創造性と技術の交差点
This is Rainomoto's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi everyone, welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity and technology. I'm Rainomoto, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in New York, Tokyo and Singapore.
Art was my very first love when it came to subject matters that I was interested in when I was young.
From the very early days in kindergarten all the way to college, I was deeply interested in art,
so I chose it as my academic study at the university.
When I was in college, I decided to mix my artistic interest with emerging technologies,
and that's what led me to a career that I have at the intersection of creativity and technology.
Andrew Zolti, known professionally as Breakfast, is someone who does this for a living,
but as an artist. We've known each other since our 20s as we were building our
respective careers in the same industry, but he decided to pursue pure art by making a business
out of it. He started to focus on it full-time around 2008 during the financial crisis.
Now an internationally acclaimed artist, Breakfast is a data and kinetic artist whose work centers
on transforming real-time data from the natural world into digitally controlled kinetic artworks
that tell stories. He has a studio in Brooklyn with around 15 engineers to invent and build
kinetic sculptures for museums, corporations, and private collectors around the world.
He considers himself the lead singer and songwriter of the band he leads called Breakfast.
Today's conversation is an in-depth introspection of pursuing a creative life.
We chronicle how he transitioned from being a commercial designer to a pure artist, how he
built his practice as an art practitioner and a business owner, how he protects his intellectual
property, his vision, and the goal as an artist, and finally a very yet profound piece of advice
for anyone wishing to pursue a creative life. So let's get started.
アーティストとしてのキャリアの転機
So Zotti, good to see you man. Hey, happy to be here. It's been ages. All right, so let's get into the
meat of the conversation. As I said, I want to break this up into two sections. One is about
your career trajectory and the transition that you've made from a designer developer to an artist.
And you touched upon your turning point when you were, this was in, like you were physically
living in London at the time? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and this is a Baker tweet that you did in 2007
or 80ish. And just to trace back our collective memory, when I first met you, I don't, I couldn't
quite pinpoint the exact moment when we met or where we met, but we, yeah, I, but you were
definitely working at a creative digital agency. I don't think it was Polk. It may have been, I was
looking at your LinkedIn just to see like, where was Zotti when we first met? And it may
have been agency.com when you were at agency.com. That's what I was going to say. I think so. Yeah.
Might've been. And this is like 20 years ago, maybe? Oh God, that hurts to say. Yeah. Yeah,
I think so. I think it was like 05, 06, somewhere in there. Yeah. Yeah. And then we would see each
other at different events and social events, you know, professional events once or twice a year.
And my memory is that we didn't see each other for several years, like maybe about five years.
And then you had your, your studio. So for me, there is a blank, blank time. And, you know,
I knew Zotti as a developer slash designer at these core agencies, creative digital agencies.
And then next thing I knew, oh, Zotti's an artist, full-time artist. So paint me a picture of that,
what that transition was like. You mentioned about that, that turning point, little turning
point that we had, but that you had, but I'm sure there was a lot in between and after that.
Yeah. I'll, I'll do my best to keep it succinct. I mean, what I remember, so go ahead. Yeah. So
I can specifically remember, I don't know what I was concepting at the time, but being at agency.com
アートとテクノロジーの融合
and coming upon, there are two, I don't know what they would want to be called art
collectives, something there's, there's two of them that I came upon in the early 2000s, which was
art plus com, which many people don't know, but they know their work. They're, they're based out
of Germany. I can't remember exactly which city. And, and honestly, I'm not even sure what they're
up to. I haven't checked in in a while, but their most, what they're known most for are these sort
of kinetic rain. They've been massively copied. And every time I see it, it kills me, but like
they were doing these sort of stainless steel balls for like a BMW museum way back.
I remember that. Yes. So like, and then they've done a kinetic rain one that's in, I think the
Singapore airport and stuff like that. So like I found them and I found another collective called
random international out of London who had at the time, way back when these tiny little
mirrors that kind of had a personality and they were on the ground, they kind of look up at you
that it kind of makes our lamp ask. Anyhow, I remember coming upon them during some sort of
research projects and it just sort of opening my eyes and, and just being like, oh, all this
digital stuff, all these things, like all this concepting and creativity, like something just
screamed at me with that. And so I started just, that's when I started trying to get out of the
screen or really out into the real world with my concepting. So even at agency.com, I started
pitching more different kinds of ideas that kind of, that weren't trapped on the screen.
