FEBRUARY 2015 AN EXCLUSIVE LOOK INTO
THE INFINITY PROJECT WITH ERIC GORVIN INTERVIEW BY: RACHEL LEONE
February 15, 2015 I was grateful to have had the opportunity to discuss The Infinity Project with Eric Gorvin. As he and the other crewmembers apart of ModSun’s Look Up tour were passing through Scottsdale, Arizona I was enlightened on positive perspectives Eric Gorvin has studied in the past and applies to his life. Not only was I inspired by discussing the process of his ideas and research while creating his book, I was also able to get a better understanding about his relationship with Modsun, artistic design, the cosmos and bettering humanity.
MEET THE AUTHOR
ERIC GORVIN
INTERVIEW & PHOTOGRAPHS BY: RACHEL LEONE
What is your name? My name is Eric Grovin aka Dj That
Where are you from? I am originally from Burnsville, Minnesota and now I live and work out of LA.
What is the title of your book? The Infinity Book. What is it about? It’s about infinity plainly and simply. I go into it in ten different chapters that are all different topics to explore my ideas of infinity and how it relates to the real world.
How long did it take for you to put something like that together? The whole project took me 3 years if you include the 2 years of research preceding me starting the project officially.
Which chapter was the most challenging to write? The chapter about time.
Where did the initial idea stem from? The initial idea stemmed from this really amazing poet, philosopher, and mathematician named Brian Rotman. It was from his book, “Ad Infinitum” and he explains that we don’t talk about infinity it an objective way anymore, we push it off as if it is something completely irrational. Mathematics writes it off and we don’t consider that it is a real force. If you take one-third and reduce it to a decimal it’s .3333333 into infinity. So, when you say one-third of something, it’s irrational. It’s like pi, or the square root of 2. It’s an irrational number. Say I cut a banana into thirds, that’s irrational, but is it? I thought if I can bring this kind of infinity into the real world that effortlessly, it must be real. It turned into something that I felt like I had to share with people.
Did anyone influence you and how? Did Mod Sun influence you and where? Yes, I was influenced heavily by my mentors at school, I had two amazing/ professors, Eric Brandt and Patty Healy McMeans, and then these two roommates Tomás Villaseñor and Andrés Guzmán that were in my art collective, STEAKMOB*, at the time. They really really helped me through the project visually and intellectually and we all worked in the same studio together so ideas bounced freely. They helped me cultivate the language and sort of how I presented it and what it was going to be like. But yeah Mod Sun was on board the whole time and was like, “You have to do this, You have to do this...” you know? And when it came time to really give it to people I was like, “I don’t know how to do this, I don’t how to do this kickstarter and all these videos,” and he was like, “I got you”. He really gave me the support on that side of things and helped me reach people with it.
What is your relationship with Mod Sun? Mod Sun and I grew up together in the south suburbs of Minneapolis. He’s from Bloomington, I’m from Burnsville. We played in two different bands when we were like fourteen to fifteen years old. He was in a band called ‘Sideline Heroes’ I was in a band called ‘The Semester’. We knew each other from the band scene and he quit his band to be in our band because our drummer quit and it was this whole thing. He hit up my buddy Pat and was like, I really want to drum for you guys, just let me hang out and let me jam with you. We were like, okay cool. I think we hung out together once and bonded before that, but then we had this session and it was just all good vibes. I was like, “This is the guy”. At the time he was looking crazy...he’s still lookin’ crazy! He was like sixteen years old, wild black hair, with like a blonde stripe and he’s wearing a scarf, walking in wearing girl’s jeans... wearing Diesel and shit before anyone was on that. I’m like, “Who is this kid!? Who is this wild? Where’d this dude come from?” Pretty much from there on we have been kind of inseparable in a way. It was funny because I went to college for five years but Me and Mod still worked together all the way through it. I started Mod Sun with him from the beginning with “I’ll Buy Myself” “Let Ya Teeth Show” and “How To Make A Mod Sun” . I was in the studio with him, recording, doing all the artwork, doing all the photography basically exactly what I am doing right now but this was like six years ago.
Then I started attending art school in Minneapolis and I was like, I can’t do this any more with you, I can’t go tour. He wanted to tour but I was like, I’m in college that’s not going to work. He said that was cool and we parted ways at that point. But I was still designing for him, we were still in contact, like I said: through the Infinity Project he was there the whole time. He has literally been this recurring human being in my life, I feel cosmically connected with him. He is actually my perfect astrological opposite, oddly enough, our birthdays are exactly six months apart.
