways of incorporating that into communal beliefs, or the organization of society or even the buildings that are made. And so you have this really intricate connection between the the life customs and rituals of a society and the cycles of the heavens. And for most of those, in fact, almost all but Western European cultures, the telescope makes very little difference, because it doesn’t really shed a lot of light on those cycles and patterns, other than really, really subtle ones that don’t really matter, for most aspects of life. So when people are in different parts of the world, you’re looking at planetary positions, for example, with the wandering stars, and you find some cycles and patterns, you might connect them to meteorological cycles, like monsoon seasons, or dry periods, or whatever. And for that, the telescope is a very little help. So it’s only when you’re talking about extremely subtle things like mountains on the moon, or phases of Venus, or sunspots, that’s when the telescope actually plays some role. So one of the famous examples is, is China because astronomy in China has been recorded and written down for well over 2000 years, there are even older observations in in China, for example, you have two purposes for astronomy, one is a calendar. And every empire every emperor, sets his best scholars to work trying to improve the previous one. Because if your calendar is really in sync with the cycles, this is seen as the mandate to rule the heavenly mandate. And as part of the legitimacy of an imperial rule, highly important. The other aspect is if you know what cycles are regular, then you know which events are unusual. And again in Chinese astronomy, it’s those unusual events, whether it’s eclipses or supernovas or other things that are happening. They’re recorded because they’re breaks with patterns, something something difficult, something awkward, something dangerous might be happening. And so you have your, your smartest minds, making sure that you know what the irregular patterns are and what the unusual ones are. And then how do you interpret it? And how do you take preventative action, the telescope doesn’t really do much help for it. So it really wasn’t much of a tool for astronomical purposes in many parts of the world. It was, however, useful for spying on people. And so one of the discussions in China of the telescope is that you will not look upon someone of a higher social standing with a telescope, you may not spy on them. And so it’s in folded into a context where the use of the instrument isn’t for what we might think of it as astronomical purposes. But it’s for human relationships. It’s, it’s a lot more subtle, and I think, a lot more interesting as to what these tools are used for in different contexts.

RAGHVI BHATIA

And I think it all kind of for me, it’s it’s it’s selfishly related to my interests, but I think it all kind of goes back to the role of the interpreter, you know, like, how are you interpreting these irregular astronomical occurrence? How are you interpreting the cycles that exist in celestial bodies to create your own calendar, like, I’ve been creating my own calendar for my religion, and it also draws from the celestial bodies and celestial movements with the way I interpret those movements is different, all religions across the world that have their own religious calendars, but they’re all kind of sometimes they align closely, but they’re all kind of off. Because even if they’re looking at lunar cycles, the way they’re interpreting these lunar cycles to create their own calendar is slightly different. And ending for me, the part of it, where I’m interested in is where there’s the gap, where you can’t reconcile celestial movements and how we have conceptualized time, like, I didn’t know, until I was doing this research to create my own calendar that I always thought a leap years, every four years, a leap years, every four years with every 100 tear, you don’t have a leap year to kind of reconcile that difference between how the sun moves, and how the Earth moves, and how we have set up dates and years.

DR. MARVIN BOLT

I’m not as familiar with Buddhist calendar or Hindu calendars, for contingent historical reasons, but I think if even if we look at the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, you find some very interesting similarities and differences. And you alluded to the lunar cycle and the solar cycle don’t align, there’s an 11-day variation between 12 lunar months and the solar year. Well, you’d think maybe, that three religions that have pretty much in common and have a lot of sacred texts in common, might have similar ways of reconciling those. And it turns out, they have completely different ways of doing this. The Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar. It’s a lunar solar calendar. And it borrows a tradition from the ancient Babylonians to make them in sync. So every seven out of 19 years, an extra month is thrown in to make them go in sync. The Christian calendar just tosses off thelunar months and goes with the solar year. Well, not exactly because the most important events of the year are kind of shoehorned in Christmas is on a fixed date. So we don’t worry about that one. But Easter well, that has to be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Well, that’s going back to the Jewish calendar, which goes back to the Babylonian exile many, many, many centuries earlier. The Islamic calendar, I think there’s an element to which it’s like, that’s really complicated. That’s crazy. Well, let’s keep it simple. We’re just gonna go tie our religious calendar to the lunar calendar and it ignores the solar calendar for Ramadan. So Ramadan, moves up into year, 11 days and over 30 some years, it sort of comes back to the beginning. So here you have three, three major world religions, all the Abrahamic, monotheistic traditions, and they do things very differently. So how much more do other religious movements Facts, they common date, to the different ways of synchronizing these calendars in interesting, unique and culturally specific ways. And I find that really, really interesting not only for that sake, but the fact that the days of the week also incorporate some of these same lunar cycles in different languages.

