Original subtitles

I like dirt roads.

Yeah.

The desert is a little bit other-planet-like, huh?

We're on our way to James Turrell.

The Roden Crater.

His art has been utilizing, creating immersive environments.

We're always thinking,

"If I could find some huge, natural thing as my canvas."

Well, he's worked in the landscapes of architecture

- for... - Yeah.

- ...decades. - Mm-hmm.

And working with the relationships

of the sky and space.

Is that it?

All of a sudden...

Wow, it's almost kind of like a pyramid.

Wow.

Well, we were looking for adventure.

And we're finding some.

We founded Arch Motorcycle to challenge the perception

of what an American motorcycle could be.

Our ambition is to create

a beautiful, aesthetically interesting,

seductive machine that you can ride.

Curiosity has been our lifeblood since the beginning.

We're fueled by far more than just

a passion for designing motorcycles.

Arch is a mindset,

a lens through which to see the world.

This is a quest for inspiration.

To witness visionaries

pushing the bounds of innovation,

to understand why inspiration strikes

and where human creativity comes from.

Nothing visual exists without light.

And if design is about perception,

about the way we see colors, shapes, and textures,

what would that say about an artist

who has truly mastered the use of light and perception?

Meet legendary artist James Turrell.

This is the North Space that I'm working on,

and I rough all these things out,

how I draw up the spaces that I want

for what I want things to do.

Part of my work is sort of just...

making the emperor's clothes visible,

making what we don't normally see all you see.

And so that's actually a part of what happens

in the different spaces of the crater,

going from one to another.

And we don't look up very often.

A lot of this is, "Look up."

My interest actually was always to be involved with light.

I was very interested in using light as a material

to work the medium of perception.

For nearly 60 years,

James Turrell has created iconic works

that manipulate light the way a painter uses paints.

His works encourage us to alter our perspective

and evaluate the very way we perceive the world around us.

Wow, James, these are all the spaces.

This is a plan here of the whole crater

and what we're doing here.

Did you have this whole vision and idea

when you set out on this pursuit,

or did some of it grow from what you learned?

Well, it's like having a general idea

- and then getting details. - Yeah. Okay.

It's like wanting to make a motorcycle

- and then perfecting it. - Mmm.

All those little pieces that come together are amazing.

When you started to look at this properly,

is this, like, 40 years ago you started looking at this, or...

- It is true. 40 years ago. - Okay.

But I'm sort of like those friends of yours

that never finish their thesis.

Yeah.

I still have a ways to go.

The Roden Crater is a 400,000-year-old

extinct volcano roughly one mile long from end to end.

Within it, James has spent more than four decades

crafting his magnum opus,

carving a series of tunnels and intricate spaces,

each meticulously engineered to isolate celestial events

and focus our attention.

This is actually like Stonehenge.

Wow.

I was very interested in early sites like this.

So megaliths or structures in connection to astronomy?

Yeah. It's sort of how we realize our celestial selves,

because I'm interested in how we've developed

all this thinking about our relationship here

to the skies and to the heavens.

And, I mean, this is something I always wanted to do.

You had this idea already.

- Well, I wanted to have it... - And you went searching for...

I wanted a place raised up, and I'll show you why.

Should we go see it?

Yeah, let's go see it.

All over the world,

James has completed skyspaces and installations

for the public to witness.

But his work here at the crater is shrouded in greater mystery.

You talked earlier about this phenomenon

where you're at the highest point...

- Mm-hmm. - ...but everything around us

looks like we're...

Yes, if you look around,

it looks like everything goes up from here.

What creates that?

It's our perception again.

Well, in a way, the Roden Crater is

sort of a naked-eye observatory.

I wanna make this volcano a piece where you actually

come to view the sky, where our celestial nature has

kind of become evident to us, where our involvement with

that beyond what we normally think about is made very clear.

Each space within the Roden Crater is intended to

isolate our focus on a singular concept.

Hello!

Is there a place where people should start,

or this is just discover whatever and however you'd like?

It's sort of the latter.

- Okay. - But this is the analemma.

Many people don't know what an analemma is.