What is it like to see your art circulate around the Internet to thousands of people that recognize it through Mod Sun? To see my work go out in that regard, for an idea that I believe in, behind people that I love and behind ideas that I believe are pure is so rewarding. I have been in positions ever since I started designing where I am pushed into these contrived situations that I didn’t want to be in, like agencies and doing work with I don’t know...people who didn’t really have soul. I would do a Target billboard or something and be part of that. I helped open a New Balance store in Manhattan, that’s cool right? I can look in there and be like, I did that, I did that, I did that, I did that but no one cares and no one knows. No one has any feeling for that stuff, they don’t care about it, they don’t love it and I am so happy I get to make work that goes out to people that love it and love the idea and Mod Sun and love the entire philosophy. That is so important to me.
What do you do on your free time and what kind of mediums do you use in art? My free time...Ha! On my free time I like to do something that I can fully enjoy and not take myself too seriously. I have been painting my whole life. I’ll paint and literally have no idea, just grab whatever color and put it down and just start. Painting for me has always been this thing that brings me back to understanding. I firmly believe that painting is everything, which is weird to say but it has all these crazy connectors. It can go on and on and on, there is never a point you can say it is done. It is this weird philosophical funny place that you get to put yourself in where it’s like: “Ah shit, I fucked up, I messed it up,” but then I’ll be like, “Ha! No, its just paint, I can paint over it and change the idea and make it my own now”. I was watching one of my mentors draw and said, “Dude, you never make mistakes...” and he was like, “All I make is mistakes!” It’s just the matter of how you work with that. I always remembered that.
In April 2014 I moved out to Los Angeles to live with Mod and JL to start the brain. Before that we were remote; I was doing stuff on the outside, never full time. Mod hit me up one day and said, “come live with me,” I was like, “word, lets do this”. He had written the whole record, it was basically finished. I didn’t do anything on the record until later (However, DJ That played the music for the audiobook of “Did I Ever Wake Up?” ed.) but from that point forward were on the same page artistically. We both knew it was an amazing record, we both knew the album was going to change the world. So how do you present that to people? How do you give them something that is visually stunning that means something but also works with the standards we have. We wanted to have Mod on the cover, we wanted to have art on the cover; we also wanted some sort of consistent element and good photography. It was this sort of a morphing idea and we literally spent every waking hour for three months just shooting ideas back and forth. What inspired the colorful crystals in the "Look Up" album artwork?
We were fascinated with the idea of crystals. They carry really incredible energy; ancient energy and they are beautiful objects. We have a lot of crystals around our house. They have always enchanted us and we wanted to figure out a way to make that a part of our art; incorporate that element. So we conceived an otherworldly place where crystals of positive energies growing all around Mod. To achieve the look we wanted, we could have done it digitally, of course. I could draw all of the crystals in the computer, and do it part photo part digital thing but we didn’t want to. We figured we should make it. Mod is all about making his stuff, if you watch all Mod Sun videos it is borderline DIY at all times. All of our sets are handmade and everything we do is hand painted. We are always selfsufficient and all the videos reflect that in that way. We wanted to retain that idea in our artwork as well. We knew the best way to bring this to life was to create them in this physical form. So I ended up making paper models on my desk of these triangles and these weird oblique foursided crystal-looking things that I was origami-ing. I was just taping stuff together breaking my brain then I found a few that I thought, yes these are great, all we have to do is blow them up to a bigger scale.
I went out and bought a bunch of railroad board, which is like construction paper but heavier duty in all sorts of colors. So I went home and made a bunch of these large-scale paper crystal things. We bought some astroturf because we wanted to make it look surreal and we had the crystal set up which was really powerful and visually striking. Then the bench thing happened. He wanted to be sitting on a bench. We grew up going to this bench in Bloomington all the time so it was another really powerful thing. The bench permeated the rest of Look Up. We use the bench on stage and in every aspect that we can. That bench in particular carries really interesting energy. The idea of where we go to let go and look up... or be alone in the universe for a moment. We would go there and watch the sun the rise. The whole thing is crazy the whole thing is so loaded with meaning. The crystals growing upward coincides with the verbiage “Look Up” and everything is directed in that way. We came into it in this natural way, exploring tons of ideas. I think the folder size of all of the content generated in the idea sessions for the album art is about 100 gigabytes, just a crazy amount of files. “Look Up” was a dream come true for me because I got to utilize all of the things I have ever wanted to utilize in a project. Keep it physical, keep the computer out of it and let it be natural, let it be real. Like I said, when I get to be behind an idea I love, and a special human like Mod Sun who I love and respect... what more can you ask for?
