Hey Jack. Thanks for coming over. Enter. My right hand here is waving you in. Welcome to my abode in the hills, Jack. Apprehensive? Take a deep breath and take this space in. These are special times, Jack. Special times. Take distinct note of this wooden floor. Here are planks of European white oak, stained to a hue between umber and molasses. Pantone is international, I assume … what a world. Listen, can you not feel the acoustical heartiness of this floor, Jack? I am down on my knees and caressing the floor, Jack. Join me.
Did you hear how this glass resonated as I placed it in the floor? That’s opera, Jack. Lully opera. Just below this nine-sixteenths of an inch thick flooring, not half an inch, Jack, nine-sixteenths of an inch, lies a resilient underlayment and damping compound. I forget where it comes from. Smack the floor lightly with an opened, slightly concave palm. No. Like this. See? Hear it? Lully. Let’s make our way to the bar I have set up over in the corner there, Jack. What can I make you? I realize that you are my employee, my smooth operative. Don’t feel obliged to drink but we have a lot to talk about. A lot to plan. Many names to take and many pats on the back suffered. Consider this a casual working meeting.
We are going to do this, Jack…but let’s ease into work-talk after some cocktails and cow. A lot to plan. I have much to share with you. This glass in my left hand right here, Jack…well, I poured a Sonoma County cabernet directly into it about five minutes before you knocked. How did the knock sound to you, Jack? What’ll you have? I can mix a drink with one hand. Yeah. That one caught your eye? Never heard of it? Lo! three-sided vessel so benign … you hold within a world supine … in a realm of shapes both rare and fine … its corners destined by design divine.
It’s unopened. Open it. I’ll have one as well. Grab some tumblers from that cabinet there. No, that one. Two. Do you not know what a tumbler is, operative? Yeah. That one. Two. Now flanked by wine and booze, three bodies in concert … … I now have three sides to me, like that regal bottle … Here, neat. Here’s to mighty beginnings … and to a new degree … and to providing wayward UT students, who might otherwise drop out … after no other unit will accept them, a haven. A haven … within our industrious and spreadsheeted program. Now, that flavor … hmmm … oak-kissed whimpers softly play on taste … emotions away … vanilla yogas, innocent anise … an opera of flavors, to Lully …
We were never taking your shoes off in the house people, Jack. This mindful flooring masks not the footsteps whispering upstairs … maybe the Pantone of flavors is different in Europe … IoT, Jack …
Jack, just last week I poured almost one-thousand dollars into a Roomba 980 and…as much as I worship its craftsmanship and form, I seethe slightly inside when it fires up automatically and takes to the planks of this Hershey-stained floor. It’s an odd paradox, Jack, despising a device only when it’s doing its job. The internet of things, Jack. IoT … We have a lot to plan, Jack … The three-sided booze is about forty-five dollars.
Over here. There’s a patio beyond this sliding door and the sun is half-tucked beyond the hills, spritzing gold on sprawl and I’m sliding the door open. Look at the sprawl and try to say it isn’t beautiful. It’s beautiful, Jack. There’s a wrought iron table and chairs and an Egg barbeque pit on the porch, Jack. The big green Egg comes with an app. Cooking inside an egg … IoT, Jack.
There’s a pool. That’s for later. My wife is stepping out for the evening. Not sure where. That’s her garden beyond the pool. Take a walk through it. You’ll get a sense of what a gifted and fastidious human she is. Go ahead. I’m not stopping you.
Pretty incredible garden, no? She received a killer teaching and research appointment from a big university in Ohio and I refuse to play spousal-hire for a second time in my career. Doesn’t matter. Go with God.
Trust me, Jack. My smooth operative. This right here. This right here, Jack, is the axis of everything. The still point of your new teaching life, Jack. What we are about to embark upon at UT, you and me … and Neal, with this Center for Arts and Entertainment Technologies … this collated and administratively approved academic unit, this landscaped, stapled and spreadsheeted list of courses right here … right here, operative Jack … this is the axis of everything … the still point around which the universe of all things creative tech, coding and makerspace-making whirlpool like ripples of electrons, code, luminous flux and quantum magics and converge upon the still point … … converge upon the still point and in singularity, meld and matriculate CAET students. I added the word “technology” to raise some administrative eyebrows in affirmation … internet of everything …
Lo! Our three-sided vessel beguilingly peers between vertical blinds and there’s a not-empty bottle of Sonoma Cabernet that I cannot open with one hand. Grab the wine, booze and a bottle opener, will ya’? We have a lot of work to do. Do you smoke? …
Listen. Earlier, when I was lightly beating my … hand upon this iron table in non-violent exclamation, as I was punctuating the reenactment of the sales pitch I delivered to the dean, could you hear the quality of this concrete slab of porch and the leftover white oak that girdles it? Take your shoes and socks off, Jack. Feel the cool foundation with slowly contracting toes. Everything is now … Internet of things, Jack … Did you bring a bathing suit? I’m looking through here for the coursework that sealed the deal. The wind. Hey, put the bottle here. The wind. The pages. I only have one hand … I now toast this wine glass with my tumbler, in ardor. Okay, here we are. Drink, drink, mighty paperclip. Do I have to do all the work?
