 One two yes, look at that. It works. I'm right. Okay, so I have a number of things to fess up to during this talk The first of which is that I came up with the title before Hello, I came up with the title before I had any idea about what I was going to talk about But I'm going to stick with the title and therefore I have structured my talk into two parts The first part is entitled I Gave up investment banking in which I will not talk about giving up investment banking So I wanted to go back a bit to explain How I came to be an investment banking? Believe it or not. I did not dream of being an investment banker when I was a kid This is me as a kid Kool-Aid Come on mustard onesie With three quarters of my siblings and my mother My brother Philip When I was a kid I was very clear on what I was going to be I was going to be a scientist And I knew that scientists looked like this These two scientists are from important 1980s film weird science And they are doing science But something else important happened in the 1980s other than Seminole 1980s film weird science and that was computers were invented Well as far as I was concerned computers were invented Computers looked like this as being demonstrated here by Matthew Broderick from Seminole 1980s film war games um, I Was fascinated with computers as a kid and after a great deal of badgering I managed to convince my parents to Drop a not insignificant sum of money buying a second hand BBC micro Cheer if you use a BBC micro come on come on BBC micro This was of course the most awesome computer in the world at the time it had cutting-edge computer graphics as you can see It also had sound it had color and it had sound which as we will discover later are two of my favorite things So basically when I should have been you know doing normal teenager things like getting drunk and vomiting I was instead spending every waking hour and many hours. I should have been asleep writing codes on a BBC micro And now I moved from that basically I do I mean it was clear that that point that the computing was what I was going to do That all dreams of being a you know a crazy physicist had gone. I was now gonna be a computing scientist. So I went to The amazing Glasgow University. Has anyone in here from Glasgow? Come on Glasgow University. Glasgow University the beautiful Glasgow University Where I then spent the next ten years in this rather drab building The computing science department at Glasgow University Notice I said ten years. I went there to do a degree and I was still there ten years later So that was one of a number of mistakes. I made in my life I was persuaded to stay on do a PhD which I attempted up for six years before Something marvelous happened, which was that I I met the love of my life and after a couple of years She said to me I am moving to London. You can come to if you want And I thought about it a bit and then thought I'm not going to finish this PhD I don't know why I've been trying And I walked out on it something. I think I wouldn't have done if it hadn't been for her Much of this talk about how I've done things that I wouldn't have done if it had been for someone else So I moved instead to The beautiful surrounds of Kilburn in London where we lived in a very damp basement for some time So this was 2000 London 2000s there was like one industry that was hiring computing scientists You know to a first approximation and that was investment banking now everyone knows an investment banker looks like right they look like this They point at things they answer phones they ruin lives I Was going to be an investment banker This is what I look like as an investment banker But this rather grainy picture is actually me at work in a real bank You wouldn't believe it but investment banking is is a lot less Like the films and you'd imagine You can get away with a lot more first thing people don't really wear braces They don't really point to things. They do answer phones They do ruin lives You'll notice here that I'm looking at a screen of lots Well next to me is a screen lots of graphs on it that really does happen though in this case I had no reason to be looking at graphs graphs on screens I just put it there because I thought it made me feel a bit more like I was doing important banking things You will find that almost everyone investment banking is doing the same thing They are looking at screens of graphs Trying to feel like they are doing important banking things. I designed a lot of software to look like this I'm going to let you to another secret there is no reason for banking software to look like this It is designed like this because it makes traders feel important That is why you design like this because if it's not if it doesn't if it's not black and With lots of green and red numbers that flash every now and then they don't feel like they're doing real work The truth is actually traders just use Excel the whole banking industry just uses Excel All the rest is for show. I Can let you into that secret because I was there So second part of my my important talk begins now, which is titled to become a digital artist I Never intended to be an artist. I had no concept of the idea of being an artist I like art at school. I mean I like drawing in things The idea of being an artist hadn't occurred to me I don't know how many people here have ever thought of being an artist or already are artists a few people. There you go They go. Okay, so I Don't I mean to me. This is what I assumed artists look like They look like brooding geniuses splashing paint on things I Make it, you know making incomprehensible works of you know incomprehensible art That's what I thought art looked like. There was obviously no reason why I would be an artist But then one day I met someone who changed my Expectations of what being an artist was because I discovered the artists also looked like this This is my dear friend Andy and colleague for many years Who would probably not