If you look it up, it's called the equation of time.

This ring up here makes a bright spot

surrounded by a shadow,

and at solar noon, it will be on this,

and it tells you where we are in the Earth's orbit.

So right there, it's gonna be June 21st,

and then here will be December 21st.

So it will be in here.

What that does, it gives you the fact where we are in the orbit.

The South Space is an ode to when we looked to the sky

to take its measure.

Focusing on that that happens in the sky,

what is really happening there?

We have only known since about the time of Columbus

our address on the planet Earth.

And then it's only been a while that we knew

where we are in this planetary system.

And then it's only been since 2012

that we've actually known our address in the galaxy.

This is relatively new.

What equipment did you use to measure this for the accuracy?

Remember, the Moon's orbit is changing,

the Earth's orbit is changing,

so what we've made is that things would be

most accurate 2,000 years from now.

4,000 years from now, it would be as accurate as it is today.

But then it would come back and be just as accurate

in 28,400 years.

The big thing here is how to make things so that the details

don't get away from you and still have the overall.

That's been always the problem we have.

So if you line up those two crosshairs...

...you are now looking exactly

on the axis of rotation of Earth.

In 24 hours, we do go 25,000 miles,

so we're going about 1,100 miles an hour.

Is there a seat belt?

- Strap yourself in. - Strap in!

So this room is my studio.

This is where I like to work.

All the things here are the things that have meaning to me

and have been part of different times in my life.

I was very much involved with the Naval Observatory

in making this model of all the stars that were nearby.

This is it right here.

So, this is a prototype that I made for this.

This shows you all the nearby stars.

Astronomers decided to actually make this model.

Well, I think we sold something like 34.

That's just a good thing to remember for artists

and astronomers and everybody,

'cause we always think we have something

that everybody must have,

and then we're brought up quickly to reality.

This is just a helmet for altitudes below 45,000.

I became interested in aviation,

so I actually had a business restoring antique planes,

and that actually supported my art habit.

My father was very interested in aviation.

He was an aeronautical engineer.

One time when I was somewhere around eight or nine,

we were flying at the end of the day.

The sun had gone down,

and the light in the sky was diminishing,

and you saw the lights of Los Angeles,

and it was so beautiful.

Anyway, we were looking at it for some time,

and my father just said to me,

"A pauper by day, a princess by night."

And this idea of how we exist

and how we manifest as creatures of light is very interesting.

Just looking at that was quite remarkable,

and it was very beautiful too,

and I just thought that was...

how we reveal our existence.

Witnessing the lights of Los Angeles

from the cockpit of his father's plane fueled James' work,

and in the 1970s, ultimately sent him

in search of a natural canvas to build a monument,

one dedicated to understanding our place in the universe.

I went looking for sites,

and I flew all the western states back and forth,

and that was really a remarkable time.

I would fly for about four or five days a week,

and then pick a town to sort of stay in

to sort of think about everything.

Each of these areas would almost engender a new idea in my mind,

so this was a very rich time.

Did this for about seven months until the money ran out.

When I first found the crater,

I was flying just to the north of the San Francisco Peaks.

Luckily, it's modest in size.

You know, now I have to really figure out what I wanna do.

That is, I wanna make this space

that's up in the air, like flight,

so that you experience the sky up in it.

I picked this largely because it was privately owned,

and I thought, "They don't seem to be using it right now."

Well, it happened to be in the middle of this man's ranch,

and because it was in the center of it,

it was not something he wanted to sell right away.

And it was three years before he finally said, "Okay."

He drove me out onto the land,

out on this one ledge that actually faces Roden Crater.

And he said, "Well, this is gonna be yours now.

"Piss on it."

That moment more than 40 years ago

altered the course of a lifetime.

Is the canvas the inspiration?

Or was it something that he would have

manifested without it?

This is a Royal typewriter from the turn of the century,

the 20th century, and I think I had this when I was ten.

So this has sort of been with me my lifetime.

And this is from the shop in Pasadena,

which you can see right here.

That's where I grew up.

I came from a Quaker family.