RAGHVI BHATIA

Without going into this too much more, because I think we have a lot of research that overlaps in this in different languages. But I think for me, where I come back to is kind of the disorientation that is caused by being in the space of lunar or solar, or, you know, another planet or seasonal, there is a predictability to how the moon’s going to revolve around the earth. And there’s a predictability to have that birth is going to revolve around the sun, and how the Earth rotates. But now you throw human activity into the midst, and you throw climate changes into the midst. And all of a sudden, it’s May in Los Angeles, and I’m cold every day, and it won’t stop ruining. I think it’s kind of you know, even when we’re looking at these predictable systems, there’s this element of chaos that’s thrown in, that kind of creates new patterns.

DR. MARVIN BOLT

I think that’s a really interesting point. The order that was found or imposed, doesn’t always hang on, for example, the seasons, you can define them by astronomy, equinoxes, and solstices, but they don’t really line up with meteorological seasons. And those meteorological seasons are changing as we speak. So how do you keep them in sync? How do you keep them from falling completely out of a connection with the traditional seasons? Going back to the days of the week, right, we have the sun’s day, we have the moon’s day, Tuesday, well, if you go into the Romance languages, it’s Mars’s day, Wednesday is Mercury’s day, Thursday, it’s a Jupiter’s day. Friday is Venus’s day. And if you go into Latin, French, Spanish, you find those names, still holding sway. In fact, if you go into Japanese, you actually also have that for the seven day week. So there are these relics of how do we keep track of different hours of the day? How do we keep track of days of the week, these all go back to some moment in time where we found a pattern or we tried to find order impose order on the world. And then when you go into a different context, the names like you said the loan words keep on but the context the connection is, is lost. And we’re surprised sometimes when we find those connections, and other times they’re just relics. They’re They’re sort of like the appendix, although we now know the appendix also has a function. So sometimes the connections are obvious. Sometimes they’re not sometimes they’re there. They just don’t know what those connections are. But I think you’ve you’ve tapped into a very interesting question about calendars, that maybe there is a newer kind of calendar to be developed, because we also know post pandemic, that the five day work week, you know, that’s really not very efficient. As it turns out, we know there’s a better way to do things. So are we going to have two day weekends, three day weekends? What are we going to do with this as the world changes as our understanding of work habits changes, how our calendar is going to evolve as we understand how to do things in a more human centered way and practically, as weather and other conditions, kind of, if not dictate at least strongly indicate that we need to do things differently.

RAGHVI BHATIA

That’s so interesting, because in Hindi, the days of the week also correspond to the planets and Wednesdays also Mercury’s day and Tuesday’s also Mars is days. That’s interesting. That’s cross continentally. There’s all these parallels. But for me, like again, the next question after that is that we’ve always conceptualized In the solar system, or the important astronomical bodies as more than seven, Louisa kind of have seven days. So it there’s always these kind of arbitrary systems that are set up because of a variety of different reasons. But everything is kind of legitimized by looking at different scales. And thinking back to in your talk, you brought up the, the telescope, I forget which specific telescope it was. But it was a telescope that wasn’t really functional. And it was meant more to be looked at, than to be looked into or looked through. And so, yeah, I wasn’t doing anything.

