Devs

I ran across the miniseries “Devs” the other day. I like that genre, anything Sci-Fi Thriller is right up my alley. And of course I love Nick Offerman from Parks and Rec. At first I thought Alison Pill was Kristen Bell. I enjoyed the Good Place for most of its run. I didn’t see her name in the credits.. and I looked up who Alison Pill was… I had seen Alison Pill in Star Trek - Picard! The doctor, the cyberneticist! Of course.. her time as a Borg was perfect. I had already fallen in love with her. I didn’t know the other actors.

SPOILERS FOR SURE, DON’T READ AHEAD

Unknown to me, the miniseries would affect me far more than I realized. It made me nostalgic, sending me back into my own past, while leaving me feeling anxious but hopeful for things to come. A reminder of who I was, what I had wanted, and maybe what I still want, but forgot. It had me stumbling into an intersection of interests I’d carried with me since my time around UCSC: AI, generative music, quantum mechanics, determinism, and the people who were exploring those ideas.

As the first couple of episodes unfolded, I told my lady, Beth, who was watching it with me, that Devs had the feel of this movie I’d seen. I couldn’t remember the name of it at the time – it was about a rich, megalomaniacal tech mogul. It was “Ex Machina” - I had never looked up the writer at the moment, but now I realize the writer for Devs is the same writer as Ex Machina. Michelle Day’s name caught my attention first. I looked her up and saw she had done the set decorations for both the Devs and Ex Machina. I loved it!

As the show moved between the offices and sweeping shots of redwoods and the buildings, I told my lady, “I swear that looks like UCSC!” I love the campus. I had to google the filming location and omg.. it was UCSC. I used to be an IT guy on the campus. McHenry was where I had spent a lot of time… walking back and forth from Science Hill and of course that field past the music rooms and the Chancellor’s house was one of my favorite places to go. I immediately had to pull up google maps and show my lady the places. There is nothing like the contrast between the brutalist architecture, the redwood forest, and the immense Great Meadow that gives way to the ocean. And the Quarry! I miss it all so very much. I dream of being back there.

The offices in the show were filmed at McHenry. The building that houses the quantum computer left me wondering whether it might be an architectural reference to the Music Center. The building appears to have been composited beyond a bridge, surrounded by redwoods, isolated in the middle of the Great Meadow. The bridge is probably acting as some metaphor too.

I loved to make field recordings with my stereo microphone and DAT recorder at the time. Professor David Cope worked there. He was a groundbreaking pioneer in AI-generated and algorithmic music. Professor Peter Elsea was there as well, director of the electronic music program and developer of LObjects for Max/MSP. I love Max and PureData, both created by Miller Puckette, but we’ll get into that later. David Cope and Peter Elsea were pioneers of their time and they both worked when I was there. I had always wanted to take David Cope’s class in LISP and music.

I made a field recording inside the hallways outside David Cope’s office and the practice rooms and outside their buildings and such. I adored it. I wish I could have been a student there. Jaron Lanier had even given a talk at UCSC and one of the questions from the crowd was what he thought of David Cope’s AI/algorithmic/generative music. Jaron had said he didn’t think it was music and that it had no soul. I disagreed with him. In my mind, Cope had written the algorithm, and that in itself provides the soul.

The show references the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics, also known as the pilot-wave theory. During this time in Santa Cruz, I had been reading, or trying to read, books by David Bohm and his theories on quantum mechanics and how we might interpret them. Not that this has anything to do with the pilot-wave theory, but I became fascinated with Bohm’s ideas of the implicate and explicate order. And how nouns don’t really work well for describing the world around us and instead we should be using verbs for everything, but that kind of breaks English in a way. Like how everything is in motion and is different from when it is at this point and then at another point in time. In the miniseries this concept might be represented when Lilly’s dad mentioned how when we enter a stream it’s never the same stream and we are never the same person entering that stream.

Already enamored with the details of the miniseries, I was floored when they played Steve Reich’s tape loops! Loving that style of music—from John Cage, David Tudor, and others—I also loved Steve Reich! In fact I used this specific tape loop as homework for a synthesis/music class at Cabrillo College. I have “to show them, to show them, to show them” laser-printed into my brain tissue.

Another weird and quirky fact is that I once lived in the house where members of the Eudaemons developed the wearable computer the designed to hide in a shoe to predict roulette wheels. Was this determined? 707 Riverside Ave.

I made the mistake of reading what the internet thought of the miniseries.

I read that Alison Pill’s acting was horrible and her face was like a brick. Before I even read that… I thought her acting was amazing. I thought maybe she was an android for a second, but then figured that this show didn’t venture into that realm. Instead I realized, after a few episodes that her character had watched the same future unfold over and over and that this was her going through the motions… she was bored of this shit already. She had already gone through the shock and ego loss that occurred when she found out that she has no choices and that everything is determined. It was perfect… her lack of any feelings, just following along with the trauma of knowing what happens next. A painful acceptance into a realm of boredom and meaninglessness. Forest seemed to act that way too, but he dealt with the boring future with a bit more whimsy.

Finding out the homeless person was a Russian operative was very cool.

I look forward to watching the mini-series over again.