thank me for putting that picture up, which is why I chose it because I believe this has been videoed So he might see it I'll send link. Yeah, once I once there is a link. I will definitely send them link. Don't worry So I met him I Think 20 years ago at a party. He was hanging a door as You do at a party He was there early to hang the door before the party began and I got there early because I always show up for things early And when he was hanging a door I Didn't speak to him then but then later in the evening I was introduced by the host And I saw a drawing on her wall and she said oh, yes Andy teaches drawing you should talk to him So I went and talked to him and I thought I used to like drawing Maybe drawings a thing I could do Because Andy he taught drawing he taught life drawing classes So he convinced me to come to his life drawing classes. So this is while I was still at investment banking I haven't given up yet. This is why the first part of the talk was Inaccurately titled I haven't given up yet. So I'm still an investment banker and I started drawing This is one of my drawings Yeah, look at that. Look at look at how I'm using space to make it feel like I'm a proper artist That's me. That's me trying to trying to you know channel an art an actual artist who knows what they're doing So at this point I should probably talk about what actually happened in terms of giving up investment banking I didn't really give up investment banking so much What happened was The 2008 financial crisis you might have seen this picture before newspapers loved to print pictures that look like this of people The bottom fell out of everything basically in 2008. I don't know if everyone remembers that So I was there on the inside when the bottom fell out of everything I was working for a credit hedge fund And of course every members it was called a credit crisis right all the credit crunch What happened was my hedge fund lost about two billion dollars Which is a significant amount of money it turns out even you know investment banking That hedge fund now no longer exists because of that In fact, I was moved to a different department. They thought okay Jonathan can go do this other thing The other thing turned out to be significantly more boring than working in a credit hedge fund So I said how about you give me voluntary redundancy instead and I said no I Said I have a lawyer who says yes Because the great thing about being an investment bank is you can afford lawyers So this is the this is the big secret in investment banking The reasons no unions an investment banking is because investment bankers can afford lawyers And if you have a lawyer, you don't care about a union You just say that use the lawyer writes a letter and they do what you say So I said I am going to leave and you are going to give me the money to leave And they agreed so I took voluntary redundancy And this was back at the beginning of the credit crisis when People were actually getting reasonable amounts of voluntary redundancy. So it wasn't a fortune I'm not gonna I didn't work that long enough to really I get out too quick. I guess It was a mistake, wasn't it? So I didn't really make a huge amount of money But I had a bit of a nest egg kind of thing and I thought I can probably survive for a little while So maybe I just won't get a job again for a little while and see what I want to do At this point, I still had no intention of leaving investment banking I just thought, you know, I'll go back later But um Around this time, um, I was starting to meet more artists, I suppose Through Andy So I met also this person, Hilary Great friend of mine as well And the three of us were sitting in This bar one day. Does anyone ever been to the foundry in Shoreditch? Yes The now dearly departed foundry in Shoreditch the great art pub So we were sitting in there one day And Andy said he had this great idea for an artwork for the foundry So the foundry was an old bank and it had this Second level basement, which was the old bank vault And he had this great idea if the bank vault is most extraordinary acoustics like Super long reverb. It was you walked in there. You made a sound and it was just Enveloping it was amazing um And the thing about the foundry was they put on strain like Super strange artworks all the time like a really Ear-bleeding eye-bleeding weird things going on um So they were willing to put up with almost anything so We talked to the the bar and he said yeah go on you do your idea So the three of us decided to form an art collective which is Output arts, which some of you may have seen me wandering around with this um Which is still going except now it's just Andy and I but anyway We decided to make Andy's idea and he wanted to make a wind harp Does anyone ever heard of a wind harp? Yeah, there you go. So i'm also called a aiolian harps um So the idea of the wind harp is that if you put a now it's called the disomething effect I can't remember i'm afraid but if you put a string in wind the string will start to vibrate That's the principle idea of it. So you put a bunch of so normally people make these big beautiful wooden wind harps With um, you know beautiful shapes and long strings and you listen to you listen carefully to it You can hear it sing This is what our wind harp looked like it looked like a couple of bits of two by two wood With some double bay strings strung across it um And the key thing here is that what we decided to make was an electric wind harp That's the electric bit. So this is where I came in because I'd done a bit of electronics at university And so Andy was like you can make that can't you i'm like Probably maybe um So we made This installation it was called three to four And it ran this is in the bank vault, which is just this big white featureless room And it was the sound of that wind harp piped down and amplified inside the space um, and then What andy called a color field projection that i had no idea what