We didn't have television, didn't have radio,

because the Quakers have a different take on modern life.

So I'd walk down the street at night,

and I could pretty much tell what channel

people were watching by the light

that was in the living room,

which I found quite interesting.

It didn't have to be the image.

It just could be the light.

But all this interest in light,

I saw this whole sort of order of business

that dealt with light.

So that's what directed me in light toward art.

It was not until I was at Pomona College,

that's where I could find this history that's littered

with interest in light.

You look at Vermeer, very intellectual light.

Goya, very emotional light. Caravaggio.

And then Turner, who is unbelievable.

But I feel that my interest is in

the revelation that light is itself.

Light is a material. Its photon has mass.

So I like to actually depict it so you feel that.

You feel the substance of light.

James likes to say that light is something material,

and therefore, I guess, physical.

I first started by projecting light onto a wall.

If I made the space properly,

the light would seem to be in the space

rather than on the wall.

And I thought that was really a big moment.

When I was in my studio in Santa Monica,

I began to realize that there were things out there

that I should pay attention to.

I was beginning to actually understand

how light worked in space

so that actually it seemed to occupy it

rather than just be passing through.

As we go through the crater,

we're going through these different areas

where I orient to different events in light

and different colors of light.

You know, art is often something

that wants to show you something beyond,

beyond how you think at the moment.

That's why I enjoy being part of the art world,

because we bring these things into the...

we physically manifest this other world.

It's cool, it's like they've created an island.

I mean, obviously the influence of nature.

Yeah, right.

For me, it was very important that

when you come to the crater and you go through this,

this is your discovery.

I don't like to actually be there

when other people are looking, because...

somehow I confuse that.

And it's not even something that I'm especially giving you.

It's something that I have also felt and realized,

and then I have it there so that you can come to it.

So it's not mine.

It's actually yours.

Nice place with, like, perceptions.

Yeah.

You notice when you walk in and you feel a little bit

sort of like your equilibrium's a little...

- messed up, you know? - Mmm.

This is almost like a sundial too.

- Yeah. And a moondial. - In a way.

And a moondial.

When the sun passes over the rim of the Roden Crater

in the Arizona desert,

its light streams into a chamber James Turrell created,

down an 850-foot tunnel,

refracting through a six-foot lens

to project an image onto a disk of white marble below.

The Sun and Moon Space,

that's the one place in the crater

where you'll see from the dawn and you'll see from the sunset

on opposite sides of the same stone.

A lot of people forget that the moon is up

half the time of the day, half the time of the night.

We just think about it being there in the night.

So we'll be able to see very clear moonrises and moonsets

in that one space there.

"How's it going, Gard?"

"Uh, I'm doing okay."

"I don't know, do you want something to eat?

"Mmm, jellybean."

I mean, I like the interrelationships

of everything, the connectiveness.

The scale and proportion of the dome to the floor

to the projection wall.

The craft is bringing such an intimacy experience, you know?

These objects that are so far away,

the construction, the mechanic brings it in so that you can...

I know it's obvious, it's like a telescope.

It's what a telescope does. Or a microscope. But...

It's impressive.

So much of this construction

is thinking about events in the future.

I mean, these are like the ancient, simple form.

The rectangle, the circle.

I mean, these are all of the kind of concepts that

you deal with in terms of design for an effect, for...

- Mm-hmm. - ...a riding experience,

a human experience, a cosmological connection.

And then you have...

The inside of the caterpillar.

The journey of the light from the sun.

It's... Like, this is a birthing canal.

- You know? - Yeah, it is. "Mommy!"

It's, like, walk to the light.

It's like going to heaven.

An interesting feeling of sort of being below the opening,

and as we're actually ascending,

I feel like we are moving up into the...

- you know, the tube. - Yeah.

When you walk up that tunnel, you're walking up 141 feet.

So that's a 14-story walk-up.

But because it's a ramp, you don't feel it.

I wanted people to feel we are really this dream

of souls going up and down between earth and heaven,

and this idea of resurrection and death and rebirth.

All of that.

Now look what we got here.

It's turning into an oval. An elliptical shape, huh?