And I don't think any of them really happened. And then I moved over to poke, which was like
the digital arm of mother. And that was in New York. And I was starting to learn basic electronics
and again, still trying to push concepts that were maybe a little bit outside the norm,
but it was when I switched over to poke in London that I sort of sunk my teeth in and was really
spending a lot of time learning electronics and things of that sort. And thus when Baker tweet
happened it was, yeah, it was, it was amazing. It kind of just blew up it, you know, it did the
viral thing back in the day and just like went everywhere. And that combined with I had,
my wife and I moved to London, but we hadn't sold, we had an apartment in New York that we
hadn't sold with the idea that just in case we didn't like London, we, you know, we'd come back.
And the problem was, this was 2007, 2008, and then the market crashed and it was a co-op in New York
and they own, they said, you can rent it for one year, the co-op board. And what happened was,
is I couldn't sell it. I couldn't sell it because the market was such a mess. And so all of a sudden
we were loving London, but we had no choice. We had to move back. And so that is when I was like,
what am I going to do? Like I've had this Baker tweet moment. I started seeing what I wanted to
do. I couldn't find anywhere that I wanted to work that felt right, or that would let me do that.
And that's when I started talking to one of the guys, an engineer called Mateus Gunnarus, that
was also working at poke, that he helped me with the Baker tweet piece, kind of more from the
hardcore software side. And I went to him and I was like,
what do you think about doing more of this? And do you want to move to New York?
And so that's where Breakfast sort of was born. And then the one thing I also knew in the back of
my head is I would never do this without some kind of like business person, because I didn't
trust myself. So I reached out actually to a guy that used to be in my band that I'd known for
years, who was over kind of leading software at Goldman Sachs, kind of a radically different
background. So I brought him in as well. And so, yeah, and so I started the studio. And at that
point for the next many years, it was the best way to describe it was a master's degree in learning
アート業界への進出
all of the electronics, industrial design. And for years, I mean, really for almost a decade,
it was just trying to learn how to do this, do it well for anyone that would give us money.
It wasn't being an artist at all. It was really just like, how do I scratch this itch? How do
we create crazy things? And you might remember, I mean, we did things all over the map that were
still kind of in advertising world. But I would say for every advertising or every paid commission,
we would then balance it with like trying to make something that was our own, like something that
just on our own terms. And then to try and wrap this story up. Yeah. So I mean, in the late,
I don't know, 2016 ish, somewhere around there is when, you know, I really started seeing,
like, where is all this going? Like, I don't want to just be this sort of services
company. It didn't feel right. And the things that I always came up with on my own were the
best things in my mind. And so that's when the decision was made. Like, what if just
we go after the art world? And so it's essentially been an evolution since then,
because the other part is that it's so costly to make this kind of work,
that finding the business model that made sense was very difficult. And the art world kind of
became like when we did the Venn diagram of, you know, how, where can you kind of name your prices
that might not match? You know, if you go down a product route, everyone expects it to be
cost effective, efficient, but that's not really the way you want to do things. And so, yeah. So
it's been since, yeah, the 2015, 2016 is when really went all in on the art world. And then,
man, it's evolved even more since, but I'll, I'll shut up. I'll go on forever.
ニューヨークへの帰還と初めての仕事
Yeah. So the financial market crash had a bit of an impact on your decision. You know, you,
you kind of had to move back because you couldn't sell your place, you said?
Yeah.
Yeah. And at the same time, you, you didn't really find any place that you wanted to work for
when you move back to New York City.
Yeah. I didn't see, I mean, I felt like I was just getting, I was getting like, I saw the writing was
on the wall for me that like, okay, there's something in this physical digital world,
which like at the time, like this is the early days, like the freaking iPhone had only been out
like a year. So like, I mean, this, people were getting excited about social media. No one was
talking about like hardware. And so I just couldn't find, you know, to start a gig anywhere and like
say, that's what I want to do would not have made sense to anyone. So yeah.
Yeah. What was the first paid gig as breakfast?