this was but he said basically you if you If you project color onto wall, it's a color field projection. I'm like Okay, okay um, so I wrote some software that would listen to the sound of the wind harp and then Project a color basically and it was it was really naughty stuff I just like picked three frequencies went. Oh, that's red green and blue It'll change color based on how much volume each frequency is um And it we and changes it went really slowly And the idea with the color field projection as it was explained to me was that If people have got something to look at But it's not too complicated. They kind of defocus and they listen harder So this is one of the first art things I learned as an artist Um, which was that people listen when they're looking Um, so we made this piece and it was beautiful. I've got to say, you know, it was actually it was a good idea Andy had um But I learned some important things from it. I learned that art also looks like this Um, and maybe this is not a big surprise to people But it was a big surprise to me because I thought art was splashing paint and it turned out art could also be wiring cables Um an art could also be this kind of thing Soldering things and in this case, I'm winding a square real Um So I started to basically at this point I did not call myself an artist at this point. I'll be clear at this point I thought andy and hilly were the artists and I was just like their tech support person That's kind of what I said. I used to introduce myself to people like that. I'd like yeah, andy. Here's the artist I just kind of like make things um in these square reals went into This piece lost and sound which is another one of the great pieces we made that I love um, which was We saw someone with a metal detector on the beach one day and we thought that's beautiful something about the The way people walk around with metal detectors listening really slowly and we thought There's something in that, isn't there? So we made this piece that looks like metal detectors, but they're story detectors so we put um effectively we put um So I was gonna head oyster cards You know the same thing as you're using or used to using the tube um in the sand and the square reals Detected the the id of the cards and when they hit a particular card it would play a story in your earphones Really simple idea Like time that's been incredible piece all the stories were about loss and it was a really profound piece Um, I would like to take credit for that, but the whole profound idea is that came from other people Um, but I made all the bits so this point. I'm still just making bits not being an artist really um fast forward like 10 years about the arts Oh, hang on. Did I talk about no, I did quite giving up So I've forgotten why I'm fast forward 10 years um, and I'm starting to make things involve thousands and thousands of leds and custom boards and stuff that was like way more professional than I was making when I first started winding square reals um But it's only really Coming up to this point when I started to call myself an artist Um, and it was incredibly hard thing to do Hands up if you are actually an artist Like you call yourself an artist. Did you find it a hard thing to do? Yeah, I found it So this is the one sort of revelation. I guess is that It is very tough particularly. I think if you You know the whole imposter syndrome thing if you come out from another industry It isn't even harder to say I am an artist Um, so for a very long time. I was not an artist. I was just a a tech support person And then eventually I kind of realized that that no I was also making art Um, and now I'm I do things With teams of artists, which is great We started to scale up the point where you can actually have other people make things for you Which is also good because it's now about the point where I just I haven't got time to do all the soldering anymore Um, so my dear friend jabs here is my go-to solder person Um, and we started making things that look like this Um, so this is a piece we made for this christmas just gone um, it's called mother Mothers of the forest. That's right. Um, and these are four meter high Illuminated sort of trees. They're meant to be barb trees Um the madagascan barb tree anyone heard of that? Yeah, so that was the inspiration for systems Mothers of the forest is another name for that tree Um, this was just for a christmas light show though. I'd like to this is a very arty piece for a very christmas show It was kind of a mistake. It's also insanely complicated and prone to breaking but We also make much simpler things thankfully like has anyone seen these yet? Yay, so that's another output arts piece Um, so this in fact was made out of leftovers This was um, this was an experiment in how simple could you make something if you've wandered up and had a look at it You'll see that it's very simple Which was a real delight to make something simple How long have I got 10 minutes perfect. This is going well um So Another thing happened in terms of the whole collaboration thing while I was going along here Which is that as part of working with output arts. I met Diswoman bishi has anyone heard of bishi? Some of you have I know because cat 5's here um, so bishi is um I mean just an amazing person but also sort of multi instrumentalist producer singer songwriter All around good egg and I met her a few years ago and started collaborating with her and I Started to do visuals for her so the thing you see behind her. This is her performing at the Purcell room last year The bit behind that was me Which is very exciting. Look here's a moving version of it Um, so I'm going to let that hypnotize you for a bit while I go on a sort of slight diversion Which is that in my original talk description. I said I was going to mention your diversity So I thought I probably should because I said I was going to So I discovered a couple of amazing things other than all the art stuff in the last