You Are a Topological Donut

ensemble 1.1.1.bass cl.1, 1.1.1.0, 2 perc., kybd., strings (1.1.1.1.1)
written spr. 2025
duration 8 minutes

Written for Alarm Will Sound, as part of the 2025 Mizzou International Composers Festival

Dedicated to and created in collaboration with Elicia Neo, whose humor, adventurous know-how, and creativity were essential to this piece

program notes

This piece was conceived when a good friend of mine, Elicia Neo, mentioned to me that she was learning Blender, a free animation software that, for whatever reason, seemed singularly donut-obsessed. For reasons still unclear to me, animating a donut was the Blender equivalent of ‘Hello, World!’, and the more I thought about this, the more amusing yet existential the implications became. The donut seemed a perfect metaphor for the superficiality of the digital world, distinguished as much by its immediate appeal as by its fundamental emptiness. I wondered how many digital donuts existed by virtue of Blender, and I wondered how many were used as assets in video games, films, images, memes, and beyond. 

It occurred to me that even prior to the onslaught of open-source generative AI models, there were probably more digital replicas of objects than there were actual objects in the world. Between photos, drawings, animations, emoji, and derivatives thereof, the digital realm - the virtual world, the ‘metaverse,’ or whatever dystopic buzzword is next - was ever-growing and ever-deepening in its expansive, cannibalistic project of cataloguing every conceivable thought, symbol, and idea its screen-addled users could provide. And again, this was happening at a wildly uncontrolled rate even before the likes of ChatGPT were unleashed. 

You Are a Topological Donut recounts, by way of its corny meditation stylings, a history of donut imagery. The piece begins with old-timey photos and moves through increasingly surreal animations, growing more and more nightmarish and bizarre as simulation, simulacra, and self become subsumed into a digital soup of hollow pixels. Even as it sinks into apocalyptic incomprehensibility, the music remains foolishly optimistic and bright-eyed to the very end. 

This piece was written in collaboration with Elicia, who created and storyboarded all the animations in Blender. Many thanks to her and the brilliant musicians of Alarm Will Sound, whose daring and technical craft gave me the confidence to write something so enthusiastically absurd.