hello world

"unspoken feelings are unforgettable"
andrey tarkovsky

My romance with the computer started early. Entering commands into the MS DOS command portal, tapping with my chubby little fingers, not sure what was happening because it felt like magic. Next came the Logo Turtle, an early digital music production program called Sessions, Oregon Trail, Myst, Riven, X-Wing, and a little known (but wildly entertaining) game called Wrath of the Gods in which the lo fi pixelated player must inhabit the roles of various Greek heroes and amble about the Grecian countryside slaying Medusa, stealing the Golden Fleece, defeating the Minotaur and sleuthing his way between the clashing rocks.

I took a class from a woman in college where we read PKD, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin and William Gibson all year long. She had a background in Medieval Literature, and her lectures tied Beowulf to Ridley Scott and back to Sappho. My excitement for futurism intensified.

When I learned about Luigi Russolo, the Futurist movement of the early 20th century, and their intonarumori, the mechanical ancestors of the analogue and digital synthesizers we use today, I felt a yearning to dig my fingers into a machine and to use that as my instrument.

I installed the program called Ableton Live on my Macbook, and when I opened it up it looked like a foreign language with a foreign alphabet. I had no idea how anything worked. Almost all of the terminology was new to me. There were dials, filters, inputs, outputs, dithering settings, amplitude adjustments, volume, gain ... I felt the weight of having so many choices, but more than anything I felt inspired that this elegant machine would aid me in my quest to make something beautiful. I just had to learn the rules, and solve the puzzle.

I felt that same way when I started learning how to code, sort of a majestic curiosity. I started to notice and think about how Bach's contrapuntal techniques and numerical symbols which he used to create his musical compositions of exquisite beauty are not unlike the languages and techniques we use today to commune with our machines. It sparked in me a longing to learn programming in much the same way I'd felt compelled to learn to make music, an intangible desire to collaborate with this object imbued with such deeply creative potential. At the root of my desire to code is my reverence for and curiosity about the systems we use to organize our selves, our thoughts, our ideas, our feelings, to express ourselves in this world. I seem to find systems of self-expression endlessly mysterious and engaging.