DR. MARVIN BOLT 

A telescope originally was a spying tool, right. And then it could also be used as an astronomical device. But it also became sort of a symbol of knowledge of knowing what the world was really like, as opposed to what it appeared to be. And you could have your own Spyglass in your pocket, and you could then have a conversation about the difference between reality versus appearance. And having one of these devices on your shelf was a symbol of, hey, you’re, you’re on top of the newest and latest knowledge. But it can also be something that was itself a work of art, something that’s striking aesthetically. And there, it wasn’t so much that you were knowledgeable, but that you had the power and wealth to hire crafts, people who could do this sort of thing. And so you might make it out of gold or silver, or, in the case of late 17th century, German context, make them out of ivory. And there’s a whole wealth of scholarship on the ivory trade in the 17th century, not only from the colonization aspect, but from working at the lave. This was something that if you were in the nobility, you were expected to have some sort of practical skill and turning at the lathe was one of those hands on legitimizes that you weren’t just some lazy ruler, but you know, you had some practical worth as well, even though of course, they wouldn’t have spent a lot of time. But this was the, this was the hobby that you would pick up and one of the things would be ivory, because well, you’re rich enough that you can afford to mess this up and break it and hey, you another piece, right? Whereas if you’re a regular normal craftsperson, I mean, you wouldn’t be messing with this stuff, because it’s so expensive. So this ivory telescope that I mentioned, of which there are about a dozen examples, this was then seen as not only a symbol of the new knowledge, symbol of crafts, men ship, a symbol of your own skill as a less than humble craftsperson, yourself. There’s all this other social cultural capital that you’re tapping into. And you’re expressing when you have this object on your shelf as something to be looked at, and not just looked through. But that distinction holds also for telescopes in the 20th and 21st century, whether you you know, put them in your window and your apartment in the city and everybody driving past knows that, oh, there’s a there’s a smart person who lives there, right? But we do this with eyeglasses, right? You can buy a cheap pair of eyeglasses, or you can buy your designer specs and everybody can admire and I won’t say the names of these glassmakers, right, but they’re meant to be looked at their status symbols. They are things that ostensibly are to look through. But you can also buy fake spectacles that have no prescription but you still wear them because they are stylish. And to go back to her previous discussion. There’s been discussion of eyeglasses in China that originally or early on. They weren’t prescription or corrective, but they were used as fashion fashionable devices that were available only to elites. There’s been a little more research now that the prescription aspect may have come earlier than we had thought. But there’s still no doubt that this is a status symbol in China as well. So it’s not just a Western European thing, this is sort of a human feature that we want to distinguish ourselves from other people for, for good or for ill. And looking at glass objects is part of a way to express that.

RAGHVI BHATIA

I get asked a lot about the ornamentation in my work. And just the idea of ornamentation in general. And I think it draws a lot from the phenomena that you just described with the utility of the telescope is to look into it or look through it. But that’s almost disregarded, after a certain point, because it’s more for the lenses probably don’t matter as much as the exterior. And the utility is kind of secondary to the status of the object. And I think it’s, again, across all religions, there’s people who kind of want to be they want. sanctified isn’t the right word, but they, I guess, they want more of an importance in the hierarchy of religion. And so they’ll spend all this money to hire craftspeople not do things themselves, but kind of have Gamble’s that they make devoted to a god or themselves or a saint. And that kind of the kind of labor and that kind of object that is made that is to be looked at becomes maybe more important than for the utility of the object or the utility of the temple, or maybe even the tenets of the religion, there are so many people that use donating to religious institutions as a way of like cleansing their money. That’s, that’s a lot less about the tenets of the religion. And it’s so much more about having something that’s looked at, and they do the citizen.

DR. MARVIN BOLT 

There’s a glass artist in South Africa, Lothar Böttcher, who has created his lovely series of work that is, consists of a piece of glass about the size of an iPhone, and in it, he’s crafted this glass to have different lensing properties, different distorting properties, if you will. And so looking through this glass is like looking through an iPhone, but it highlights how looking at the world through an iPhone is is a distortion of reality and how the iPhone looking through it is not just seeing the world, but it is warping the world, it is misconstruing the world, it is just looking at the world. And you can take that even farther by looking at iPhone cases, or iPhone paraphernalia, where it itself has become the art form. Not to be seen with that old antiquated washed up piece of technology that’s, you know, three or four years old. I mean, that’s just, that’s just crazy, right? It’s become an analog in a way of, of those old telescopes or microscopes for that matter, where the the sensible function, that purported function, the advertised function is not only not the only function, it sometimes becomes a minor function. I mean, who talks on an iPhone now? Where’s the phone part of the iPhone? I suspect few people, this is going to be a just a lot of people under the age of 25, or 30, do not talk on their iPhone. And I find that just a very interesting corollary of what a piece of technology starts off being and turns out to be very, very different.

