Julian Glander is a New York-based modeller and animator famous for his cool colours and big blobs. His work has appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Adult Swim, and last year he released his creative sandbox, ART SQOOL to the world. We talk about ART SQOOL and a few things which aren't ART SQOOL here.

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Gamer_152: I understand that ART SQOOL grew out of a feature film you were writing. Can you talk about that project and what prompted the change in medium?

Julian Glander: Essentially, in 2018 I was in Germany for Pictoplasma conference, and I had this pretentious idea that after the conference I would go to Prague for a week, hole up in a really nice Airbnb, and write a screenplay. The whole week is kind of a blur in my mind now and I wish I had taken better notes, but essentially a couple of ideas became squashed together to form Art Sqool. One was a coming-of-age story about a young person striking out on their own in the world, and the other was this idea for a sketching app that I was developing for my personal use. Essentially, I am not a big fan of drawing but as a graphic artist I find myself having to do it a lot to sell concepts through to clients and art directors. So, I had this idea of making a special iphone app, tailored just for me, with super minimal tools that would help me make sketches. As I started laying it out it felt like it had to be a game.

G_152: In 2015, you released a small game called Lovely Weather We're Having. Were there any lessons you carried forward from that project into ART SQOOL?

JG: I'm really proud of Lovely Weather We're Having, and that is not true of all of my past projects...it's really tonal and quiet, and to me it feels really good to play, teetering somewhere between game and interactive poem. But I think it didn't find the right audience, and a lot of the gamers who played it were kind of frustrated and disappointed by how un-gamified it was. So, one thing that was super intentional with Art Sqool trying to reach a really specific kind of person -- certainly a student at an actual art school, or just a vaguely creative person, maybe someone who plays games once in a while but doesn't consider themselves a gamer, and someone who doesn't see themselves as represented in the subject matter of most video games. Those are the people who seem to hang onto this one the most, and they're also a kind of person that's pretty easy for me to identify with.

G_152: A lot of your work has been on individual GIFs, but ART SQOOL took months to develop. What was it like spending longer on one piece?

JG: I've done plenty of longer-form projects before, what was nice about this one was doing it in sessions instead of all at once. I put together a design document, and sent it over to my programmer Eugene Burd who put together a prototype. And so we would volley back and forth, I'd work on graphic assets or music or something for a few days and then send it over to him and forget about it for a week or two. It's a different feeling letting ideas marinate and develop over time VS shooting them out into instagram as soon as you make them. I like the immediacy of getting 100000 likes on something the same day it was made, but I'm trying to kick that addiction in exchange for more long-term fulfillment.

G_152: You've talked about how the game is inspired, in part, by comically bad applications of AI in art spaces. Are there any particular examples that influenced you?

JG: Haha, there are so many bad ones, I think you talked about this in your article but the wave of Fake AI stories in the 2010s really stuck in my brain. Like, I remember reading about tech companies raising millions of dollars for self-driving delivery bots, but they weren't actually self-driving, they were being remotely controlled by underpaid tech support workers in South America. So much of what we want from AI is an illusion of some powerful algorithm that makes the "right" decisions by basically telling us what we already know. Professor Qwertz is a classic man-behind-the-curtain, and I even considered the idea of revealing him as a fraud toward the end of the game -- but I don't think it's necessary. He does it all by himself.

One thing that's frustrating to me about so much of the conversation around AI is about where it's going to be in ten years, and not where it is right now. Like, oh, an AI bot wrote a fake Frank Sinatra song, and it's about 70% Frank Sinatra and 30% psycho robot. So it's really funny and uncanny weird but let's be honest it doesn't do what it's supposed to be doing, which is sound like an actual Frank Sinatra song... Are we really ever going to get over that hump? I feel really cynical about this stuff, since we've fallen so short of the last decade's hype around so many other world changing technologies : self-driving cars on every block, a 3D printer in everyone's house making everything we need, VR in everyone's contact lenses, etc. As it stands now these are all kind of goofy half-effective novelties.

G_152: The design of the ART SQOOL campus is very distinctive. How did it come together? Were there any features you knew you had to include?

JG: The original design was a lot more map-like, with everything laid out on a flat plane. I also had toyed with the idea of having different departments - music, sculpture, etc - but it would have taken so long and so much $ to get it finished. I was looking at some screenshots of Super Monkey Ball, and the idea of these little islands floating in the sky just seemed really right. Like a mini golf course in space. My favorite area of the map is a big, desert-like zone with a bunch of billboards on it, inspired by Ed Ruscha. All of the text on the billboards is in Wingdings -- just sticky little phrases that had been in my head -- and one thing I never expected was that a bunch of different people went around and translated them.

G_152: ART SQOOL seems very well-received. Would you consider returning to game development in the future?

JG: Probably, but I'm not actively pursuing it right now and I'm kind of waiting for the right idea to zap itself into my brain again. One thing that was nice about Art Sqool was that I went into it with a pretty vague idea of what I wanted, and the game sort of shaped itself along the course of development. I have a lot of game ideas where they come into my head so fully-formed that I can't imagine spending several months on it and keeping the excitement up. Like, just having the idea was enough, it would be cool if someone else made that game but I don't really need to see this one through.

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Thanks to Julian Glander and thanks to you for reading.