Black Holes and The Hole in My Head

So the year is passing.

I can see it spinning and disappearing down a Black Hole which might be exactly how time renews itself, or how the years slip into parallel universes. Maybe it is just Alice and White Rabbit disappearing down the rabbit hole, life pursuing impossible adventures.

It wasn't long ago that it was suggested that Black Holes eventually evaporate into nothingness, which turned the world of physics upside down. There he sat in his wheel chair among his colleagues with that perpetual half-smile and said the math confirms it, prove me wrong. Hawking later declared that both views of physics were correct because of parallel universes. Tell me the emperor wears no clothes.

Of course, physicists had been content with a zero sum game. Ever since Einstein overturned Newton (or did he?), we knew that energy was converted into mass and mass into energy. But the universe could be dissipating into...well...nothing. Where's the fun in that?

Yet, although I'm no physicist, I think someone may eventually proclaim that the universe is multiplying... and it will be true, somewhere ...at least in a parallel universe. (Actually I am a closet physicist. When I was 9, I won a prize for a paper submitted to an international astronomy contest and I have been hooked ever since.) It seems plausible that mass and energy (all the same thing, just as space and time are the same phenomenon) are continuously and incessantly becoming and cycled through parallel universes which are also endlessly cloned. It is rather like wave forms generated from nothingness into somethingness.

I have a hole in my head. I got careless and ended up with the destruction of some grey matter. Physicians said it was minor. I accepted that for a very long time. That was well over a decade ago. I recently saw a picture of this hole in my head. It looked exactly like a Black Hole sitting there a little off center of the galaxy that is my brain. For doctors it is just a matter of brain cells, but I am not convinced.

The problem with the destruction of brain cells is that you can't be sure what you lost, because you just don't know. Now the doctors are great about rehab, but there all those subtle things that have disappeared: memories, names, faces, songs, lyrics, very fine muscle memory, and on and on. Not even the doctors really know how vast and subtle this loss really is... (they seem OK if you can touch your nose with both hands with your eyes closed), and I am thinking maybe that part of me has slipped down a Black Hole into a parallel universe somewhere.

Recently I met someone who had an effect of energizing me about facing my perceived loss. It is a little like the Big Bang all over again inside my head. So I started to try to find my way back to myself. What is really strange is when I encounter some artifact or document that obviously emanated from me, I don't recognize it except to know that somehow it is collected under my ownership.

Occasionally there are some breakthroughs where I recognize a filament on the edge of my past and begin to follow it, or rather it starts to pull me irresistibly to a new place. I feel like I am being pulled into that hole in my head and slipping through it into a parallel universe, familiar, but also very strange...and there they are...there are those lost moments, memories, and musics dancing along with me... Nothing may have been lost after all.

Don't get excited. No neurologist would ever give credence to what I am describing, but I would say don't knock a Black Hole until you've gone down one. Now I know why the White Rabbit was in such a hurry!

Looking in the Windows

Something has inspired me to return to a part of myself that I had shut out after a stroke more than ten years ago, feeling that I had closed the book on that part of my life. In meeting some friends and starting to share something of that remote time, I tentatively have tried to rebuild some vacant parts of myself.

It was rather like looking into windows of the past, except that most were covered and obscure. I wasn't sure what was there. It was a weird experience. I pulled out some scores and tried to read through them... it was very painful to look at music I once knew by heart, and now had to learn from scratch all over again... and not too well at that. My fingers had no memory. However, slowly I started to play a few songs, very haltingly with lots of errors. Frustrating! Then I lapsed into improvising, something that was once spontaneous, but now was halting and insecure.

The improvising started to flow and I felt something kindled and ignited. As I left my space and went out into the city, I found myself improvising a rhythm in my head...some lyrics...Walking by the windows of restaurants and coffee houses, I looked into the windows hoping to see someone I recognised. I have been thinking about composing a new theatre piece, and suddenly looking in the windows became an extended metaphor and a text emerged:

Looking in the window…
Looking for you there
Looking at the people
You're not anywhere.

Looking in the window
Looking for your face
Looking at the strangers
You're not any place…

Looking through the window
Trying hard to see...
Looking at the people
Looking back at me.

Through the glass, I see them
Laughing as they talk…
Wish that I could be them
Instead I have to walk
Searching in the windows
Looking for your smile...
All those endless windows
Detain me for a while...

Maybe you are somewhere
Waiting for my eyes
Sitting with the strangers
In your best disguise.

Looking in the window
Hoping I will find
You inside with people,
Smiling in your mind,
As though we shared a secret...
Knowing I must see
You, inside with people...
That's how it has to be,
Me, outside the window
No where else to go...
What at last I've found
You might never know...

Defeated by the window,
Touching through the pane,
Meeting you as always
In a far domain...
Parted by the window,
By the fate of Time's debris,
The magic of your presence
Somehow has set me free.

Views from the Bridges: Pioneer Internet Artists

A collaborative Internet Production produced in a classroom studio as an Internet experiment proved to be a highly creative project undertaken by Steinhardt graduate students in performing arts at NYU. The event was produced "world-wide" to a limited audience on December 15, 2009, and is a testament to the increasing effectiveness of self-contained user-friendly codecs for interactive creative work. Huddled around the equipment and launching their ideas into cyberspace, these creators seemed more like pioneers forging a path into the future of global collaborations. In the past, such activity required extensive technical support by an institution and an army of Internet2 ITS specialists. Instead, these artists were empowered to establish their own avenues of creative exchange via the Internet.

