48 :: generative life :: 6/13/01
It's 9:30 am or so and soon Lydia is going to need to really buckle down and work. She's already reviewed the day's schedule on her computer, checked the voicemails and e-mails that came in from people working late yesterday, jotted down the key details from those messages, and rearranged the Post-It Notes on her memo board, in the order in which she hopes to complete the tasks written upon them. Follow the notes through their descent and you get a rough approximation of the day she imagines for herself. The memo board is a map of time. George's letter. Turn over new resumes to Larry in HR. Meeting at two.
Sip of coffee. Blank mind. Her days often run like this. A flurry of activity at the beginning of the day, quick tasks, emptying, clearing, organizing. She doesn't really count any of it as work; it's more like a precursor to work. A getting ready. Then there's this pause during which she'll drink her coffee, hit Yahoo and read headlines, check her personal e-mail, sneak in what she can. Then, usually around ten, she sinks in to the duties of the day, does the stuff that's time- and attention-consuming.
Right now she is playing with AudioMulch, a sound manipulation program that she's downloaded, half-illicitly, onto her work computer. She has a tiny computer headphone plugged into one ear and a (currently inert) phone headset clapped onto the other. She's setting up a simple patch in the Patcher pane. A tiny web charts the sound: some drum loops, running through a flanger and a phaser. AudioMulch starts playing the loops she's selected and they filter through her chosen set of contraptions, shifting in minutely unpredictable ways. This is generative music: select a few simple rules to govern the play and let the algorithms do the rest. She'll let a patch run in her ear for maybe an hour, reaching up to tweak some variable every ten minutes or so. The patterns of drums govern the atmosphere of her workspace in ways that operate below the threshold of conscious awareness.
Sometimes she feels like she never fully reaches consciousness while at work. When she was at Indiana University, she majored in Communications, hoping perhaps to do some broadcasting work. Chicago's a good place for radio: she loves This American Life, which is produced by WBEZ, and WNUR, "Chicago's Sound Experiment," is exemplary— but she doesn't have any idea how to get her foot in those doors. Instead she's working as an administrative assistant (secretary, her mind whispers evilly at times) for one department of a management research center. Answering phones, constructing memos, managing the e-mail lists of the department. Using her communications skills to create a clear channel between an addressee and their audience. The actual content of most of the communications that she facilitates— the message —is of absolutely no consequence to her; half the time she doesn't even have access to it. And that's fine with her; it all pretty much bores her silly.
Drums reverberate in her left ear. This is her life. She's not sure what to do next or where she's going. This job isn't what she hoped she'd be doing, but it's tolerable. Or: it's tolerable, but it isn't what she hoped she'd be doing. She has a resume up on monster.com and a few other sites; she feels a distant hope that some weird nexus will form between her and her dream employer in cyberspace. But no luck so far. Unseen_girl, indeed.
She tries to cheer herself by thinking about Thomas; but she feels somewhat disoriented even about him. She'd figured that their kiss at the Phill Niblock show had marked a shift into a relationship; she'd figured that something would follow— a night spent at his house, a conversation about their new status, something. But no. She'd driven him home, expecting him to invite her in, but instead he'd just kissed her awkwardly at the corner of his mouth, said I had a really nice time and went in. The next weekend they planned to get together via e-mails but she got busy with work towards the end of the week and failed to push the plan into coalescence. And this week his e-mails have been infrequent, distant-sounding. Reference to their kiss or any kind of new status to their relationship is conspicuously absent. And now she doesn't want to e-mail him because she doesn't really know what the fuck is going on in his head. Gah.
She looks at the web of sound. Complex systems— that's what they call systems like these, ones that generate upwards from a few simple ground rules. And yet she envies their simplicity. She would give a lot, right now, to be able to find a few basic parameters that she could accept as governing principles for her life. Then she could let all the details fall into place, generate up from them. But what could those principles be?
The phone headset chirrs to her.
—Delphi Management Resources, she says. —How may I direct your call?
Further Reading ::
Information Prose : A Manifesto In 47 Points ::
A manifesto, outlining some of the aesthetic goals behind Imaginary Year, can now be read here.