It was, I think the, the most, the notable one, I'll put it that way. Cause we had like
one little dinky thing that's not worth talking about. But so the first, the whole idea was coming
off the back of Baker to eat. It was this idea of if you build it, they will come. So the first
thing I ever conceived was a good friend of mine was riding her bike. She was planning to
ride her bike across the country. And so what I decided to do is like, what if this is kind of
funny to talk about today at the time it was, what if we gave the bike in AI, this is 2008, 2009,
2009. What if we gave the bike in AI and the bike could share its experience of going across
the country? This is not the paid gig. I'll get to that. But so we created this like hardware
that could go on the bike, that the battery could last a really long time. And it would take
all the bumps and shocks and temperature. It would take all, it was just a ton of sensors
and then it would go up into, you know, a very rudimentary AI that would then kind of write
tweets and it would sort of post those tweets out from the bike's perspective and you could
follow this bike. And so the whole idea was to kind of try and follow the recipe that happened
with Baker to eat, do something that maybe was a bit noteworthy and it worked. And then the
最初のプロジェクト
first call we got was actually from Conan O'Brien's people who were just launching his new
show on TBS. And they said, we love what you did with the bike. Can you do it for a blimp?
And so the first project was creating this AI thing, the same thing we did for the bike,
but like an actual real blimp that was flying around the country with Conan's name on the side
of it. And it did a similar thing. At the time it was using Foursquare and it was checking into
places and it was, I don't know, it's a whole funny thing. But yeah, so I was giving AI to a
blimp. It was cut for Conan O'Brien. So that blimp project for Conan O'Brien was the first paid gift?
I think, yeah, yeah. That was it. Wow. It's kind of funny. Yeah. So between starting this studio,
by the way, one thing that I meant to ask was why breakfast? Where does the name come from?
Yeah, that's usually the first question. So I don't remember anyone's name, either person or
company or anything. It's always been like, it's just something wrong with my brain. Like I just
can't remember it. So I wanted to pick a name, a name that you say once and you just get it. And
then the way I got to breakfast was at the time I was learning all these electronics and industrial
design and mechanical engineering. And the whole goal was to fail fast, to learn as fast as we
could because we had to make some money. And so the whole idea was like, break things very quickly
to learn. So break fast breakfast. That makes sense? That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah.
It was all about, yeah, cutting, cutting into this new world. So I guess, you know, the famous
Silicon Valley, Facebook. I know that happened a year after and I've never been able to
disconnect the two. So once Facebook came out with that, I was like, oh God, explaining the name is
gonna have that riddled with it. But it's same mentality, same idea. Spirit of it,
spirit of it. And very simple, very simple. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So were you able to,
キャリア転換の不安
the reason why I'm asking about this career transition, these questions is I think in
different ways and perhaps different generation, now a lot of people are thinking about whether
in their 30s or I would say even say 20s, 30s and 40s. And I interact with people in different
age brackets in different contexts. So like I teach at a university, a graduate course. So I
see these quote unquote kids or young people going into the workforce. And in 2025, a lot of
students, grads are not having an easy time getting a job. So that's happening among the
people in their 20s. And then 20 years senior to that 40s or even like late 40s and early 50s,
perhaps in people who are closer to our age, unless they have their thing, like you have
your thing and I have my own thing that I think I see a lot of people having either existential
challenges and I might even say crises in terms of what they want to do for the next, not just
the next one, two, three years, but five, 10, if not the rest of their career. Yeah.
Yeah. So when you were, you know, this is 10 to 15 years ago, but when you are making that transition,
what, did you have any worries? You know, what were, was it scary and what kept you going?
It's terrifying. Yeah. I mean, there were many, there were many nights of walking my dog on the
sidewalk, just sitting there looking up, not knowing if there's some entity somewhere that
like you just started talking to and you're just like, please don't let this fall apart. Please,
just, I need something to keep it going. Yeah, no, it's absolutely terrifying. And I think the,
I think I've always been of the mindset that like, you make, you make your own luck, right?