It’s a dream project. It’s a dream situation.
MOD SUN PERFORMANCE AT PUBROCK IN SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA 1.15.15
Where did you go to college? I went to college at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. College isn’t really for everybody and MCAD really pushed me in ways that I couldn’t have been pushed otherwise and made me do stuff I didn’t know I was equipped to do which was really the most positive thing that came out of it.
End of my junior year I dropped out for one semester because I was like, fuck this place. I failed my junior review and that’s a big deal at MCAD because if you fail your junior review that means they won’t actually graduate you with your degree. I failed it on technicality and it was basically because I had Mod Sun artwork in my shit, I was showing all my design stuff, nothing left unincluded. They said to pick ten pieces so I said, “okay I got this, this and this. I got all these screen-printed posters,” I was super into screen-printing and I was so proud of my installation. I had cool books, CD art... fuckin’ awesome, right? And they didn’t know how to take this. I could see it in their eyes like a deer in the headlights it was crazy. Three of my top professors were all just looking at each other and I was like, what in the fuck is going on? They failed me. The head of design comes up to me and said, “I need to talk to you, Eric” and told me I failed but they would let me retake it because it was on technicality.
I was like, “wow thanks so what do you want to see?” they told me, “this, this and this,” I said, fine and passed it. After that I said, “You know what? You guys don’t understand this and that’s messed up. I made really great work and you didn’t respect that.” So, I dropped out for a semester. It set my whole school schedule of graduating off so I basically added another semester. I didn’t want to graduate in the winter just because I just think summer is better for graduation. I ended up only taking senior project which is a six-credit course and usually you take fifteen. I had just the same amount of hours at work so I had all this time.
"It was this really seamless process of research and musical e x p l o r a t i o n . . . "
It let me build The Infinity Project, like I would not have been able to do The Infinity Project had I not been allowed to just spend the next eight hours to create and not worry about what you are going to come up with, just think, just make and experiment relentlessly. It pushed me to make something beautiful that I was super proud of and there was nothing that was rushed about it or unsacred. Everyone in my class was like, “what are you working on?” and I would only say very little. I would never stay there I would always go to my own studio because my studio was amazing. It was dubbed “Da Haunted Attic” and it was this huge thousand square foot attic with a burning wood stove in the middle of it, so beautiful. It was just this gorgeous place with great energy where we could vibe all day. I would just sit up there and play piano, look out the window, write some stuff down and read a bunch of shit. It was this really seamless process of research and musical exploration. My friend Eric Carranza was a huge influence; he was on the music side of things, and was with me through the whole Infinity Project. He really helped with that side of things and keeping me on track.
So, at my last critique, like the last critique ever we were going around critiquing everybody’s senior projects and mine was top-level way in the corner because I needed this crazy space. I also had a projection happening, all these videos that I made for The Infinity Project. It was a sixhour critique and I was in the sixth hour. Everyone was so burnt out from the whole day of critiquing; we got to mine and everyone’s jaws dropped like, “what? What in the? What is this?” It was so funny I was like, “check this out! I made this book, it’s 130 pages with all this crazy stuff I researched for the last two or three years! I recorded this music especially for this and it has themes of infinity within the music.”
Everybody was yawned out from the whole day and I had the most silent critique ever. No one knew what to say, but what do you say? I just gave you a book called The Infinity Book I look crazy. You don’t know what to ask because you’re freaked out. Really I had been working on it before that, not even knowing I was going to be working on it. It was shocking to everybody and my teacher told me I had to publish it. I was like, “I don’t know the first thing about publishing” and she was like, “self-publish it,” I was like, “How do we self publish a book I still don’t get it?” she was like, “Do a Kickstarter”. At the time Kickstarter was poppin off it was c o o l .
Is there anything in the book that you forgot or left out and realized it after it was published? I feel like I curated it perfectly and everything I wanted to be in there, was in there. However, I do wish I had provided more of my own insight. Every chapter I am in there and I am talking but I could have gone into more detail. I left a lot up to the person viewing the book, I didn’t do a lot of leading around which is what would have happened if I were talking through the whole thing. “Oh, this is what I think about this. Check out these things. Look at figures A, B and C. Blah, blah, blah”. I knew I didn’t want really want that. Infinity is something that is almost religion and people can equate it to that. If you have something that is sacred like that, I don’t know... For some reason at the time it didn’t feel right but I wanted to make it beautiful. I wanted to make it like every word you’re hanging on to and every image you’re fascinated by so there was no overkill. In a way I’m happy I didn’t but I think now I want to release a follow up book that is a little hand held book that takes all those chapters maybe do more reflection. That’s really powerful when you speak on something and for me I let the images speak, the poets, the philosophers, the mathematicians and then I spoke. I let a lot of things speak but it was a selfless book...So I think that is the plan, I think a second book maybe... maybe.
