{"id":7426,"date":"2017-06-07T03:00:23","date_gmt":"2017-06-07T11:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7426"},"modified":"2017-06-07T03:00:23","modified_gmt":"2017-06-07T11:00:23","slug":"proof-of-principle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7426","title":{"rendered":"Proof of Principle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dateline Munich. Scribbled in a near-coma while sitting in a chair which has been designed by aliens who obviously never looked at a human body.<\/em><\/p>\n

Which is to say, at an airport…<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"\u00a0\"<\/a>

\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

Something slipped under my radar last week. I was nose-deep in “Freeze-Frame Revolution” and the upcoming Ratio talk, and when I looked up to find my way to the airport, “Fish To Mars” had hatched.<\/p>\n

It’s still larval, mind you. Eighty percent yolk sac and 10% big round eyes. But there it was, wriggling in the current for an hour on the evening of May 31: a live trailer-for\/excerpt-from next year’s (hopefully) full-blown production “Fish To Mars” belted out\u2014 appropriately enough\u2014 amongst the seals and lumpfish of the Bergen Aquarium.<\/p>\n

I’m writing the story. It involves terrorist vegan gengineering and academic hierarchies and marbled lungfish and autocannibalism.\u00a0 Also terraforming and First Contact with aliens who showed up on Earth long before Kubrick’s transcendent monolith-makers, and who\u2014 being not very bright\u2014 bet on an utterly wrong horse. There’s a lot of story, a lot of backstory, and yet the story almost seems to be the least<\/em> of it. It’s an actual opera, you see; a fusion of classic high-pitched arias and growling distorted black-metal grunge. There’s music, and a libretto. There are singers and sets and costumes\u2014 relatively primitive at this stage, the event was basically a proof-of-principle exercise after all\u2014 and scientific fact-checking courtesy of\u00a0 a number of real<\/em> authorities, not the least being the co-discoverer of Dark Energy<\/a>. We’re after verisimilitude, here. This aims to be the most scientifically-rigorous opera about alien lungfish on Mars ever written.<\/p>\n

It is a high bar to clear.<\/p>\n

The production is so multifaceted that the story itself is really more seed than structure; the actual production was built by people from a half-dozen institutions and I-don’t-know how many independent agents and artists.\u00a0 It was an orgy of musical collaboration between Oded Ben-Horin<\/a> (on the classical side) and Arild Brakstad<\/a> (on the black-metal side), all of us herded by the award-winning jet-setting Karin Pittman<\/a> of the University of Bergen (and who honestly seems way too connected for your average marine biologist\u2014 I’m starting to think that’s a cover identity or something).<\/p>\n

Really, it shouldn’t have worked. But I’ve heard some tunes, and I’ve seen the pics, and\u2026well, yes. It really seems to have turned out nicely. Wish I could’ve been there.<\/p>\n

All the following photos are by Jarle Hovda Moe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The set was really cool.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"...although<\/a>

…although admittedly, some of the props could have used a bit more work.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"JHM_8739-small\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"JHM_8742-small\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"JHM_8969-small\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"JHM_8829-small\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"JHM_8788-small\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"I<\/a>

I think those were scientists on the left. And the guy with the bowling ball on his head is either an engineer or the most overqualified post-doc in the solar system.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"I<\/a>

I think this might be kind of a post-apocalyptic Greek Chorus.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"I<\/a>

I don’t actually now if this is part of the performance or not, but it looks cool.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"This<\/a>

This is Karin, who set the whole thing up. And something else I got a PhD in once, but I’ve forgotten the details<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dateline Munich. Scribbled in a near-coma while sitting in a chair which has been designed by aliens who obviously never looked at a human body. Which is to say, at an airport… Something slipped under my radar last week. I was nose-deep in “Freeze-Frame Revolution” and the upcoming Ratio talk, and when I looked up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,35,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art","category-on-the-road","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7426"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7456,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7426\/revisions\/7456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}