It looked like it was perfectly round back there, huh?

Yeah.

Oh, my God, it's, like, such a huge oval!

When did it grow?

That's just crazy.

Your perspective can change.

Yeah.

Things don't always appear how they seem.

And now these stairs make sense.

Stairway to heaven.

And that's why you have the golden stairs,

which are bronze,

into the light.

That sounds really simplistic,

but, you know, we are simple people.

And artists in particular are simple people.

Oh, no. Now it's gone from vertical to horizontal.

I mean, it's almost just a little slit now.

It's a slit in the wall.

What's going on in this crazy fun house?

Where are the clowns?

I feel like this is a fun house.

It's kind of a dance of a fun house.

It's just revealing the fun house of... of nature.

It's nature's big kid fun house.

It's a big... Look at this.

Now it's the keyhole. You can't see down.

That's not round anymore, either.

That's not round anymore.

So many mechanical aspects of perspective

which turn into metaphor,

which then with the questioning and the metaphor of the story,

enriches our lives.

Mmm.

I wanted people to treasure light,

to treasure that experience.

So I wanna have you come to it very freely and on your own.

We actually tap into things

that are part of the spiritual aspect of life.

Oh, my God, I gotta sit down.

I mean, the room's not round either.

The room's not... Of course it's not.

But if it looks round, is it round?

- Sure. - It is until you...

- Until it's not. - Until it's not.

Yeah.

So we're on the site plans?

We're on the site plans.

So, we wanna talk to you about a couple of things on this.

One, the contouring near the amphitheater

has been smoothened out for your sketches.

Just wanted to see if that's looking better to you.

Take this one, draw that one across, two of the reds.

When the Roden Crater's transformation began

more than 40 years ago,

James Turrell saw it all in his mind.

And today, about half of that vision has been realized.

Architects Udit and David now work with James year-round

to continue its construction.

James, we kind of bring his designs to life

a little bit more and then work with his teams.

We're working on the Amphitheater Space.

It's kind of one space tied together.

But it'll be for live performances, theater, music,

and then that's on one side,

and then on the other side is a live Ori.

An Ori is a scaled reproduction of the orbits,

but because we have, as James says,

all the room in the desert, we can show all of the planets.

And those orbits track across the crater.

And the whole intent is that there's a celestial awareness

of your place in the grand scheme, not just on Earth.

So the big thing for us is to figure out how...

we can realize the actual dream.

And that has to do with how things are physically made,

because even though we have to make this in the physical,

I'm still wanting to have this really work out

in terms of light, and...

how we come into it with the experience.

And that's what we're trying to work out in all this.

So beyond the design fun,

how is the practical construction aspect?

Uh, it is a...

it's pushing... it's definitely pushing construction

far beyond its typical tolerances.

I didn't know it would take many years

to finish a project like this.

You have to remember that there's this strange hubris

that both architects and artists have.

I can make a drawing here.

There's a 900-foot tunnel, 14 feet in diameter,

and that is easily drawn.

And...

And I'm able to do this and did this,

but then you have to, when you make it,

line it with concrete and then put baffles in it

to make it be accurate.

You know, we have in the mental, or we can say in the spiritual,

and then you have to realize this in the physical.

I'd like to have them just a little bit wider

than he's drawn them.

Mmm. This way?

Yeah.

He's made his plans a long time ago.

What he's been working on since I met him

is refining and expanding on it.

Sometimes I feel like he's adding a lot more...

to the original plan.

We are working to actually finish the full plans,

which is what I'm doing with Udit and David, to get...

So at least I've planned that out.

But I made a career out of being OCD.

Um...

We're getting there.

This is the Amphitheater Space,

and then you would go up to here, that's the other route.

So this is the crown. Do you guys call this the crown?

- The Eye. - The Crater's Eye.

Crater's Eye.

So it's in the bowl of the crater.

So the brain of the head.

Right.

We've seen the pivotal kind of

main axis of the Earth's rotation.

Yep.

And now we're seeing the center of the galaxy.

- Why don't we go inside? - Yes!

So this is actually a prime example of the scale.

