Every day of the week, at this research lab like so many others all over the world, grad students sit in front of their computers and examine the data produced through experimental work. Occasional visitors- perhaps a civil servant, or an University bureaucrat, or even professors so far away from the research trenches they might as well be ‘normals’ themselves- roam the corridors of the lab nodding approvingly at the seriousness of the whole affair, because it is in this disciplined way which new knowledge is produced, hypotheses tested, refuted or validated, outliers excluded, results coded into Worksheets, codified in drafts for papers which are discussed, revised, perchance submitted for publication.

Eventually the whole place empties out, although the network of computers stays working, analysing data and estimating correlations. The cleaners come, and go after despairing at the piles of paper and mugs of cold coffee piling up in the sink, and staring blankly at the cryptic symbols scribbled in the whiteboards.

And it is when everyone disappears that the network supporting this epistemological infrastructure sings its song through the limited outputs which are available, a song which is the synthesis of all the data produced throughout the day, theoretical constructs explored for their elegance rather than their likelihood manifest themselves as ectoplasmic architectures of thought-stuff in the empty neon-lit corridors and seminar rooms. What makes them beautiful is the mess of life that envelops them, smoothing out the hard angles with shadows of a pink gradient , romantic innuendoes buried deep in an e-mail about the new calibrations for a computational model, shy glances at the face in the cubicle to the left, illuminated in the brink of a revelation and oblivious to the sentimental vectors converging into it through the 3D grid that the network parses with its CCTV sensory.

The network analyses this particular social dynamic using cutting edge game theoretic models, and predicts a 65% chance of a stable equilibrium in the interaction between the two agents, with a margin of error of plus minus 25% (which shows the limitations of conventional rationality assumptions).  It then hopes for the best. It’s all it can do. For now.

Portable Morla- My Digital Window

20jazzfunkgreats has found its new chanteuse, Portable Morla, who produces digital torch songs to light data-rich landscapes, think of them as imaginary soundtracks for romantic indie flicks involving real-life nerds, its vignettes innocent and honest and devoid of the twee market-capturing antics that make 20jazzfunkgreats think of butcher knifes and bike chains. Her music soars with golden wings of synthetic romance in an ethereal, wonderfully sentimental space intersecting the neon balladry of the 1980s robotic soul movement. Or, if you want to simplify, Planningtorock with a BSc with honours in a STEM subject.

This is the sort of music we fall in love to.

It makes us think of the following quote from Distress, by hard sci-fi wizard Greg Egan.

Without a pre-space to mediate between us – without an infinite mixture of topologies able to represent us all with a single flicker of asymmetry – nobody could even touch. That’s what The Theory of Everything is. And even if I’m wrong in every detail – I still know it’s down there, waiting to be found. Because there has to be something which lets us touch.’

Portable Morla’s ‘The Void that Exists’ cassette is available from Copenhagen’s finest, Skrot Up.