To be published in LEONARDO: Art and Technology
by Doctor Friendly, a.k.a.Aaron Wolf Baum, Ph.D.
Figure 1.
The Nebulous Entity, Figure 1, was the nerve center of an alien civilization; a mobile sculpture; a performance piece; a technological satire of our society; and a shambling mass of tentacles and bric-a-brac. A giant, post-apocalyptic pied piper, it roamed Burning Man '98 with a sea of extraterrestrials in tow, emitting fractally structured gibberish and calling into question all notions of reality, information theory and life itself.
However, I am not responsible for the Nebulous Entity.
The Nebulans began as a story told by Larry Harvey, of an alien culture incestuously merged with its own technology, scouring the universe for new sources of information. The Entity was their info-consumption nexus, embodied by sculptor Michael Christian. At the time I heard of the project, I had been working on the use of biologically-inspired algorithms to create sound. I proposed creating a voice for the Entity.
The Nebulous Entity sound system consisted of a laptop computer running software I wrote in Matlab, driving four large speakers. Its hard drive stored over 500 samples --commercials, television, radio, and movie clips, and other sounds frequently heard in our culture (babies crying, car horns, sirens, etc.). The system also automatically collected samplesfrom its environment through a microphone on the Entity itself. The software continuously generated fractal waveforms and used them to layer randomly-selected samples, playing them at varying speeds, forward and backward, and at multiple times.
The system ran night and day, giving rise to moments of great serendipity. One afternoon as a sudden windstorm rose, The Entity began to emit multiple copies of the dishwashing detergent tag line "It's not nice to fool MotherNature!", complete with a punctuating thunderclap, at several speeds simultaneously and at enormous volume, causing considerable amusement among the occupants of the surrounding flattened tents. Approaching an ambulance after the Burn, the Entity voiced a variety of siren sounds, attempting to communicate before it moved on.
Encountering a 32’ tall pulsating mass of tentacles, surrounded by a wild mob of glowing aliens in the middle of nowhere, belting out orgasmic cries and sped-up commercials for the Army National Guard is enough to give even the most overstimulated hipster pause. The Entity sought to annihilate preconceptions, and for those days in ‘98 it stomped them flat.
I have been involved with two other large installation works at Burning Man: The Futura Deluxe ('99), and Doctor Friendly's Friendly Fractal Dome ('00). The Futura Deluxe is well described in this issue by my collaborator and colleague Steven Raspa.
Doctor Friendly's Friendly Fractal Dome arose from my continued work on the use of biological metaphors to create sound. I had developed autonomous systems capable of producing fascinating soundscapes entirely from scratch –without using samples or conventional synthesis techniques. Being based on the mathematics thought to describe the original emergence of life on Earth, the sound’s primitive, evolving, and enveloping quality seemed perfect to share at the festival. I envisioned a womb-like space, inverting the usual BM environment – bright, exposed, windy, loud, unpredictable – into a sound-insulated dome, sixteen feet in diameter, lined with foam and artificial fur, dim, with four studio monitors producing a quiet mix of quadrophonic audio fractals. The entrance was a 2’ diameter tube, 3’ long, encouraging those who entered to stay a while. I envisioned the dome as a perfect place to lie back and think, listening to the shifting fractals the way one stares into a fire -- the mind finding patterns and tries to make sense ofthem, sending thoughts in new directions. The dome got rave reviews, and was jammed full for the whole week; as many as 2000 Burners experienced the work. A streaming stereo version of the soundtrack is available at EternalNovelty.com.
Thank you,
Doctor Friendly