When you look at this, it looks simple enough, right?

Kind of, but not really.

Well, you're looking at this right behind you,

so the scale of it is just completely different

to what you see on drawings.

So that actually goes all the way up to

pretty much, like, four inches down from the dome above.

How high is this dome? I can't even tell.

It looks flat.

Yeah, I think it's... Is it 28?

Yeah, 28 to 32 or something like that.

And this is cut out of the volcano?

- Yes. - The idea is that

in its end state, all of these spaces feel like they've

always been here, not that we've created surgery on a crater.

And then what's the big deal about the super chair here?

- That's not a chair. - Yes. Yes.

There's going to be a chair.

The chair's not in yet.

This is that chair that where you sit,

you'll be centered on axis looking up.

What are you gonna look at?

The center of the galaxy.

That's where you'll be pointed at.

But nothing will be focally intensified or anything?

- No. - You'll just be facing...

- Yeah. This way. - Correct.

But not projected on anything, just projected on your retina.

Your eye, yes. Yeah.

Okay.

The center of the galaxy is right back there.

It's interesting asking that question about

where they think creativity might come from.

There is something about experience.

I don't know that that's the spark of it.

James, he didn't talk about it a lot.

I mean, there's his upbringing

as, you know, his exposure to the Quaker faith.

- Yeah. - But, you know,

I did a little bit of digging on the Quakers,

and there is this focus, very much this focus on light,

and everyone has an inner light,

and I wonder if that's part of his fascination and belief

in the power of light comes from that, you know?

I mean, obviously it's significant to him, but...

- Yeah, it's the heavens, right? - Mm-hmm.

He also drew in from the natural world, right?

The color of the sky.

And seeing the full glory of what is around you all the time.

You know, he was kind of speaking about, like,

"Well, we had all this energy to go to the moon,

"but we're really on a spaceship here."

- "Look." You know? - Yeah, right.

"Watch. Experience."

"Hello, dum-dum."

"You're in space now."

Mm-hmm.

Where are we going?

We're going to the Crater's Eye.

Crater's Eye.

Are we in the central...

Yes, it's the very center of the crater.

The very center, yeah.

So you'll be looking at the sky

through the aperture of the Crater's Eye.

So... it gathers the light.

In other words, it makes the light much more intense.

Mmm.

I have sat in that Crater's Eye a few times,

and it's amazing how different it is each time.

Wow.

It's an Yves Klein blue polka dot on the ceiling.

There's a circular aperture,

and it's a rounded space.

And as the sun goes down, the sky color changes.

And I'm looking through the space and seeing,

thinking something that's beyond this world.

Wow, that's a wild color blue now.

So that sky, if I walked outside,

would not be that color.

It would be much more bleached.

And what changes the color of the sky?

Because of this light interacting with the sky.

And by changing the color of these lights,

the color of the sky would change too.

Pretty relative, yeah.

Hello!

Am I... Is it just me hearing this?

- Wow! - Yes, it's just you.

That's kooky.

You gotta try that.

Hi.

It's not... There's a little bit of reverberation,

but not as much.

Oh, it got really magnified when I was...

Ha!

Maybe you need to stand right in the center.

I'm not in center?

Ahh.

Ahh!

But you sound the same to me.

Right.

It's vibration, man. It's the... you know,

the reverberating off of the walls here.

Mmm.

Your singular breath

connecting to the breath of nature.

Keanu and Gard, looking at the aperture,

I think they were quite moved by it.

So this kind of... to me,

kind of enforces this idea of portals,

walking through and you would be in...

somewhere else.

My brain is, like, mad.

It... it's interpreting in, like...

...very weird feeling.

It talks about what it means to be,

to exist,

to be in this universe.

Ahh. How's that?

That's spaceship.

From this perspective, you really start to feel like

you're looking into the iris of an eyeball...

that's looking at you.

Looking at it, looking at you,

looking at it.

We always use light to reveal.

We use light to reveal something about things.

What is the purpose of life?

You know, that's what we're sort of asking here.

Is it our career?

Is it our family?