When would something like that happen? I think it would probably be within the year. I want to start writing again. I don’t know, I miss that part of it. I mean when this record comes out we might be like out touring like crazy crazy. I think we will be so if I do anything it would actually be on the road and kind of nice. That’s the move.
Would you consider writing on the road?
Yes, I’m writing on the road. Not the one by Jack Kerouac but I am physically on the road writing. Haha but yeah, like you always feel like you could have done something better. There is always something in art if you’re a true artist that you won’t be happy with. With that project I was really happy with it, it was a l l e v i a t i n g . I felt like it was a service that I got to share that with people. Once I was done with it I was so proud of it just like,yes I did it.I did it, I did it, I did it. That’s the best feeling ever. Like I said before with Mod Sun The Infinity Book was a passion project, it was selfless and didn’t have a direct market. There was not specific person that was going to buy it. I’ve had people from every continent buy it. It sold in South Africa, Australia, a lot in Germany, England, I think there was one in Asia somewhere. I can’t remember but you know what I am saying. There are weird people all over the place that just find one thing that they like and give it a shot and order it not even knowing who I am. That’s so cool to me. I have sold technically 250 copies but it’s like I don’t care if I sell that or 250,000. It was the fact I got to do it that is so beautiful. Now it’s rewarding and working with Mod, we get to make these ideas and have a place to put them. The Infinity Project was my personal journey and now I get to be apart of another journey.
How did you create the cover? What inspired that? I did these pencil studies based on a few different philosophers problems with infinity and divisibility. Say how to divide a circle, draw a line down the center, a cross line, a line between those and keep going. I was doing these exercises sort of like, what does happen if you cut it in half? And what if I just go through with this, be a weirdo and really truly see what happens if I cut a line in half, how far is infinity? All these lines together created this beautiful unexpected thing. Then there is the place inside of a place problem too. How can you be inside of a place if it is inside of a place? And isn’t that place inside of a place? Are we just in places of places? Where does it start and where does it stop? It was all with a compass, pencil and ruler that was it. Circle, squeeze the compass a little, then another circle and kept going which created its own thing. The one on the cover is a combination of the two I just explained and the third one was just a circle I tried to draw forever. In my head I said I am going to draw a circle forever. That was apart of the experiment. How far can I go into forever? What does it look like? It ended up being beautiful again. The last one was a simple circle because at the end of the day its all just one thing.
The most unexpected thing about the whole project was I did it, then I just let it go. I let it go be itself. I didn’t try to choke it or try to make it do something it didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to get obsessed with it anymore because it would have been three years of being obsessed with it. It was literally draining me and like I said earlier it was a relief to put it out. This stuff is like haunting me in a way and I had to make sure this goes out into the world does its thing, is its own organism, ideas and culture. I just spent some time away from it just to let myself breathe and to see what people thought of it. Now it is kind of coming back where people like you are getting my book and people I would have never thought were going to get my book. In the last three or four months it has been kind of a resurge. I try to keep it word of mouth because its like my little gem, my little Easter egg. I think that in thirty years people are going be like, “Oh my god, what in the hell, this is crazy, who is this guy?” I think that is my Easter egg; I will go on to do really amazing things. I’ll be known for a lot of other things and that book might be lost in time you never know. It might go away for a few years or ten years like you can’t buy it, it’ll just be out there in the world doing stuff without me, and then someone will come across it. It is so hard to fully take all of it in and no one understands that I did all of it. I made the music; the art and it just doesn’t compute with people that you can do that. It is hard for people to get it right now but some people really understand it and really connect with it. I have a few friends that text me about it daily. It is dense. You can read a paragraph four times and get something different from it every time but that’s the whole idea. It’s a coffee table book at the end of the day. It was designed to be nonlinear. It doesn’t have a story line.There is nothing about the first page relevant to the last page other than the binding fact that all the chapters are about infinity.