The artists began by discussing themes that might enable them to work independently while developing their ideas around a common thread of creative work. Their study had involved collaborative work throughout the semester with emphasis on technology and multimedia production, including the technical skills that enabled them to transform almost any space into a multimedia broadcast studio.

The artists consisted of Scott Berenson, Jane Blackstone, Sunmin Kim, JoEllen Livick, Laura Montanaro, Andrew Struck-Marcell, and Julie Song, with Dr. Chianan Yen serving as a technical consultant. Their chief technical Guru was composer and audio/video engineer Professor Tom Beyer. In attendance as an Internet audience was Synthia Payne, an educator, composer, and performer. Other collaborators participated via the Internet using iChat or Skype to join the scenes in the studios. These artists were Mariangeles Fernandez Rajoy, a producer and conceptual/visual artist from Buenes Aires; Ernesto Localle, architect and animator from Buenos Aires; N'seeka MacPherson choreographer and dancer, from Connecticut College in New London; and Ocarina performer SunYoung Mun and Technical Coordinator, SungHoe Ku from South Korea; Musicians Alex Nossa, electric bass, and Michael Scheideman, electric guitar connecting from Harlem; The School of Rock in Charlotte, NC and a graphic artist from Brooklyn.


The group developed a theme around the concept of bridges. There are physical bridges that connect people and land masses, but the Internet itself becomes a bridge that dissolves boundaries and connects people. This metaphor seemed to stimulate a number of ideas. The collaborateurs (this term was coined by JoEllen Livick and seems to serve as a descriptor very well) devised a working title of Views from the Bridges. Some discussion emerged about Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge, and whether it might have any relevance to this Internet experiment. As it turns out, some of Miller's content was appropriated for Montanaro's work. With Scott Berenson serving as producer, each callaborateur then set about developing a multimedia scene with a target date to mount this creative work (without prior rehearsal) on the Internet December 15th.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect was to develop a schematic of how the Internet Broadcast would be set up, what equipment would be needed, what configuration would be used, and how collaborateurs would function during the set up, for the production as a whole, and for their specific scenes. Ultimately, these kinds of decisions set the criteria for the range of possibilities and improvisational alternatives during the production.

An effort was made to reduce the amount of stress by designing this event as a work in progress and to accept whatever challenges or impediments might arise, but to work through any problems as part of the creative process. Given the time frame, there was no time to rehearse with the distant collaborateurs, although a few quick connections were made as tests.

Six Scenes were developed with transitions between each scene improvised on the Tabla by Andrew Struck-Marcell. The scenes were:

Blocking the Box (Scott Berenson)
A View Beneath the Bridge (Laura Montanaro)
What's Up With Talking? (Jane Blackstone)
EtherSketch (JoEllen Livick)
Bridge of the Moments (Sunmin Kim)
Dreaming of Going to Korea (Julie Song)

During the performance, Jane Blackstone took on the role of moderator and M.C. Other collaborateurs worked at cameras, mixers, computers, or helping to manage scenes, as well as perform in scenes. All the artists were serving as videographers, musicians, composers, technologists, cable and adapter specialists, critics, and whatever. They managed to transform the room into a serviceable studio, despite the limited space.

Although the production has the trappings of a live-television studio production, the impact of the Internet participants transformed the space, making an interactive medium dramatically different than the more traditional media of theatres or concert halls. All of the connections with iChat and Skype worked remarkably well, and what was even more impressive, the connections were established within the time frame as needed without exception.

Julie Song improvised an additional connection by using her Air laptop to independently connect with her friends in Korea so they could view the production through her computer camera lens. The production computers were connected by Ethernet, but her laptop successfully connected with Korea with a wireless connection. This suggests a possibility for multiple simultaneous connections using many laptops with one-to-one connections that could be merged as a cohesive, unfolding, and spontaneous event.

An important component, although more silent than we would have wished (we lost the iChat connection at the end were not able to have a final group discussion) was "Synthia" Cynthia Payne aka Synthany, Artist and Educator, adept at audio and video production, editing, coordination, networked music improvisation, recording and event installation. She agreed to be our audience of one (although the other Skype/iChat connections added additional ambience). In discussing this idea with Synthia, we observed that when we have conducted these kind of on-line experiments before, the presence of even one person on the Internet expanded our sense of space and established a sense of a new and different medium. She understood this right away and remarked that the cyber connection seems to create extended space and time, altering our fundamental experience. Synthia appeared in our production as audience, sometimes on the main screem, the side screen, and most often as a perpetual resident on the ceiling.



The theme of bridges was quite successful. "Bridges" as a way of connecting, of crossing borders, of providing access, proved to serve as a prolific source of ideas and images. Also impressive was how these young artists produced everything from scratch in six weeks, including filming, editing, composing, and arranging for counterparts at distant locations and designing and setting up a multimedia environment that successfully worked as an Internet Broadcast Studio. There were lots of glitches, of course, but not really as many as might be expected. It was an experiment that tested the range of artistic expression in the context of engaging technology to enhance the expressive capacity of human activity.