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Jessica’s talk had some very interesting AV components. At one point, she played a great series of audio samples with accompanying waveplots. I was a little underwhelmed by her engagement with the technical side of her work—maybe she was nervous, but it seemed at times as though she was deliberately trying to sound “technical,” something that makes me immediately suspicious.

Much of Jessica’s talk was about the change in technology from the 1960’s to the present: transistors are smaller, memory is bigger, and the like. It didn’t relate much to anything else, except that it was an interest of hers, which I suppose we did all show up to listen to…at a couple points she used the strange example of cars to compare to the progress that computers have made: cars still do the same thing, cost about the same, run on gas, etc. More than a few people in the (mostly MIT-student) audience looked as confused as I that we were making this comparison.

I’m aware that I’m not saying much that’s positive about Jessica, even though I admire what she’s doing and how she got here. I’m a little puzzled myself as to why I’m dwelling on the negative aspects, and I think the distinction is dawning on me: Jessica Rylan is a good maker of things, and is firmly interested in the dialog surrounding her work. She has a rich relationship to the equipment she uses and the sound she makes (her website is very well-spoken), and is admirably open and involved in helping others have the same experience. Of course, the other side of all of this is that I really don’t care for her actual music—it appears as though she has taken to describing herself as a “noise band” because of the current cachet surrounding this genre, since her music rarely shares the qualities of other groups in that genre.

Altogether, the presentation didn’t go very well. Ms. Rylan’s prepared notes weren’t thorough or focused, and her remarks didn’t really get at the ideas behind her process and her music. Perhaps the entire audience would have been better served if he had made a clear decision either to discuss her artistic intent and motivation or to delve into the technical aspects of her hardware fabrication and setup, rather than paying lip-service to both. I’ve seen from this talk how someone who is otherwise in control of her direction and practice can make the mistake of showing work that is either poorly contextualized or, worse, attempting to capitalize on an audience’s lack of understanding rather than add to such an understanding.

I’ve held off on releasing this post for several months for a couple of reasons, and I’m glad to revisit it, especially since the project I’m working on now has put me in much the same situation: several times in the recent past, I’ve been compelled to “tech it up” when discussing my project with sponsors, press, or visitors. It’s amazing the kind of hyperbolic bullshit one can concoct when watching a sponsor’s interest in your professor’s opera flag before your eyes.

However, these experiences have only strengthened my resolve to be more open when discussing my own work, which hopefully will be soon (Sponsor Week is at the end of October, and I expect to have one or two projects of my own ready to show by then).

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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.

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!