And maybe this comes back to the, like, just, I will work hours and hours to kind of make things
happen that I don't think would happen otherwise. But I mean, I think the, I don't know if I'm
jumping too far to like advice, but essentially in my mind, it was always about not wanting to do
アーティストとしての転機
anything that anyone else is doing. It's like finding that weird little, um, just how do you,
how do you turn, you know, even five degrees that way and just be doing something that no one else
is doing. I mean, to be honest, the part of the reason I started going down this hardware route
is because, you know, we were, we were involved in the web in the early days and it felt like,
you know, you felt like a bit of a rebel, like everyone else, like tons of people didn't get it.
It was kind of fun. You'd sell a website to a massive brand and the brand like, didn't really
know why they needed a website. Right. And so you could just, you could kind of get away with murder
in some ways because they didn't know what they needed. And you were just like, I just want to do
cool shit. Um, and I saw that going away. Like I saw like, okay, now this is becoming a profession.
This is becoming something where all the clients are now telling us what to do and this and that.
And so for me, it was like, all right, how do I get into fresh territory that brings me back to
that thing where people are like, I don't understand what you do, but I like it. So
just do your thing. So in some regards, I guess what I'm getting at is like, I kind of always
tell people, cause I kind of, I get this question a lot of like, what's, you know, what would you do
if you had to like pivot or anything? And for me, it's like, it's just taking all the skills you
have and then adding something totally different to it is my mind. It's just combining two things.
Um, and so whenever I kind of hit a wall or feel like, uh, having an existential crisis, like,
can I just keep, like, I don't, if you just stay on this one path, it feels like every path will
dwindle eventually. Like you can only squeeze so much out of the sponge. And so for me, what I
always try to do is then look like, can I combine biology? Is that the next step? Am I like, okay,
what have I started? Can I make like organic stuff be connected to my, like, I don't know.
These are the thoughts I had is like just going really left field. Um, because I know if I did
that, if all of a sudden I came out with an artwork that had like a beating heart, literally
connected to a bunch of things, like, I know that's going to get a bunch of attention.
And it's just a matter of that might sound kind of extreme, but I think where I'm going is just like,
I think oftentimes people are just sort of looking down the obvious path. And it's like,
if you just take all the skills you have and can combine it with something that's
a little bit out there, a different industry that maybe you have to learn a little bit.
I think, I think to me, that's the, uh, I don't know, maybe that's the life preserver or opening
a new door or something of that sort. But, uh, I don't know if that was an answer to your question.
No, no, no. Yeah. That's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you mentioned that after you started Breadfirst,
so the first several years, was it purely or mostly client paid work?
It was, yeah, I would say literally back and forth. So it would be kind of a client paid
project. Oftentimes it was sort of a brand trying to get that brand, kind of what I was just saying,
like a lot of times brands will reach out and say, like, we don't really even know what to ask
you, but we like what you're doing. And here's what we have going on. And so we do, we'd knock
out some sort of crazy thing. And then I would take that money and do something on my own terms with
it. Uh, and we, sometimes there was a product, sometimes it was just a random idea or just a
little experiment or, you know, just these little side projects. And so it would ping pong back and
forth. Um, yeah. And then you talked about briefly, transitioning to pure art, if I may call
it that. Yeah, no, that's what it is. Yeah. So that, that I want to talk about that transitional,
アートとビジネスの相互作用
that pivot. And it sounded like you wanted to focus on things that you want to do. And because
the things that you were making out of your own desire was, were the best thing that you could
make. Exactly. Was that, was that the only motivation? It was, uh, it was that, which I
don't think any creative person can relate to, like, you know, being able to turn it around where
it's like, no, this is, you're, you're reaching out to me for the thing that I'm good at. Um,
but then it, I mean, absolutely was a business decision. Um, you know, the, what I do is so,
it's such a bad business idea. It's such a bad, it's such a bad business model,
admittedly, because you're talking about needing extremely talented engineers. So
like at this point, the studio is about 17, 18 people. I have engineers that come from like
SpaceX and Disney and Rolls Royce and all these places, you know, they're not cheap employees by
any means. Um, then you're losing anywhere from a quarter to a third to a half, sometimes almost
the entire budget, just to the hardware, the hardware is so incredibly expensive. Um, and at
the end of the day, like people, you know, you could have a million dollar project and it's not
crazy to spend half of that on just the hardware, which that's a painful, you know, for anyone to
be dropping a million dollars is a big deal. And then for me to know, I only am taking home half of
that. And that could be a year long project, which means like that, that 500 K spread across a
studio of a lot of, with a lot of high cost, like it doesn't really net out very well. Um,
so the point of that is the art world admittedly sound intriguing because how do I take this,
this piece or this thing I make, and in what world can you attach a price tag to it?
