Meet Tiffany Shlain, SHACK15's New Artist-in-Residence

Honored by Newsweek as one of the women “Shaping the 21st Century, Tiffany Shlain is an artist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, founder of the Webby Awards and author of the national bestseller 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week, winner of the Marshall McLuhan Outstanding Book Award. The Museum of Modern Art in New York premiered her one-woman cinema experience Dear Human. Tiffany has received over 80 awards and distinctions for her work including being selected for the Albert Einstein Foundation’s Genius: 100 Visions of the Future and NPR named her UC Berkeley address on its list of best commencement speeches. Her films have premiered at top festivals including Sundance and were selected by The U.S. State Department to represent America around the world. Her films and talks have been viewed over 50 million times across platforms. She is currently working on a new body of visual work that explores different perspectives on humanity and nature for a Fall 2022 exhibit at SHACK15.

SHACK15: Tell us about the artwork you are doing as part of your artist-in-residency?

Shlain: Before Covid, I had been working with my team on a new type of experience I call “Spoken Cinema”: a “live film” about the history of the internet and the relationship between humans and technology. The Museum of Modern Art premiered Dear Human in New York on Feb 15, 2020. The response was super exciting and we planned to take it on tour. Weeks later the whole world shut down. And while the past two years have been an intense and challenging time, the silver lining was that it forced us all to focus on asking the big questions: What’s important? How do I want to live my life? Who do I want to spend my time with? I spent a lot of time at home with my family, or out in nature. I loved the scale of the redwoods, the solitude, the sense of connectedness, and the feeling of humility and awe as part of something larger than oneself.

I started creating sculptures and photographs and an experimental film trying to convey that feeling. I wanted to evoke the effect of our size and scale in nature—our sense of smallness, escape, refuge, realignment, humility, perspective, healing and awe that vast vistas and towering trees that have stood for thousands of years bring. Covid reminded us all that we can’t control everything and that we are part of a much larger narrative of interdependent forces.

I turned my home office into an art studio and soon it was overflowing with objects from nature, tools, sculptures and photographs. Let me tell you, It’s hard to do an “artist-in-residence” program in your own residence. I’m so grateful to be invited here as an artist-in-residence, with the space and beauty of this building and community to unfold these ideas on a bigger canvas.

SHACK15: You have spent most of your career as a filmmaker. What led you to filmmaking as a means to explore the important themes in your creative work?

Shlain: When I was growing up, my family’s temple was the movie theater. It was such a consistent ritual in my life, even after my parents got divorced. Every Sunday night we’d see a film then unpack it over dinner afterward, and really discuss all the important issues of life.

The immersive experience of being in a darkened theater with a packed audience is such a powerful conduit. I love creating films that bring forth important ideas, challenge assumptions, make people laugh and cry and feel. I have always felt that the word “movie” is about creating experiences that “move” you.

SHACK15: What draws you to the themes you explore? From technology to gender to neuroscience, creativity and philosophy?

Shlain: All of these themes are really about exploring what it means to be human, and how to adapt and flourish in today’s world.

Two main passions drive my career: film and technology. When I founded The Webby Awards in my twenties, I made a short film every year to kick off the show to articulate how this technology was changing our lives at that particular moment. I like to ask: What does technology amplify and what does it amputate? When should we turn it on, and when should we turn it off?

My films about neuroscience and psychology come from my upbringing. My father was a surgeon who operated on and wrote about the brain, and my mother went back to school to get her PhD in psychology when I was young. Growing up learning so much from them let me see how much of the human experience is shaped by our brains. In my work I love creating metaphors and visuals to make neuroscience and psychology accessible and entertaining to hopefully help evolve your understanding on being human.

In terms of my films about gender and power, I feel very lucky to have grown up at a particular moment in history where I never questioned that I could be anything. It was just my mother’s generation that was told to marry well and not focus on a career. Watching her break free from that mold and go back to school to get her PhD had a great influence on me. So many women including my mom widened that narrow path before for me and I want to push the sides out even further for the next generation. It’s my duty to do so.

My identity was also shaped very much by my Jewish heritage. My grandfather escaped from Odessa, Ukraine as a teenager. His father hid him in the back of a hay truck and told him to go to America to raise enough money to bring his family here. He came to America with nothing and no immediate family to support him. Most of his family died in the pogroms and the Holocaust. It is a painful history (and the horrible situation happening right now is making me think of it all so much) and I am emboldened by his courage, knowing I had so many more advantages growing up.

So when I make films about being Jewish or being a woman, I’m not only interested in exploring the topic, but it also feels like it’s my responsibility to share these perspectives.

My films on philosophy or creativity are usually sparked by something I want to understand in a more robust way. I often collaborate with my husband Ken Goldberg, the artist and UC Berkeley professor of robotics. We’ve done art installations together, co-written several scripts and we co-directed several episodes in my original series The Future Starts Here. In Why We Love Robots, we explored the history of artificial creatures and in Robots, Botox and Google Glass, we analyzed the Freudian roots of the Uncanny Valley.

When I pick a new film topic, I feel like I am booking a ticket to a new adventure. I will come out changed on the other side and get to share all that I have learned with audiences. And I always use humor as a way to open people up to ideas.

Most of my films usually come from the perspective of being from outer space looking at this unusual species called humans. My new visual artwork also takes this vantage point.

SHACK15: How has living in San Francisco informed the content of your films and other projects?