DR. MARVIN BOLT  1:09:14  

So Raghvi, I was really struck in your presentation about doing glass working and practicing spirituality as complementary and overlapping and intersecting and as you were developing those connections, I’m I’m curious about what that looked like and felt like and how, how that just how that process that integration, developed and evolved as you started doing that and how it’s led you to where you are today.

RAGHVI BHATIA  1:09:55  

A few years ago, I found myself at a point where I was kind of wrestling with a lot of the ideas that we’ve been talking about for a while now, kind of concurrently, there was no framework that I was working I was interested in. But I was always interested throughout my investigations, whether it was the process of creating a new language, or whether it was using the glass beads, or the idea of evolution and cleanliness and uncleanness in the idea of the mediator, the intermediary, the translator, across all of these pursuits, and the role that’s played by these intermediaries. And then I was also interested in the ideas of belief in the art world and independently, and in the art world, and independent of the art world. So these were a few things that I was interested in wrestling with and kind of had work going through everything I was doing at the time. You You mentioned how my work has a connection to spirituality, but I actually kind of very concretely, differentiate between religion and spirituality. So I’m interested in religion, but I’m not necessarily, I’m not at all interested in spirituality, and more interested in the framework of organized religion and kind of how that’s become something that’s looked at and not necessarily, you know, looked through or utilized. I guess there’s a variety of things that I could have chosen at the point where I started developing the framework more concretely using aspects from organized religion. I think the way contemporary politics works, or the way the capitalist economy works, it has a lot of these things where there’s a big role played by the intermediary. And the idea of beliefs, I think there’s different frameworks that I could have probably picked. But I picked religion because of how pervasive organized religion has been across the world for so long. Like, it’s one of the oldest forms of these frameworks, I think, something like the capitalist economy, or contemporary politics, there’s they’re significantly newer than organized religion. And then as I was building the framework, like I mentioned, I started using the celestial and the microscopic to kind of legitimize a lot of the things that I was saying, and the role that I was developing for myself as the intermediary of this religion, and picking from a lot of these things that are common across religions, or exist in the physical world and interpreting them

DR. MARVIN BOLT

Something that you said just really struck me as novel. What struck me is: you distinguish between religion and spirituality, but then you took an interesting twist. Because usually what I hear is, “Well, I’m interested in spirituality, but religion I’m not interested in” and you’ve inverted that. 

RAGHVI BHATIA 

I think for me. I tried to focus more on the agency that people have, whether those people are positing themselves as believers or followers of a religion, or whether they’re positing themselves as the mediators or intermediaries are prophets or God, you know. There’s so many instances across the world of people proclaiming that they’re the reincarnation of a specific god, or a specific prophet. So I think I tend to focus more on the relationships between people and between institutions and the role played by people, specifically, the agency that people specifically have, when it comes to carrying out those roles. And I’m interested in the shell basically. I’m interested in the shell that can house spirituality. But I think at this point, more often than not, doesn’t have spirituality. And a lot of the times I think it’s more about the shell. So when I’m talking about my practice and my research, I keep going back to organized religion. I keep saying organized religion over “religion” because I think it’s very different for the way local religions work and the way indigenous religions work, and the way spirituality works, and you know, like new spiritual practices. And so I like to make clear distinction that I’m looking at the shell of the institution of organized religion and not necessarily what could be inside the shell. You know, a lot of the shells you find on the beach: they’re empty inside the shell, but they’re the shells were like… how the shells would house an organism inside them. Doesn’t mean they always do. But there’s the possibility of that.