Is it our spirituality

and how we actually regard our life on this Earth?

That's an interesting question

that each of us has to answer on our own.

I did have a business in aviation

by restoring antique planes.

Here's one.

This is the Spartan Executive.

This was really nice. This was made in '36.

1936!

Wow!

Sit in there and you'll see how it is to take off.

I'm just gonna say, since Keanu's flying, bon voyage!

Bon voyage!

- Goodbye, cruel world! - Oh, my God!

There's not a whole lot of runway that you see on takeoff.

You don't see anything.

So you look out the side and have to keep it straight.

This looks like a lot of fun.

It is.

Have you flown it?

Yep, yeah. That's how I got here.

Is that right?

Can you speak about how flying and aviation

informed you in terms of light,

and did that inform you or inspire you in any way?

Well, it does, because there are quite a few things

that happen in the atmosphere, just like when you see a sunset.

You see even more things when you fly.

The combination of atmosphere and weather

with the sunlight is extraordinary.

The big thing is about flying in the atmosphere,

that's in the ocean of air.

The Earth is covered 70% in water in an ocean,

but it's covered 100% in the ocean of air.

And it's in the ocean air that light really reveals itself.

I was watching one of your interviews,

and this idea of being observed

and light having a property of its refraction

changing through observation.

Light behaves a certain way.

It's different, the behavior is different

when we are looking at it.

- Human looks at it. - Right.

There's no doubt about it.

Light knows when we're looking.

That is, it exhibits the behavior when we're looking

that's different from when we're not looking.

This is bizarre.

They had a good experimental model

so they could actually determine this,

but it's the behavior of light through a diffraction grating.

And when we're looking at it, it exhibits one behavior,

and when we're not looking,

it's another.

Okay, but can we just go back to why does light change

from a human observance, and what's the implication of that?

The implication of that is profound.

There is this spirit of creation.

So maybe this is a gift from a higher power,

the whatever we think a "creator" is, or...

- Totally. - Yeah, okay.

It's just cashing in to another state.

Light knows when we're looking.

Light knows when we're looking.

But that goes into, like...

Anyway. Okay.

- That's... - It's...

And what do you think about that? What does that mean?

When you sit in a chair that's looking at

- the center of the galaxy. - That's escape.

You're like...

- Yeah. - And you're becoming

moment in that thing where, like,

light watches you watch it.

That's coming one-to-one.

And then you're one-to-one,

and then that's where you can be,

because you cannot exist until you are seen.

There we go.

That's like if a tree falls in the woods and no one sees it,

- did the tree fall? - The tree fell, man.

We need to be seen.

And how you are in that moment to do that,

I think, is revelatory.

And we have to have humility and grace.

- Yes. - And joy.

- Absolutely. - As well as a good...

You need some of that too.

Yes.

Anyway, that's my Reed's Riff for the morning.

I think that's very important.

But I have to say that art is about good questions

rather than good answers.

So curiosity too, then, maybe.

And imagination.

Yeah, yeah.

I am not the same as I was before I met you, sir.

And this is a really good way, so thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for saying that.

Human creativity can manifest

in small ways and monumental ones,

and our adventure in the Painted Desert

shined a light on that scale,

separating us from what we thought we knew

and allowing a new perspective.

Meeting James Turrell was...

for me, inspiring.

Absolutely.

The breadth of his knowledge was extraordinary.

Talking about ambition and creativity and art,

it's like a true renaissance.

It's the scale of it.

Yeah.

The... I mean, I just remember thinking,

feeling the idea that designing and creating a motorcycle

is kind of small all of a sudden, you know?

I mean, I think that's part of it, isn't it?

To feel that kind of humility, to feel that awe,

this connection to something far greater than you.

Artists have always been involved

in things that are beyond.

That feeling and the color, the vastness,

the no particular anywhere to look, but everywhere to look.

And for me, you're sort of looking at

how you look and how you perceive.

That sort of overall thinking about it.

I love this life. I do love the living of this life.

Where it's the ride,

it's the flight, the sail,

and that's how we manifest.

And that's where creativity comes from.

It's the ride.