Unmarked Paths
Shared Experience and the Transfer of Learning
Much of my work in music, software, performance, sewing, and finding space for experimental work has taken shape without a marked path. Sometimes I had to choose the unfamiliar route, and sometimes the field had not been explored enough for anyone to know what it could become. Each field taught me something I carried forward, but it also sent me back with new eyes, changing how I understood the work behind me and the work still ahead.
I learned that finding my own way was never the same as going alone. I often understood the work by making my interpretation visible. Once other people could see what I was hearing, the work opened up beyond my version of it. Sometimes I had to make a new lens before I could understand what I was looking at, and once that lens existed, other people could look through it with me.
One of the first things Morton Subotnick told us at CalArts was that we were there to learn from the other students, and that turned out to be less a piece of advice than a description of how the place actually worked. The classes mattered because they put us in contact with the work and with each other. A question from class did not always end when the class ended. It could follow us into a rehearsal, a concert hall, or some other room where the idea had to change because other people were listening.
In Robert Kraft’s class, analysis itself became something I could question and reshape. We were studying pieces through traditional analysis and pitch-class set theory, but I kept wanting to understand what happened when the piece was actually heard. The numbers and symbols often felt like just another way of representing what was already printed in the score.
I kept talking about this limited form of translation with the graphic designers two floors down. Those conversations moved the focus out of notation and into drawing shapes. I began using those shapes as a language for making linear maps of the piece, first with colored chalk and later on long strips of paper. In hindsight, they were basically poorly drawn spectrograms, but they helped me understand what the performance felt like it was doing rather than simply measure it. I was trying to make the performance and the music visible, not turn the score into another mathematical translation. The maps gave me something more direct to bring back to the class. We could see how different parts of the piece related to one another across time. They made my listening visible enough for other people to question it, hear the piece with me, and make connections that might not have appeared in the math. The class gave me room to keep developing that language.
That encouragement permeated the building. Something we worked through in class could spark a new performance, a lunchtime experiment, or a test of what a space could hold. We surprised the administration with Feed It Hay, a prepared piano piece in the lobby where a baby grand was fed hay and other objects as a way of making the overflow of performances in the music wing impossible to ignore. There was also a piece with a chainsaw on metal car parts. I created a clarinet-and-tuba improv duet for the famous CalArts pool, where I played the tuba part in the water and the piece was later described by the president as music made from the sound of bubbles rising to the surface. Experimentation was not only encouraged. It fed the students around it, pushing each of us to explore our own work further than we might have alone.
One of the clearest examples was the late-night tape concerts a group of grad students organized in the ROD concert hall. The hall’s schedule was filled with recitals and formal concerts, but a lot of students had new tape pieces that needed a different setting for that kind of listening. So we created the Music & Meditation series, starting after the normally scheduled events and running through the night: a dark hall, pillows on the floor, and five or six hours of tape music. We made a context where the work could be heard differently. We were not only learning how to compose for different media; we were learning how to build the conditions around the work so that it could exist. Our desire to create was stronger than the fear of newness, but it still needed a room, a community, and a form of permission.
After graduating from CalArts, I wanted that exchange to keep going. Music & Meditation gave one of the clearest models for what I carried out of school. If the right context for the work did not exist, we could make one. Music Next Millennium grew from that same impulse, but outside the school’s protection. It was a nonprofit and concert series built as a public invitation for experimental work that did not already have an obvious place to be heard.
It also struggled. We did not find the funding we needed, and after two seasons the organization could not continue in the form we had imagined. What I thought we’d built was a place with resources and collaboration, one that would keep gaining momentum as more people became involved. I believed the structure we’d built was enough to carry it forward on its own. The constraints put on the organization gave it the formal weight that was supposed to make it credible, but ended up cutting off exactly the ideas that would have encouraged more involvement and creative process. Building a space for creative work is also a form of learning, and some of what it teaches only becomes visible once the space is gone.
Music Next Millennium did not become a permanent institution, but it changed how I understood the way new work reached an audience. Some organizational structure was necessary, but too much in the wrong place could drain the enthusiasm that made the work rewarding. I started to see the edges of the organization differently. I had been trying to give the series more weight by placing it in formal black box settings, but that frame narrowed what the series could become. A living room, a storefront, or an experimental venue might have held the work differently and allowed the audience to enter with a different kind of curiosity. What stayed with me was the experience of presenting work through a form that was still finding its own language and learning what helped it gather momentum.
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The question of venue and audience came back with Extra Action Marching Band. The band was built around breaking the fourth wall, but Burning Man complicated that idea because there was almost no fourth wall left to break. Booking shows for Extra Action brought the question of venue back into focus. A more normal stage gave the band a frame to push against. It let us build a show, create a theme, set up the fourth wall, and then destroy it with purpose. From there, organizing tours to New York and Europe meant more than finding places interested in that type of performance. It was a way of bringing the band into places where its power could be felt more directly, by the audience and by the band.
