FUTURE BLINDNESS

Some interesting (to me at least) trends in my dreams recently:

I dream that I am working on a problem involving actual objects I interact with and sometimes, more excitingly, I dream a couple steps ahead and later find myself in a sort of functional deja vu.

I will be working with an object and, when I look back at it, its geometric properties will have changed. For example, last night I was working with a bicycle wheel and when I looked at it again, the spokes were not radially symmetric—some spokes were connected to other places on the circumference, and some were missing altogether. I have been reading about Voronoi diagrams and this might be related.

In a really good dream, there is almost always a dog. Most recently, I was playing with a dog in a museum of wearable furniture. The dog took the form of a dog I know here in Somerville (hi, Drummer!) but its colors were the colors of my new shoes.

I am especially interested in the shapes that result from the aforementioned geometric inconsistencies. A shape revealed in a dream, like the gunner’s sight.

I used to have a recurring dream about floating through the schematics of a mechanism that produced a truly random audio signal. I would float through tree-like hierarchies and as I neared each one, I could listen in on what was playing (much like Max/MSP, although I hadn’t known about that yet). Each night that I dreamed further into the structure, it became clearer and clearer that the machine simply skittered between one hundred symbolic/significant sounds at random times and durations. I know it was one hundred sounds because the structure revealed itself to be ten trees of ten inputs each, with a randomized switch at each ten-in-one-out node. I drove myself crazy trying to figure out how the switching between signals was randomized.

I stopped dreaming about this mechanism when I finally floated near enough to a node to peek inside. It was a crystalline petri-dish, and the insides of each dish were a mess of gold foil electrical contacts and the cloudy honey you see on the sides of trees. There was a flap of gold, free to move, inside each dish whose motions were connecting the various outputs and inputs. Inside each node, a fluorescent bee was pushing the gold leaf around, this way and that, making and breaking the circuits. A real natural type of output.

LASERS!

Originally uploaded by AKA MEDIA SYSTEM

laser cut laptop stand, v1
- AKA

It has been difficult to find a moment to write about the last two weeks. I will try, briefly, to relate the events so far.

Last week I took Wednesday and Thursday off from Ambient to go to the all-hands production retreat for “Death and the Powers,” the opera I’m working on as part of my research at the Hyperinstrument Group. I admit it—I only got a chance to read the libretto all the way through on the night before the production meeting began.

When I had finished reading the libretto, I laughed out loud for almost a full minute. They did not know how it ended! Despite this, the meeting went well and was quite productive. I was very impressed with the creative team, and Pinsky coined a part of the (erotic) choreography “The Chandelier Position;” we got along quite well after that. I had the sense, though, that he was having his own fun with us (the technical staff) by writing into the libretto a series of known-impossible tricks (for example, the stage direction “NICHOLAS calmly removes his head from his body, and smiles at the Delegation”).

After the first day of brainstorming, we had made good steps towards a complete vision for the show’s aesthetic and production values. It was clear that after a long and exciting day of new ideas, us engineers had gone home and thought for a moment more about phrases like “those batteries will cost nine hundred thousand dollars” and “Nicholas’ arm should detach from his shoulder and crawl around” with understandable trepidation. On the second day the scales fell from our eyes, and we went through the libretto again with a pragmatic run-down of the requirements for each minute of the show. I learned quite a bit about engineers and their working process, which is different from other styles I’ve encountered but not without its merits.

Unsurprisingly, the meeting ran a little long on the second day and a couple participants almost missed their flights. (No, I don’t believe we quite finished deciding how the opera will end I was thrilled that I left the meeting much more excited about the opera than I had been coming into it. The story is wonderfully written, with a couple completely beautiful moments, the set is going to look rad, and the story itself is more compelling than the synopsis I had read months ago.

Come Friday morning I sure wasn’t looking forward to going back to Ambient to answer the phone. I hit the ground running on Monday as we began to set up the Hyperinstruments space for all the UROPs we’ll be working with all summer. This took most of the first week, during which I am also supposed to be learning Eagle, Mathcad, Solidworks, Visio, OMAX, and a few more things I have written down somewhere. I am drinking a lot of Diet Coke, and I haven’t exercised or cooked myself a meal in over a week. Today is my last day at Ambient (hooray!), so my fond hope is that this weekend I will be able to organize myself, take stock of my time the coming summer, and be able to start on Monday with a new, more productive and flexible routine. If you have any suggestions, let me know—I got the email address I was hoping for, so you can guess how to reach me!

Um

Originally uploaded by AKA MEDIA SYSTEM

Um
-AKA

Well it was about two years ago that I got to kiss Harlo outside a bar in Manhattan. I think the bar was called the Pink Cake, or the Cake Repair Shop, or something unmemorable. Certainly, I remember being there for a fraction of a second and then leaving, unimpressed.
Since then, everything has gone right, mostly because Harlo is at my side. Leaving the Finance Industry, leaving New York (we will return, though!), leaving the Customer Service Industry, leaving all my operational and strategic doubt behind has been easy because I know Harlo will support and indulge every move I believe is Right. I can only hope that I am doing the same, at the same level, for her.
I shot Harlo in the woods and she has a circular scar. We have spat at each other with mouths full of summer water. We have compared puppies and stickers and arrived at a consensus for each. We are winning the strangest game. We are growing together—head, hair, teeth all stronger and sharper. Our sound is fierce and focused. We are in lockstep, loving competition and I can’t get enough of it.