few years One thing I discovered is that I'm autistic And I'd spent 45 years thinking everyone else was being difficult and then I realized it was me So I discovered that and that was something of a revelation I don't know if anyone's had a sort of a late diagnosis um, and it's like you're like Oh my god, like all this stuff makes sense like all the stuff I've talked about for the last 20 minutes suddenly started to make sense like this is why all this stuff was so hard This is why I was failing at things. This is why I spent 10 years attending to a phd I'm just not cut out for that sort of stuff. I'm really not um And the other thing I discovered recently and this was even more profound and this was Like extraordinary it blew my mind is that I suffer from a thing called Wait, I'm going to get the title right the other thing I suffer from is not going to remember the names of things. Um, it's called Uh hypophantasia Anyone heard of that? I'm not quite a phantasic. So a hypophantasia. It's like I can't imagine things visually in my head so this was More extraordinary than you can imagine because I didn't realize it until I was I say came up on twitter This little test like are you are you an a phantasic and I sort of looked at it went So I did the little test and I was like Oh, so the test you want to know the test? This is a great one. It's really interesting so Imagine a ball on a table Someone walks up to the table and pushes the ball What happens to the ball? Okay, so Who imagined the person that did it? What they looked like So when I did this thing, I didn't imagine anything like the The table the ball What it looked like the person Um Any of it at all. I just understood the abstract concept of a ball rolling for table And I did the same test of Andy my colleague and he was like Oh, yeah, yeah, the guy was wearing jeans. He had short hair He had made his back to me the ball was red the table was wood. It was an elliptical shaped table I'm like I just looked at him like You are making that up And then I went to speak to some other people and they were like, oh, yeah, yeah, she was a woman. She had blonde hair She did this she did that and I And it was that point. Oh, I've run out of video at that point. I suddenly realized that I don't imagine things at all And I was talking to some like my flatmates And they were saying what when you read a book, don't you know what the people look like? I'm like No Do you like This has been an extraordinary revelation because I make visual art How do you make visual art if you can't understand what things look like? This is like super confusing um so Five minutes. I'll make this work. Don't worry. Um I've realized that I make art the same way I write code Which is that I bash in a bit of code and I run it and see if it works And then I bash in a bit more and I run it and I iterate and I make art the same way I start making a thing and I look at it I go No, and I change it and I look at it again Maybe Um, and that's I sort of iterate art the same way I iterate code I guess I do everything the same way I do code to be honest. I'm a code of a heart really um So that was my diversion to newer diversity Get yourself checked out in case you've got one too. Surely everyone here's got a newer diversity um Back to bishi um, I've also recently started making music videos of bishi Which is um, I made my second music video recently um, which was something I never thought I would ever say It's like you can't understand how extraordinary it is to me to say I made my second music video because I used to be an investment banker. How do you get from there to there? um And in a sense lots of people come up to me so my watch is buzzing at me Really distracting me. It's telling me that my studio is about to shut um, I Lots of people said to me How is it you've done like you do a lot of different things? Like it's crazy. You do so many different things. I'm like, well, the truth is no, I don't I do one thing I write code But it turns out that one thing has a multitude of applications Um hands up if you write code Oh look at all of you um Uh learning to write code clearly, you know, it was that bbc micro that you know completely has defined my life Because I look at everything as code now Usually python Um for the last 25 years I've written like dan where you are dan. I write python Um, this is not python if you're looking at it. You've already spotted that, haven't you? Come up to me later if you want to know what that is um So all I really do is write code. I just write code in ways that makes a heart um And I guess That's been a big surprise to me is that this thing I learned can be art Um, lots of things can be art, but also code can be art um, the other thing I learned is that um I for a long time have struggled with understanding what it is I do as an artist If you are an artist, you've probably also had this struggle of Yeah, um You know, what is my practice? What is it? I make as an artist. How do I dare? I call myself an artist It's part of this imposter syndrome thing um But I've come to a realization recently which is that um standing in the background Pushing buttons and making things happen for other people that is my practice And I'm happy to do that Collaboration is my practice. I'm not because for a long time. I thought well What is it? I do because I'm always making things with other people. I've decided that doesn't matter collaborating That is an artistic practice. I'm able to realize things. I'm able to To imagine things with other people and that's That's a powerful thing and I'm proud of doing that which is new to me to be able to say that in fact um, so I guess um Yes, this is really working. I'm up two minutes left um I'm coming to some kind of conclusion here. I think um, which is You can give up investment banking to become a digital artist Hands up if you an investment banker Yes, look at that You sir, give up investment banking and become an artist