A few weeks ago, my awesome friend Tinah Lai introduced me to the world of the
NASA Datanauts. It's an amazing program that NASA is doing right now, to encourage girls to explore the data science frontier through classes, fellowships and apps. Tinah got a group of friends together to show us how to put together a keyboard using some foam core, circuit boards and a mobile app. When you connect it to your smart phone via Bluetooth, you can push the keys and sound FX will play on your phone. I'm talking sound FX...from space!! Everyone assured me that the sound FX were from NASA's vast archives, but I'm pretty sure that we made contact with extraterrestrial beings and now they're super excited to come to Earth and hang out with us.
We also got to decorate our keyboards, and mine of course ended up featuring one of my
Post Modern Muses. And who better to communicate with space via keyboard than
Lady Gaga?? I'm calling the device
Gaga's Hell Piano
It's directly inspired by her extraordinary performance of "Paparazzi" on
Saturday Night Live way back in 2009. With its fierce scarlet lighting, flames in the foreground, and Gaga and her backup dancers' red leather ensembles...I'm pretty sure this performance metaphorically takes place in hell. I have my theories about what this all means symbolically, but I'll spare you all from a 400+ paged dissertation.