This, Jack … Now this is a spreadsheet of proposed arts and entertainment courses that I presented to the dean. My sales pitch was slick. I had answers for everything … mmm … Well look at this one, course number, AET555D. Course title, KEKULÉAN MACHINE LEARNING. Description, what if we could affix all knowledge to our bodies with a bowtie-like appliance that also surreptitiously squirts water? ... Ahh, that’s delicious … AET555M: REAL-TIME REFLECTION PROJECTION. The world we see is projected onto ours. People are making digital art, video games and electronic gadgets with their minds. It happens with the help of a projector known only as, “the projector.” People got very good at using the projector but over time, they stopped using anything else. Eventually our world disappeared. Everyone used the projector. Everyone … Oh, I love this one … AET555A: KNOBS AND TEMPORAL TOGGLES. Switches everywhere. Things that make things turn on, turn off, reveal density, luminosity, temperature, and emotional attraction. Want to hunt for game, hail a cab, start Tootsie-Pop production line or send a church some money? Well now you can, all from the luxury and convenience of the present moment …There’s AET555K: RITUAL E-CHOREOGRAPHY AND TRANS-INFORMATIONAL PERFORMANCE … … Class, are you fully prepared to unstitch the threads of causation and dance on the very precipice of agency? In Ritual Choreography and Trans-Informational Performance, the green room becomes a cosmological tapestry as mosaics of motion sensors shatter the boundary that separates the natural and the rastered. This bleeding-edge course beckons the curiously bold to explore the surreal and sublime in ways that have never been motion-traced before … The dean’s poor head was like a pond, Jack … rippling as I tossed these gems at him. I think I really reached him on a gut level, mano-y-mano. Two very smart men talking shop. Here Jack, this I believe, is the coup de grâce to any bewilderment the dean may have had up to that point, AET555A: THE INTERNET OF ALL THINGS INCONSEQUENTIAL … By the end of the course, you will have explored the boring connections between all things irrelevant, critically analyzed the cultural implications of communing appliance tribes and received a charge to think up more ways to grid the ordinary. Final IoATI project will seek to connect the knot tensions of running shoes to the runner’s perception of thirst. The dean is a runner, Jack. A run-ner. Long distances, Jack. I think even a hip replacement … Showmanship … Ahhhhmm … The internet of things, Jack. I interneted with the dean …
… … Oh, how did I come up with all of this, you ask? Oh, ha! ... I pulled it all out of my ass, Jack. I am saying those exact words to you right now. “I pulled it all out of my ass”, Jack.
Here’s the thing, Jack … Academics usually only know almost everything about one thing … As bright-eyed undergraduates, they major in a topic that is broadly situated around that one thing … They then get inspired by a professor, maybe, and get smarter and ascend and move on to graduate school, past coursework, exams, exhibitions and theses and all while, with increasingly honed focus on that one thing, … become sharper and zoomed in and zoomed in and there’s the doctorate or the PhD and there it is, a dissertation on that one thing … EVEN GRASSHOPPERS PREFER BLONDES. THE ORAL ROUTE TO CURING BOWEL CANCER. ANIMITRONIC AFTER-HOUR PALM READING … Just one thing, Jack. And academics can get really fussy about … things they don’t know anything about …
This proposal right here, Jack, is but a … spiraling shape affixed to a long, retractable arm connected to a handheld device with a motor … I switched it on, and it purred … The device has sensors that measured the dean’s mildly fluctuating levels of hypnosis and of his proportional stages of insecurity, caused by the still point … the dean’s one thing, around which my presentation of all things creative tech, coding and makerspace-making spellbindingly swirled … like ripples of Esperanto, Greek and … pig-Latin … that converged … in singularity … to form the dean’s quick and monotone response, “let’s do this” … … I didn’t really have to do anything else, Jack. Maybe I didn’t … Internet of things, Jack ... There was never a chance for fuss …
… Feel that cool foundation …
I’m hungry, Jack … You? … … Let’s … open another bottle and … race. I have a bathing suit you can wear. We have … a lot of work to do. We still need to talk about how you, Neal … … … and the others who need to be hired will help me, help us, make some sense of this … the spiral … the spiral I pulled from my butt … … … Ahhh, that’s good … … … … My sales pitch was slick … I had answers for everything … There were no questions…
A runner … The dean is a runner, Jack …
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