DR. MARVIN BOLT

So this may or may not seem related. But what struck me in your last comment was the notion of purity, which is also a very fundamental human sociological feature. As I hear you talking about that, you’re really looking closely at the sociology of religion in one sense. And one of those sociological features is that notion of purity. And in glass, purity is a very interesting notion in that the earliest glasses had mixes all sorts of things, right? And that’s why it’s opaque because you have all these little micro crystal forms. And it’s really not until the late 19th century that you get an ability to isolate elements very, very carefully and very clearly that this is in and this is out. And what glass science now is looking at how do those little variations those little additions, though, not impurities… but I guess in a sense of impurities, deviations from the standard recipe. That’s where all the magic happens. That’s where the innovation happens. That’s where the carefully tailored glass for specific purposes. That’s where that comes from. And I have to think if I were a little smarter, that there’d be some really great observation about human society that you know, it’s, it’s the little additions here and there that make the magic happen. So maybe if there’s a listener out there, who was struck by this observation, you can come up with a more articulate way of connecting how engineering glass and engineering society has some interesting features in common that can make both glass better and society better.

EMILY LEACH

If you want to learn more about the last three seasons of GEEX Talks, stay tuned for some closing thoughts from the GEEX Team.

Thanks so much to Raghvi Bhatia and Dr. Marvin Bolt for this thoughtful and far-reaching conversation.

Follow Raghvi @raghvib on Instagram. You can find Dr. Marvin Bolt’s publications on the history of glass on JSTOR and ResearchGate. We’ll have links in the show notes.

The GEEX Talks Q&A is produced by Emily Leach (that’s me!) and Ben Orozco.

Our theme is “Refraction” by Podington Bear, with additional music from Otis McDonald. This episode featured a clip of Giannis Antetokounmpo’s post-game interview from April 2023, along with a performance of Schoenberg’s “String Quartet No. 2” by the musicians from the Ravinia Festival’s Steans Institute.

Thanks so much to GEEX Talks Subscribers for your continued support and engagement! 

Your questions shaped this conversation. They’re available on the show notes on our website, where you can listen to all our episodes and all three seasons of the GEEX Talks lecture series. Make sure to share questions for speakers via email to questions@geex.glass.

Learn more about subscribing to GEEX talks on our website: geex.glass/support.

If you haven’t subscribed to GEEX Talks yet, there’s a three-month public access period  — visit the GEEX Glass YouTube channel to listen and enjoy Raghvi and Marvin’s lectures before they’re archived on June 19 and July 17, 2023.

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The GEEX Talks Q&A Podcast is supported by a Craft Research Fund grant from the Center for Craft. The Craft Research Fund is a visionary program dedicated to supporting scholarly craft research in United States. Center for Craft supports academic and artist researchers, independent scholars, curators, and graduate students writing, revising, and reclaiming the history of craft.

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HELEN LEE

Wow, that’s our third year. You two are hands on the ground producing this content. My role is really moreso running around behind the scenes drumming up the support, which also means that I’m then in greater contact with the people that are consuming this content. And that’s been really valuable to understand how it’s being used, who is seeing it as valuable. What’s the totality of three years of working with different partners to help support this idea and this vision?

BEN OROZCO

This most recent episode with Raghvi Bhatia and Dr. Marvin Bolt has just been really fascinating to be a fly on the wall as we’re working on producing and editing it. The different themes of kinship, migration, antiquity: it starts to paint an even broader narrative of what’s going on in glass right now. And what has happened in glass.

EMILY LEACH

Inviting in researchers: we’ve done that from the beginning with Dr. Jane Cook and with Dr. Chitra Ramalingam. But to be able to have artists and researchers in conversation directly with each other. And to see, again, just like what radically different approaches still share so much in common has been really just exciting and invigorating throughout all three years.

HELEN LEE

I really appreciate the different vectors at which we’re pulling out the boundaries of last history, the holistic approaches of like, its people, and its histories and geographies. And it’s also like disciplinary boundaries. Where are people coming from? Also, where are people going with the glass education?

BEN OROZCO

​​Yeah, for me, it’s q&a discussion, it’s just become so clear how it’s not just glass as a vessel. But it’s glass acting in service of so many ideas, thinking about ways to build communities and craft and looking at migration and seeing how glass was used as like a currency as part of colonization. And then lastly, thinking about glass. With antiquity. There’s so many directions to go in in terms of timekeeping, ornamentation, religiosity and the way that we view our own perspective,

HELEN LEE

In the beginning, in the first two seasons, each artists had a talk. And then each artist had a Q&A. And in the interim, we would solicit questions from the audience to substantiate that Q&A. But here, we’re having the artists and the research talk to one another. And I think it’s interesting for that to come about in year three. On the logistical end, again, it’s worth thinking about how especially the support from Center for Craft really gave us the vantage point to be willing to like take the risk tolerance of let’s try a new format. And let’s think this broadly of building out an entire season under one thematic umbrella. Both of those felt like large stepping stones for us to take. But then also, I think more interesting on the ground as an educators thinking through how the kind of interface with intentionally asynchronous engagement with community has been structured. And I’m interested to see how that continues to like evolve.

