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- Hi everyone, welcome to
the Cooking Show today.

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- Thank you so much for joining me.

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We'll be building, we'll be cooking,

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and we'll be having a great time.

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When I started making videos,

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I was just watching on
my downtime on YouTube,

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a lot of aspirational
media like cooking shows

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and music videos and home improvement TV.

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I was playing around with maybe
the formal elements of how

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the material world is shown
inside of these things

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that are halfway advertising
and halfway instructional.

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- Then I started to really
think about the hosts

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of these things, the perfection
that is tempered with

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this often sort of fake
or performed vulnerability

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where it seems like certain
things that are probably

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beyond most of our own grasp
could be graspable or held.

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We'll be right back.

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(upbeat music)

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I grew up in central Brooklyn.

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I think I was a pretty
sort of solitary kid.

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I would spend a lot of time
just kind of looking at things,

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surfaces and the outsides of buildings,

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sort of making up stories for myself.

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So this is the house I grew up in.

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We like to take a kind
of laissez-faire approach

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to the front lawn.

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I was doing a lot of things
that would sort of seem like

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art or felt like art
from a pretty young age.

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It was like the space where
the world made sense for me.

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This one is like a Halloween,

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I think I was a dead house wife,

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that's what I said I was that year.

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- Even at this age, she was stubborn,

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she kind of knew what she wanted to do.

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She had her own mind.

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(upbeat music)

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- Early on actually, I had
called myself a painter.

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And I think really what
attracted me to that

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was like paint itself.

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The sort of alchemical magical
way colors came together

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on the surface of a canvas.

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And I realized that like state of becoming

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was what was really exciting to me.

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That's how I started making
video, actually was sort of

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recording myself in the
process of making paintings

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and then remixing that

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or reediting that later on to share

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what I really cared
about with other people.

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(upbeat music)

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And then that evolved into
sculptures and installations

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to sort of house and
recontextualize those moving images.

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(upbeat music)

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Oh look, here's you with
your beautiful face mask.

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- If my kids ask me to
go to the moon with them,

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I'm gonna try to go there.

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You know, I'm learning, she's teaching me.

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And that's what artists
do, they enlighten us

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because they see things
on a subconscious level.

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- I knew that my mom was such a ham.

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I never saw her actually
cooking food in the kitchen

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when we were growing up, but
we had these long mirrors

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in front of the kitchen and
she would do these sort of like

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fake Julia Child's
performances for herself

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and maybe like burn a piece
of toast and then walk away.

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- Today I'll be showing you
my daily clean beauty routine.

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This one is so much fun to use.

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I'm going to show you how to make this.

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- So it felt really natural
to sort of invite her

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into my process in that way.

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- It smells like Cheetos.

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- I do like to kind of
operate in this space

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where the videos at
first look like something

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you're really familiar
with, and then I start to

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insert these uncomfortable things,

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maybe these uncomfortable
truths into a familiar form,

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and then sort of see what happens

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when that friction comes up.

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- I think a lot of these themes

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that I think about like aspiration

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and how we try to seek
control over our lives,

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they come so much to the forefront
in this space of wellness

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and wellness culture.

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And our bodies are obviously
the site where so many

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of these things really play out.

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In 2019, that company, Mirror,
started doing a lot of ads

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on the subway.

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You could have this instructor
beam straight into your room

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and it could look like high-end design

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and they could be kind of coaxing you out

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of whatever into exercising.

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And so I just wanted to try to make my own

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and see what would happen.

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(downbeat music)

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I thought about them kind of
like haunted medicine cabinets.

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Rather than giving you clear instruction

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about how to work out or
what the weather is like,

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they're just as much sort of
asking you for instruction

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or giving confounding advice

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or they're playing CAPTCHA tests

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and maybe wanting you to
help them out with them.

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(downbeat music)

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I called the piece Needy
Machines in that way

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because I thought of these
objects as sort of needy.

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But also wondering within this
space, especially the space

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of the bathroom, if we are
needy machines somehow.

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I think it's also a friction I'm living

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with constantly, right?

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And I think we all are.

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Between the sort of space of
fantasy we want to live in

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and then the truth that we kind of know

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even in an embodied way

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about the instability of everything.

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(downbeat music)