So the race is on to design an efficient environment for fusion. One of Fuse’s ideas is to get a bunch of large capacitors to discharge at once, thus starting a reaction. That’s why, in our show, there were all these big caps behind the audience. (Large-cap builds are also seen in other fusion startups, such as Helion.) Fuse’s goal, as JC describes it, is to become the SpaceX of fusion, to enable “big tech” achievements with all types of partners.
Let’s go back to our story. JC contacts Serene and tells her that we are opening a second facility (the first was in Canada) and that it would be nice to have a spectacular opening ceremony. Serene, being the founder of a startup and naturally also working on musical robots, applies obsessive logistical efforts. Charlotte, being a director, does the same. Those of you with some life experience might wonder: “This sounds like an alien planet with two queens. Was it, um, a process? I won’t respond directly except to congratulate you on your finely wrought wisdom.
Now you know the basics. I’m a scientist and I don’t enjoy superstitious interpretations of reality, but a lot of coincidences had to happen at just the right time for this program to come together in just a few weeks. At the last minute we needed high-performance robots; A UC Berkeley robotics professor, Ken Goldberg, found them for us. Why does reality sometimes synchronize like this?
I used to host high-tech, high-effort music shows, often in virtual reality, in the 1980s and 1990s. I burned out. It was tremendously expensive, stressful and exhausting. I used to long for the future where virtual reality would be cheaper and many people would know how to work with it. But when that moment came, instead of relief, I had the feeling that virtual reality had become also easy. There used to be a feeling that the stakes were high. Every triangle in the scene had to be made to count, since there couldn’t be too many, even though the computer that made the real-time graphics cost a million dollars. There is a tangible sense of care in those early works.
If I longed for hassles and expenses as guarantors of what was at stake, I found them again in this show. The week before the performance reminded me of those early days of virtual reality. Late nights, which are no longer as easy for me as before, in rehearsals; Serene would be up there trapped in the cables and the mathematical dress, designed by Threeasfour, but there is a synchronization problem with the robot’s movement. With help, he breaks free, reaches a screen, and does 10 minutes of high-speed programming. The robots slide again.