Shlain: San Francisco, at the edge of land and ocean, is an ideal environment to look into the future and across horizons and foster forward thinking. I love our history of Beat culture, free speech, love-ins, creating new technologies, openness to people living and loving in a way that feels authentic, and to psychedelics. We are about being open and embracing new ideas and new paradigms. The wide semi-circles of windows at SHACK15 looking out onto the water from the port of the Ferry Building feel like a perfect metaphor for an open mind.

SHACK15: How did you become interested in creating art across different mediums?

Shlain: To me I am exploring the same ideas, just through different ways of communicating. Filmmaking, writing, talks, performances, and visual art are different ways to wrestle, investigate, and explore ideas and they all have unique creative constraints…I love a good creative constraint.

With my films that were made for the movie theater, it’s powerful knowing people are going to watch together in a theater with that kind of focus and shared experience. It’s also interesting (and a different kind of challenge) to make a short film you know someone is going to watch online or on their phone and all the distractions that surround that experience.

Film Still from Tiffany’s film *The Adaptable Mind*

With producing and directing The Webby Awards live shows it was about both honoring and commenting on possibility and hubris of the early days of this new medium of the web through many different mediums: films, working with dance troupes, installation artists, performers. As a creative constraint, we made winners keep their acceptance speeches to five words. Always my favorite part of the show.

With my talks and performances, I also get to employ my physical presence and my voice to communicate along with my images on the screen behind me. They say that when you are hearing someone speak, you get information from 50% of what they say, and the other 50% from their body language. I’ve been experimenting on how to make something engaging on Zoom—it’s not easy but when it works, it can be very dynamic.

With my recent book, I wanted to share a practice my family (Ken and our two daughters Odessa, 18, and Blooma, 12) had done for over a decade that had transformed our lives. Drawing from the ancient ritual of Shabbat, a day of rest, we updated it for our modern times by going off all screens one day a week. We call it Tech Shabbat and it’s a simple idea that helps recenter and replenish each week. While I had explored this idea in my short films and my feature documentary Connected, I wanted to go deep on the research, history, neuroscience and how we got to where we are with screen addiction and a simple strategy on how to move forward in today’s 24/7 world. So I ended up writing 24/6: Giving Up Screens One Day a Week to Get Back More Time Creativity and Connection. I truly enjoyed the creative constraint of only having words to create the experience… and reading is such a much more intimate experience that someone can do on their own over a period of time.

With my new visual art, I love the tactility of creating physical sculptures and large scale photographs. In a film, depending on the length of a project, I have 80 minutes or 20 minutes or 5 minutes to communicate an idea and leave you with a feeling. When I am creating a sculpture or a photograph, I am aiming to get to that idea or feeling much more quickly, in a single image or piece.

I’ll be creating NFTs to go along with my new visual art. The whole crypto/NFT world feels like the early days of the Webbys with Web 1.0 when a lot of things are being created and figured out and there aren’t a lot of roadmaps. Those are always my favorite periods. I’m excited by the new creative constraints and the potential for artists in this web 3.0 world, especially when the environmental impact aspect improves.

SHACK15: In addition to your new visual art work, are you doing any film work?

Shlain: I am working with companies with my team at Let it Ripple Film Studio on a new program called The Future of Work + Wellbeing: Creating a Flourishing Hybrid/Remote Workplace. As the New York Times brilliantly put it, “we are coming out of a two year 50 million person experiment of changing how we work.” Among many things, it showed that the mentality of one size fits all, and five days a week at the office is not the best model anymore.

I present a series of cinematic interactive talks online with the whole company or teams that look at the history of technology, work/life, as well as the neuroscience on why it’s important to put your mind into different modes and a lot of tactical tools on how to do it. The program aims to establish a thriving post-pandemic work environment. We just did this program with The Clif Bar company and Coca-Cola. One of the themes is that as much as technology helps us work so much (try to think of the pandemic without it) and has blurred the boundaries so you can work from anywhere, it’s important to bring some boundaries back. Like the weekend and moments throughout the day to unplug, go for a walk, get a different perspective.

SHACK15: March is Women's History Month. What story or stories are you trying to tell when you focus on gender and human rights in your work? What can we look forward to in your upcoming screening and discussion on March 29?

Shlain: Women are often told and tell themselves a story of scarcity: we only receive this much funding, we are only this percentage of CEOs, etc. I like to reframe the story of women and power to remember that 10,000 years ago women were worshiped as goddesses. We were high priestesses, lawmakers and shamans.

In one of the films I am showing called 50/50, I travel throughout history to key leaders to tell that story, a story of centuries of courageous women and turn this story of scarcity into one of abundance.

I will be sharing three short films I have made over my career about women and power and women’s rights. I invite men, women, and people of all genders to join us for a screening and discussion about how to create a more equitable world.

And yes, there will be popcorn. I used to say that popcorn was just a conduit for the butter. Now I’m realizing that films are conduits for popcorn.

Events to experience Tiffany’s work at SHACK15 in the Ferry Building, San Francisco

March 29, 2022, 6pm - 7:30pm, Women + Power screening

April 28, 2022, 5:30pm - 6:30pm, Tiffany Shlain & Ken Goldberg will share episodes from their Emmy-nominated series The Future Starts Here

October 26, 2022, 5:30pm - 7:00 pm, Artist Talk

November 2, 2022, 6pm - 9pm, Opening Reception: Human Nature

December 6, 2022, Artist Tour & Discussion

December 10, 2022, Public Tour of Human Nature

To find out more about Tiffany’s work, her films, talks, art & monthly newsletter-> tiffanyshlain.com and follow on IG, and TW