That might seem, you know, is a big number, but isn't looked at like, Oh yeah, no, I could,
that, that doesn't make sense. It can make sense, you know, painting, it makes sense that a painting
can cost a million dollars or whatnot. So, um, so it was really that it was like, because if I
sold these as products, or if I sold them as design objects, even they just wouldn't,
the studio would fall apart. It wouldn't be able to make enough cash. So, um, and so it's been a
balance of, uh, so, so yeah, it was very much a financial decision as well. Yeah. So switching
gears to that part of the conversation where I'm interested in uncovering the business of
creativity or business of art. And in your case, as you mentioned, you know, it's you as an artist,
but also your company or your team as a, as an artist collective, if I, if I, if you will,
and, uh, as you touched upon a little bit, you know, they are employees that you are hiring and
paying a good amount of money to each because each, each one of these people, um, is very highly
skilled individually. You know, they're not just anybody. Right. Yeah. So, so that's one part of it.
And then the other part of it is like the value that attach to your art, which can be to your
point, subjective. And if you say it's $500,000, it may be $500,000, but you know what, it's actually,
you know, $2.5 million because I'm the only one where we're the only ones who can make this, um,
in the world. So do you, you know, and as I imagine some of the work that you do is commissioned by
museums and organizations and some of the work you do on your own, but again, just to,
if you look at, say like that in a year, you know, you kind of have to project as a business owner,
you kind of have to project how much money you're making and how much money you're,
you're paying. Yeah. And I know I'm asking a pretty complex question in a simplistic way,
but how do you budget plan your business? Yeah. So one thing when I started down the art route,
one of the other decisions that was made was, um, I don't know if you remember my thread screen.
I don't know if you remember this. Yeah. So it was, you know, for, for those listening, it was a
アート制作の進化
6,400 mechanical spools of thread that could change color. And anyway, at the, at the time,
anyone could hashtag an Instagram and would make their image that they hashtagged out of this
thread. That thing was a disaster. Um, in that it was, it was a perfect example of, it was a great
idea. It worked, it ran for a week, but we built it. We put in so much time and engineering into
it, but the budget wasn't big enough to build it in a way that it would last. Um, and so I made a
decision at that point, okay, moving forward, we make, the goal is to engineer mediums. So I have
my flip discs, for example, I have my bricks that rotate. Uh, so essentially it's like technological
mediums that we can perfect. So we can put a year, two years, three years of engineering time
into them, perfect that. And then I can create various artworks out of them. Yeah. So, so there
is a, an efficiency there of kind of creating these underlying technical infrastructure things to, to
make more pieces, um, to kind of get more to the core of your question.
What it looks like now is actually during COVID I started, or just before COVID, which worked out
well, I started making smaller artworks for collectors. So, you know, three foot by three foot
pieces. Yeah. So the goal now is to try and sell anywhere between 30 and 50 of those a year,
um, which is quite a lot. I mean, it's not unusual to be selling, you know, one a week,
um, or in sending one out, which is a lot of work and those are all done as additions or
unique pieces. So that's kind of one revenue stream. And then on top of that is the more,
so that I would say then there is kind of the larger commission pieces, which these go into
lobbies or museums or whatnot. And those are using these mediums that already exist.
So they might take four to six months to produce, but they're not, there isn't a lot of engineering
there because we've already perfected the underlying engineering. So it's more of a
getting the team to just do the production and build an assembly. Um, so that's kind of the
second layer. And then the third layer is the really big, completely custom multi-year, uh,
pieces that can go on. And, you know, a good example of that is if you saw my pearl,
did you see this crazy thing? This is the pearl, which is this, uh, giant sphere that's on the ship.
So it's on a cruise ship. And I mean, that thing took four years of our time. Uh, it, it was a
mess. I mean, the thing has nine, 9,000 motors moving 24 hours a day in the middle of the ocean.
