This was an unusual project in that I wrote a script rather than a score. Phil Soltanoff, with whom I have collaborated on several major projects, challenged me to write a keynote address to be delivered by William Shatner, giving me carte blanche as long as it was about art and technology. The catch was I could only use words that Shatner spoke as Captain Kirk on the original Star Trek series. Phil and Rob Ramirez (video system programmer) had unleashed an army of interns to cut up and log all the Kirk clips, and I was then given a small lexicon of about a thousand words to work from. What followed was one of the more tortuous episodes in my creative life as I tried to solve a problem not unlike the world’s biggest crossword puzzle: how to mangle Kirk’s mostly monosyllabic commander-speak into a fluid, intellectually stimulating thought piece on the nature of human endeavor in an era of rapid technological transformation. After weeks of those nauseating dreams where one repeats the same vague operation ten thousand times to arrive at nothing, I heaved a hail mary. Imagining the algorithm amazon.com uses to decide what I might like, I input Kirk’s entire vocabulary in alphabetical order. To my relief, it output the script as an uninterrupted stream.
Originally commissioned by Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX) the Shatner project was then presented by the COIL Festival (NYC), PuSh Festival (Vancouver), and Mass Live Arts (Great Barrington).