EMILY LEACH

One element that has stayed true throughout all iterations that there is a degree of intimacy that I don’t think one necessarily receives in like a more traditional artists talk or Q&A format. There may be a little bit of parasocial relationship in that kind of podcast space of like, “they’re just… they’re talking to me directly!” But at the same time, like, they kind of are. You’re in an effectively private space with two — or more — incredibly excited, enthusiastic lovers of glass, sharing their experiences, sharing where they hope to go. And I think that that, to me, is something that didn’t necessarily feel incredibly accessible — that kind of intimate space — just starting out in glass. And I’m really grateful that we get to be able to offer that to a new generation and offer that to people who have been in those spaces before.

HELEN LEE

I’m just so proud of the season! I think we learned a lot. I think we also, you know, produced a lot of content that really hopefully seeded a lot of good conversations.

BEN OROZCO

It’s always so exciting and affirming to see any questions that we got through to the themes, and thanks to all the schools for implementing this if/when they can. It’s very cool to see how this is like a learning concept.

EMILY LEACH

I think that one thing that a lot of participants might not be able to see in the final products of these Q&As is — whether they’re the seasons one and two or the podcast series — is that questions are so invigorating and exciting to speakers as well. It’s so uncommon for people giving an artist talk or lecture to get questions that are this thoughtful and this in depth. I hope that part of that is because of this asynchronous format, but I also think it’s just kind of the nature of this audience that we’ve been lucky enough to cultivate over the last couple of years. And so I hope that people understand that your investment is also something that is a gift, really, to speakers as well.

HELEN LEE

And I mean, and just the sheer notion of building, you know, like the role of the question and building this, you know, like it’s not insubstantial, the impact that one individual question has on the larger shape of a particular episode or the body of a series and looking back, especially on three years now and actually seeing like, Oh, we’ve actually like built a curriculum. I mean, that’s dropping in sort of like a key word that has a certain degree of cachet in academese but it also like does really shift what one might look to as an archive of thinking through a contemporary approach to last very humbly.

EMILY LEACH

Thanks so much for your support of GEEX Talks in all of its iterations. That’s a wrap on Season Three: Expanded Glass Histories. Stay tuned.

HELEN LEE

Oh my god, three years. (laughing)

BACK TO PODCAST PLAYER

Selected questions from the audience:

• SUCCESS/FAILURE: How do you define success and failure (artistically, scientifically, or historically)? Thinking of glass, do you define success by controlling the will of the material or working with it?
• ‘NEW’ OLD GLASS: Thinking about how both of you are reinvestigating and recreating old processes (i.e. Tschirnhaus’ double lens burning apparatus, Zellige tiling, etc.) What is the impetus or impact of repurposing these methods? What do you hope to learn?
• SHADOWS: How is mimicry related to the idea of a subjective truth of reality? How is this variation connected to the dichotomy of reflecting/absorbing?
• PRACTICE: I have noticed that people in STEM are intimidated or discouraged because of a belief in art as an innate talent versus something that is actively developed. What would you suggest to change this mindset?
• ARTISTIC GROWTH: Have you ever conceptualized your practice as other than a religious sect? What did that look/feel like and how did that thought process evolve over time?
• ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES: Can you speak to alternative histories of the telescope outside of Europe and the U.S.? What was the impact of the telescopes introduction to other cultures and communities?
• LOOKING AT, LOOKING THROUGH, LOOKING INTO: How do you distinguish the ideas of looking at, looking through, and looking into? How does it impact or change the way you see and learn?

Thanks to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for sharing questions!

Theme music by Podington Bear. Additional music in this episode by Otis McDonald.

Edited and produced by Emily Leach and Ben Orozco.