Um, so like that's, that's kind of, so you have, you know, that that's on the upper end of the
spectrum for sure. We're not doing a lot of those pieces, but, you know, in, in between that. So
there's kind of this, these three layers I'd say that ends. So the goal is to kind of land, you
know, X number of the small, you know, sell a certain number of the collector size pieces,
uh, then these sort of mid tier ones, and then these sort of larger, more custom ones.
Yeah. Um, the, the, the term that you use mediums. Yeah. Right. So when you say a medium
and knowing your work a little bit, at least from the outside, um, actually, you know,
when you said me trying to explain it, sure. Can you explain what you mean by a medium?
Yeah. So, um, I mean, the best way I could describe it is it's, it's really,
well, I'll, I'll go through a few of them. So one is, you know, flip discs or flip dots that
some people might know they were invented in the sixties. Um, but essentially for the, I started
messing with them 14 years ago. And since like, they were very antiquated, they don't move very
well or very fast. And so the last decade or so we've been perfecting those. So that is a medium.
So I make many different pieces out of these discs that flip and I do a lot of creative things with
them. Um, then I have what I call these bristles is our internal term, which are these bricks,
キネティックアートの技術
often metal, sometimes there's stone or marble, uh, these two sided bricks that we can rotate,
uh, and have really accurate control. And so we'll create big arrays of them, uh, to create
pieces out of them. I have, you know, a piece in Vegas like that, a piece in actually in Japan
as well. Uh, I don't know, probably about 10 or 15 of those around the world. Um, so that's a
medium, which really just means rotating a thing. So we have perfected the ability to take something
that's quite heavy and rotate it really accurately, make it interactive. So that's another medium.
I have another one called reeds, which are these long, elongated, uh,
poles for lack of a better term that can kind of pivot at the bottom. So, so you can kind of think
of it as like mechanisms. So I can now take a long skinny thing and wag it back and forth,
which sounds really simple, right? It sounds like, Oh, you just take a motor and do that. But it's,
I mean, when you look at the whole software infrastructure, the whole wiring infrastructure,
making sure that the, the motors are silent, making sure that they withstand certain weights.
So, I mean, it takes years to perfect that. And then what I attached to that mechanism,
that medium can change. So like it can look, I can make the aesthetics drastically different,
but all of that underlying technical infrastructure, you know, we spent a long
time perfecting. And so we call them medium. So I probably have about seven or eight of them
at this point. I see. I see. I see. Do you ever mix these mediums in a single piece?
I haven't. Yeah, no. I mean, I have, I mean, there's a lot of overlap between some of them
in terms of them technically. Um, but up to this point, I haven't brought multiples together. They
tend to be, um, there's all a lot of reasons for that. Some of it is just efficiency. Uh, it's,
it's common for me to have multiple pieces near each other and kind of in the same space,
like they use different mediums, but I haven't, I haven't really squashed them together into a
single piece. And also I would imagine, uh, technically too, they're different. So it may
be difficult to mix them. Yeah. It's, it's one of those things where I hate to say, like I said,
there, you know, these things are very costly to begin with. And so that would introduce
more complexity and more cost where, as opposed to since most of my work are arrays of kinetic
elements, the, the preferred approach is often let's just add more kinetic elements,
like essentially more resolution or make the piece larger is, is likely the better option
than to kind of start mixing other ones into it. Yeah. Yeah. So that was part one of my conversation
アーティストとしての道のり
with Andrew Zolti, professionally known as Breakfast, a data and kinetic artist with his
studio in Brooklyn, New York. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I've known Zolti
and actually I've known him as Zolti, not as Breakfast for close to 20 years, but never had
a chance to dig deep into how he transitioned from being a marketing creative slash developer
to a fine artist. It's something that I was always curious about as an individual who has
been passionate about the art world since my teenage years. I hope you got a glimpse into
what work is like for an artist and what it takes to quote unquote, make it in the world.
In part two of this conversation, we talk more about his work as an artist and importantly,
his tangible advice for anyone who's interested in pursuing a creative life. If you are listening to
this on Spotify, there's a Q and A field. So please do send us your questions and comments.
And if you like our podcast, please leave us a five-star rating. We're so grateful. I hope you
enjoyed this conversation with Breakfast as much as I did. I'm Reina Moto and this is The Creative
Mindset. See you next time.