That same sense for shifting contexts helped me in software development, where the ground kept changing under the skills I had already built. Fortran and Pascal, which I had picked up at CalArts, were already considered legacy languages by the time I entered the game development world. Even languages and tools I used early in my career eventually fell away as I moved from one company to another. More than once, I had to remake myself while job listings asked for five or ten years of experience in a language or framework that had barely existed long enough for anyone to have that history. The death of ActionScript was one of the sharpest turns. Flash had been a major platform for creative work on the web, but Apple’s rejection of Flash on the iPhone and iPad helped close that path faster than many of us expected.
The industry moved toward JavaScript because the browser became the shared platform. Then JavaScript kept expanding. Frameworks changed, build systems changed, even the assumptions about where data lived and how the work should be done kept shifting. At GameTek in the 90s, we had to write our own code check-in system. Many parts of the game stack that engines now provide, like collision detection, state machines, sprite animation, sound hooks, and the pipelines that moved art and code into the build, also had to be built or cobbled together. Now shared code repositories, game engines, physics systems, sound and audio controllers, asset pipelines, and automated build tools are treated as ordinary parts of the developer’s environment.
Each change made yesterday’s hard-won knowledge seem less useful on the surface, although some of it became the foundation for what was to come. What carried forward was the ability to recognize when a path was closing, find the next set of people and practices, and bring what I already understood about structure, interaction, debugging, collaboration, and creative tools into a new working language.
Now AI is changing the act of writing code again. A tool can generate code that looks finished before we understand what value it brings, or whether it belongs in the system at all. It can change where the work gets done, but we still have to know what the question is and what the answer assumes. Working with AI still requires the lived experience of making something and knowing the material it is built from, even when that material is code. The deeper skill is knowing enough about the work to recognize what kind of answer it requires.
That question made sewing feel less like a detour from software and more like another way to understand it. Sewing brought the transfer of learning back into my hands. After decades of writing software, I began making clothes because the things I wanted to wear either did not exist or did not give me enough control over the result. At first, sewing seemed like a new craft that was completely different from my software life. But the deeper I got into it, the more it began to change how I understood the work and processes I knew in software development.
I wrote about some of those connections in an earlier essay, Sewing and Software Similarities. What matters here is how sewing made learning visible again. A garment does not let a decision remain abstract. If I alter the pattern or if the fabric behaves differently than the way I imagined, the result shows up on the body. The mistake has a shape. It pulls, twists, gaps, or refuses to hang the way I expected. That kind of feedback is humbling, but it is also generous. It tells me where my understanding ended.
That learning did not happen alone. My aunt’s knowledge as a quilter entered the work differently after I had made enough mistakes to understand what she was showing me. A friend who had worked in film costuming helped me see the workshop itself as part of the practice. Even a small thing like Stitch Witchery taught me more than a trick; it was a reminder that every craft contains shortcuts, inherited methods, and bits of practical intelligence that rarely appear in the official explanation.
Sewing changed how I looked back at software. I began to recognize the places where I had moved too quickly, treated a prototype as disposable, or failed to give a problem enough time to reveal its real shape. The lesson was not that sewing and software are the same. The lesson was that learning can move from one material to another. A sleeve, a seam, a broken interface, and a piece of code can each teach a person how to stay with a problem long enough to hear what it is trying to say.
Looking back across these experiences, I can see that the transfer of learning rarely moved in a straight line. CalArts gave me a way to understand software before I knew how much I would need it. Software gave me a way to understand structure, failure, and revision before sewing made those ideas physical. Sewing sent me back to software with new patience for problems that needed more time before they could be solved. Music Next Millennium showed me that new work needs more than enthusiasm. It needs a frame that helps it reach an audience without draining the life out of it.
That is what I mean by an unmarked path. It is a place where the instructions are discovered through use, failure, conversation, and making your experience visible enough for others to respond to and reflect on. Learning transfers through experience, and experience gains its power when it is shared, reinterpreted, and brought into new materials, communities, and forms of work. A garment can change how I understand an interface. A rehearsal can change how I understand what collaboration can be. A failed concert series can change how I understand what a project needs so it can survive.
I keep coming back to the idea that finding my own way was never the same as going alone. Even when you are working by yourself, you are not without the company of experience and community. Knowledge gathers through communities of experience and through the stories people share about those experiences and what they taught them. A way of listening became a way of looking. Thinking about the right venue changed how I understood the environment a software project needed. A sewing shortcut changed how I understood precision.
Learning gains its force when experience moves through people and across ways of working.
The next path will always arrive partly unmarked. That is not a failure of preparation. Change is not a hallway someone is sent down to discover things. We make change by noticing what has shifted, putting the work where other people can explore it with us, and building enough shared understanding to keep going. The interesting part is how we meet that change. And when we can, we leave behind more understanding than we found.