I made it like that for a reason. I arranged the chapters in a way that I would want to see them as me. I open it on infinity so lets just talk about infinity and define it off the bat, get it out of the way, talk about who has already talked about it and where it has already existed in culture then on to the next problem. Then onto numbers and problems that occur within numbers like calling numbers, numbers. Where do numbers come from? Is this even a conversation? Is infinity a conversation? Can we say that we didn’t say that 2 is 2? Or is 2 actually abstract and it doesn’t exist? Problems like that. I in my own way stepped the reader through the book to break them in and mold the idea. Then I start throwing weird stuff at them like math. A whole bunch of weird math stuff. I think that even if you don’t like math you can still read it and understand it. I actually have a thesis paper I wrote on the difference between quantum and classical mechanics in the book. That was my big literary piece in it. I break down the difference between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, which are the two branches of scientific research that are coming more together hopefully more or less. Quantum physics says all this is just the matter of just saying that is or could be not; particles have their own mind in a sense. My backpack exists because we all agreed that it existed kind of thing and that’s only theoretically practical so you can’t prove it physically yet you can in a microscope. There are issues that revolve around that. How can we look at the base matter of earth and light?
These things are at the very smallest level so scattered and unpredictable. They do whatever they want. Quantum mechanics says atoms disappear and reappear that’s the thing. They say you can’t say this is real because these things are constantly making up their mind to be or not to be and that’s crazy. You can prove that in a really really really really tiny world but in our large world made of material matter it doesn’t hold up. This bench is here. I am sitting on it and its not going to break because it is matter. We’re good. There is no situation where I am going to fall through this bench. It’s just not going to happen but again the power of the mind, the power of the collective consciousness, the power of these things you can go theatrically and say if enough of us believed, we could make this bench fly. We could turn the whole parking lot, 180º or anything you want.
That is why I like the infinity book. I want people to come down to earth with it and use it as a tool because these are real things. If we could prove that at a microscopic level and we can prove it on an astronomical level what is it to say this doesn’t exist here? Infinity, the whole book and underlying message was that I wanted people to understand that this wasn’t irrational and we could talk about this in a rational way. We could use this to better ourselves. I put it in the book as like a lot of the downfalls of us as people is that we see these finite things; we get wrapped up in them to a point where we are completely disconnected with our infinite self, the nature of the universe and all the things that are sacred in my opinion. That whole bit of trying to cram your understanding of the world into a finite place... I don’t stress anymore because I just know that it’s life, time, and I’m just here. The only thing that you can say is finite is my body. The rest is just beautiful and I am privileged to be here on earth. . I don’t know if I am from here but I am privileged to be here. It would be silly of me to spend my time here worrying about all these things that at the end of the day are so benign comparatively to the nature of true infinite anything. Let’s talk about infinity so we could use this in a way to make our lives better and not think this is the end. In this moment why would you give yourself to that finite, petty problem, issue or hairball of stress, doubt and fear? Why would you give yourself to that when you know that is made by your finite mind by you trying to say you need one of this, two of that, three of this? You create your own hairball so to be able to step away from that and step outside of that and say, “I now see this is a hairball made by me,” and then to look up and say, “Hey, that’s insignificant”. You can look up to the sky and those stars aren’t just stars. They have solar systems just like ours. There are earths around those stars, they are in our galaxy which is our neighborhood. Our little cosmic neighborhood of our milky way and all these stars have the potential to be just like us. They can be just as beautiful, just as wonderful and I just can’t give myself away like that if I know that. If I know that we are here amongst these other things that are so much larger. The sun is like 500 times bigger than earth, its like a basketball versus a grain of sand. I can say that out loud and that could be fact but it sounds crazy because we are on earth, which is huge, but I can say that out loud and have it be fact and nobody takes it seriously. We are finding planets that can host life. Think about that outside the fact. To me there’s just so much proof... how can you look at our solar system and think you are this finite thing in this shitty, fucked up, weird mole in the milky way. Don’t tell me that and don’t feed me that. That is not fair, I am beautiful, we are beautiful, this world is beautiful and life is fucking infinite. You don’t have to worry about the shit. After all the meditations I just remember feeling so alleviated and so happy that I could say factually that infinity is real.
Let the world talk to you. Let the universe interact with you. Let it happen, trust it and just be cool with it. That is something I wish I had added more of and just really talk passionately about that sort of thing. There is one entrance in there that is sort of about that. I just really think it would help people if they understood they are not crazy for thinking that they are being played right now. You got money, start there. One, two, five, ten, twenty, one-hundred counting numbers. Finite things. Blocks. Literally the building blocks of finite behavior is in the currency. You got played, we all got played and its okay. We can learn from this and become more enlightened. We can be in the system without being in the system.
ERIC GORVIN @DJTHAT
WWW.ERICGORVIN.COM