So the race is on to design an proficient environment for nuclear fusion. One of Fuse’s ideas is to discharge several vast capacitors at once, which initiates a reaction. That’s why all these great personalities stood behind the audience during our performance. (You also see big-cap builds at other fusion startups like Helion.) Fuse’s goal, as JC describes it, is to become the SpaceX of fusion, to enable “big tech” achievements with all kinds of partners.
Back to our story. JC contacts Serene and says that we are opening a second facility (the first was in Canada) and it would be nice to have a spectacular opening ceremony. Serene, being a startup founder and, of course, working on music robots, employs obsessive logistical efforts. Charlotte, being a director, does the same. For those of you with any life experience, you may be asking yourself, “That sounds like an alien planet with two queens. Was it, um, a trial?” I won’t answer you directly, except to praise you for your finely hewn wisdom.
Now you know the basics. I’m a scientist and I don’t like a superstitious view of reality, but many coincidences had to happen at the right moment for this series to be created in just a few weeks. We needed high-performance robots at the last minute; Ken Goldberg, a professor of robotics at the University of California at Berkeley, found them for us. Why does reality sometimes synchronize so much?
In the 1980s and 1990s, I organized demanding and technically advanced music programs, often in virtual reality. I burned out. It was extremely costly, stressful and exhausting. I used to long for a future when VR would be affordable and many people would know how to work with it. But when the time came, instead of relief, it felt like VR had happened too effortless. There used to be a sense that the stakes were higher. You had to count every triangle in the scene because there couldn’t be too many of them, even though the real-time graphics computer cost a million dollars. There is a palpable sense of care in these earliest works.
If I missed the hassle and expense as a rate guarantor, I found it again in this program. The week leading up to the show reminded me of the early days of VR. Delayed, slow nights that don’t come as easily to me as they used to during rehearsals; Serene would be trapped there in cables and a math suit designed by Threeasfour, but there is a problem with the robot’s movement synchronization. With facilitate, he frees himself, walks to the screen and does 10 minutes of quick programming. Robots are soaring again.