The Voice of The Nebulous Entity

The Nebulous Entity was the nerve center of an alien civilization, a mobile sculpture, a performance piece, a technological satire of our society and a shambling mass of tentacles and bric-a-brac (Fig. 2). A giant, post-apocalyptic Pied Piper, it roamed Burning Man 1998 with a sea of extraterrestrials in tow, emitting fractally structured gibberish and calling into question all notions of reality, information theory and life itself.

The Nebulans began as a pageant play, a story told by Larry Harvey of an alien culture incestuously merged with its own technology, scouring the universe for new sources of information. The Entity was their information-consumption nexus, embodied by sculptor Michael Christian. At the time I heard of the project, I had been working on the use of biologically inspired fractal algorithms to create sound. I proposed creating a voice for The Entity.

The Nebulous Entity sound system consisted of a laptop computer running software that I wrote in Matlab to drive four large speakers. Its hard drive stored over 500 samples—commercials, television, radio and movie clips, and other sounds frequently heard in our culture (babies crying, car horns, sirens, etc.). The system also automatically collected samples from its environment through a microphone installed on The Entity itself. The software continuously generated fractal waveforms and used them to layer randomly selected samples, playing them at varying speeds, forward and backward, and at multiple times.

The system ran night and day, giving rise to moments of great serendipity. One afternoon, as a sudden windstorm rose, The Entity began to emit multiple copies of a margarine-commercial tag line, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!" complete with a punctuating thunderclap, at several speeds simultaneously and at enormous volume, causing considerable amusement among the occupants of the surrounding flattened tents. Approaching an ambulance at the Burn (the burning of the 40-ft wooden Burning Man sculpture takes place at the end of the event), The Entity voiced a variety of siren sounds, attempting to communicate before it moved on.

Fig. 2.

Michael Christian, The Nebulous Entity, mobile installation, 1998. The voice of The Nebulous Entity: laptop computer running Matlab-based software, four self-powered speakers, microphone, mixing board.

(Sculpture © Michael Christian with Cristina Harbridge, Jay Kravitz, LoriAnn Huft, KaosMiKitty, Todd Curtis, David Andreas, Jim Fuhrer and crew. Lighting by Jeremy Lutes. Sound system © Aaron Wolf Baum. Photo © Gabe Kirchheimer.)

Encountering a 32-ft-tall pulsating mass of tentacles, surrounded by a wild mob of glowing aliens in the middle of nowhere, belting out orgasmic cries and sped-up commercials for the Army National Guard, is enough to give even the most over-stimulated hipster pause. The Entity sought to annihilate preconceptions of standard culture, and for those days in 1998 it stomped them flat.

I have been involved with two other large installation works at Burning Man: The Futura Deluxe (1999) and Doctor Friendly's Friendly Fractal Dome (2000). (The Futura Deluxe is described in this section by my collaborator and colleague Steven Raspa.) Doctor Friendly's Friendly Fractal Dome arose from my continued work on the use of biological metaphors to create sound. I had developed some autonomous systems capable of producing fascinating sound-scapes entirely from scratch—without using samples or conventional synthesis techniques. Being based on the mathematics thought to describe the original emergence of life on earth, the sound's primitive, evolving and enveloping quality seemed perfect to share at the event.

I envisioned a womblike space, inverting the usual Burning Man environment—bright, exposed, windy, loud, unpredictable—into a sound-insulated dome, 16 ft in diameter, lined with foam and artificial fur, dim, with four studio monitors producing a quiet mix of quadraphonic audio fractals. The entrance was a 2-ft-diameter tube, 3 ft long, encouraging those who entered to stay a while. I envisioned the dome as a perfect place to think, with listening to the shifting fractals similar to staring into a fire, the mind finding patterns and trying to make sense of them, sending thoughts in new directions. The...