Dream d274-s: Notebook entry:

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was inside the spherical sound installation again, but this time I had been inside the ceremony long enough that the experience was completely different from the first visit.

The first time I had been disoriented by the absence of direction. The sound arriving from everywhere simultaneously had been new information and I had spent the session trying to locate the sources, mapping the sphere, understanding the architecture of what was happening. This time I already knew the architecture. I went in and stood in the center and let it happen.

Lano was there, slightly ahead of me in the darkness. The installation was the same piece or a different piece of the same kind, I could not tell, the composition moving through its spatial phases, objects made of sound traveling from one hemisphere to the other. He did not turn to look at me. He was listening with his whole body, ears tracking the movement of the sound objects. When a particularly complex passage arrived, multiple elements crossing from different directions simultaneously, he said, without turning: "Complejo." Complex.

Not complicated. Complex. The distinction mattered. Complicated is many things that are hard to understand. Complex is many simple things interacting to produce behavior that none of them could produce alone. The installation was complex. The ceremony was complex. The crowd in a warehouse at the moment of sync was complex. Each individual responding to simple information, the aggregate response emergent, unpredictable from the individual parts.

I had understood this intellectually during the investigation. Standing inside the sphere for the second time I understood it in my body. The sound was locating specific points in my nervous system with each movement through the space. Not metaphor. The composition had been built to do this. The constraint enables the complexity: forty speakers arranged in a sphere, each carrying one component, the whole reassembling inside the listener. The listener is the room.

The installation piece lasted twenty-two minutes this time. Different length, different composition. The same principle. When it ended the white shape was briefly visible in the dark gap at the top of the sphere before the overhead lights came up. It was there and then the lights were there and it was gone.

I had stopped being surprised by where it appeared or how. It appeared where the pattern was most fully instantiated. The installation was the pattern in its most precise form. Of course it was there.

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Returning to a space with accumulated knowledge changes what the space teaches. The first visit to the sphere produced confusion. The second produced understanding. The ceremony has not changed. The instrument for reading it has changed. This is what investigation does over time: it improves the instrument.