The Night Fusion, Art, and Silicon Valley Remembered What It Means to Create

Every so often, Silicon Valley remembers what it’s supposed to be—raw, weird, and capable of stopping you in your tracks. That’s exactly what happened on August 8, 2024, at the opening launch for a new nuclear fusion energy startup. The day was so surreal, I wish I could dump the whole experience straight into your head like a hologram, all at once. But words work line by line, so you’ll have to bear with me as I unpack it piece by piece.

For a year or two leading up to that day, I’d felt a quiet unease hanging over tech: the whole space had lost its spark. The generative AI boom was a big part of that. It’s not just the tired question everyone repeats: “If AI can do everything, what’s left for humans to contribute?” That’s a trick question anyway—AI is built by us, from our data, after all. What bothered me more was how the all-consuming focus on AI reshaped how we think about life itself. So many of my friends were going on about using large language models to calculate the “optimal” future. Suddenly, life wasn’t a journey to live—it was just another problem to solve.

I think the way out of that trap is for us to stop trying to control everything, to step back and reconnect with the edge of the unknown. I can’t prove that argument with words, but every once in a while, if we’re lucky, we get to feel it. That day in August, we got that feeling.

The guest list was a deliciously chaotic mix: venture capitalists, U.S. military and intelligence officers, leading physicists, and underground San Francisco artists, all invited to a closed, off-the-record event. We walked through a massive, imposing vault door into a soaring, dimly lit space, where rows of guest seats looked tiny against the high ceilings. Behind us, row after row of refrigerator-sized capacitors stretched out like a dark sea. Up front, the stage set was almost impossible to parse at first glance: bright white, ethereal, unapologetically high-tech, massive, glowing from within.

Then came Serene—she doesn’t use a last name—a woman of almost otherworldly beauty, wearing a gown that looked like a physical diagram of higher-dimensional mathematics. A bundle of thick white cables rose from her back, arcing all the way up to the facility’s ceiling. The idea was that these cables would read the shifting electrical signals from her body, and use that data to remotely control a fusion experiment running in a separate location. She wasn’t just standing there passively, either: she was playing piano, with a level of skill that felt almost unnatural. It wasn’t just technical mastery—she had a weird, magnetic charisma that held the whole room frozen. Then they told us: she’s also one of the most accomplished hackers on the planet, creator of core open-internet tools like Snowflake for the Tor browser. Wait, what?

And the whole event was being directed remotely by a supermodel who was on tour with St. Vincent. I swear, that’s not a mistake.

Robots were playing instruments on stage too, moving with the fluidity of trained dancers. Two of them handled a cello, pulling a rich, warm vibrato that no one expects from a machine, and a third had a robotic arm playing alongside Serene on the piano. This wasn’t the stiff, clunky robot music you’ve probably heard before. Warped, shifting projections covered every surface, blending objects together so you could barely tell where one ended and the next began.

I was up there too, playing the unusual instruments I’m known for, wearing a white robe, a necklace strung with turquoise fangs from Morocco, and a brain-sensing cap on my head. This was always supposed to be an underground, invite-only event, but Katie Drummond, WIRED’s global editorial director, chewed me out for not bringing a reporter along. So here I am, playing gonzo journalist, doing my best to capture this wild, one-of-a-kind cultural moment.

By all rights, this event should have been a messy, disjointed mess. It had every ingredient to be a confusing, try-hard mishmash. But somehow, grace and luck collided into something magical, and everyone in the room walked away changed. Jane Rosenthal, head of the Tribeca Film Festival, was there—and she cried. Grimes was there too, her kids trailing after her on the floor, all of them frozen in awe. One of them said it must be what monsters listen to, and that’s as good a description as any.

No two people remember how all the pieces came together the same way, but this is what I recall. I got a text out of the blue from Charlotte Kemp Muhl, the supermodel. Let me tell you who Charlotte is: she’s been on every major magazine cover and billboard across the world—I remember staying in a New York City hotel once, and she was 12 stories tall on the side of the building across the street, I think for a Maybelline ad. But that’s the least interesting thing about her. She’s a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer. For years, she’s made music with her long-time partner Sean Ono Lennon in bands like The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, and right now she’s the bassist for St. Vincent. Those two put on some of the wildest, most experimental shows you’ll ever see. She’s also a brilliant, unapologetically weird music video director, working with artists like Adán Jodorowsky. She’s more cyberpunk than any fictional character I’ve ever read—she talks a mile a minute in a flood of surreal metaphors that leave you reeling.

How do I know Charlotte? It feels like everyone in Hollywood and Silicon Valley crosses paths with her. For me, it was through Sean. Back in the 1980s, when Sean was just a kid, Yoko Ono brought him to my startup to try a VR demo. He showed up wearing a rainbow-frilled coat, just like the biblical Jacob, and Yoko made alien vocalizations while she tested the VR headset. And how did I know Yoko? Back in the late 1970s, when I was a teenager, I ran in her circle in New York, organizing late-night impromptu experimental music performances with people like John Cage.

So one day Charlotte texts me a photo of Serene, in that insane dress with cables coming out of it, and tells me I’m playing in the show—this is all part of the plan they’ve cooked up.

Serene is almost impossible to put into words. She’s a world-class concert pianist. Not long ago, I saw her sit down and play an impromptu set on the lobby piano at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, and after she finished, no one would let her leave—everyone had to talk to her, ask who she was, what they’d just witnessed. She’s like the Higgs boson of pianos: she just pulls everyone into her orbit.

Her talent is almost unfair. I play piano too, and Serene’s skill is honestly annoying to be around. She can sight-read the most insanely complex pieces on the first try, and masters even the most notoriously difficult works without breaking a sweat. Remember the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto—the one that drove the main character insane in the movie Shine? Serene learned it like it was a children’s lullaby. She’s an official Bösendorfer artist, an ambassador for the most expensive, elite piano brand on the planet.

And as hard as this is to believe, she’s also a brilliant computer scientist. Google hired her straight out of high school, and she was the first engineer at Google Ideas. Now she’s running a soft-launched startup called Snowstorm that supercharges the capabilities of the Snowflake data platform. She obsesses over every tiny detail of user experience, torturing herself over the nuances of font choice and color palettes. Watching her code is just like watching her play a complex concerto—she’s so fast it looks like someone sped up the video.

Earlier in 2024, I was at the Tribeca Film Festival for a panel with Natasha Lyonne, when Darren Aronofsky pulled me aside and told me I had to come to a startup showcase run by his partner Alice Lloyd George. Alice runs a venture fund, and the startups were set up in booths in a gallery space. There were these weird, organic projections on the wall from artist Koto Murai, who’s best known for his collaborations with Grimes. Koto also works with Serene, who he’d invited, and I’d brought Charlotte along—so the three of us met right there, that day. It feels like that meeting was too random to ever happen, but artist Dustin Yellin captured it in a photo, so I know it’s real.

Charlotte and Serene clicked instantly—it felt like they were always meant to work together. When those two are in a room together, there’s so much glamour and creative energy I sometimes have to close my eyes just to think straight.

Turns out Charlotte and her team had already been developing robots for experimental music, a collaboration they call Finis Musicae. Sage Morei led most of the design work, Nader Shokair built most of the hardware, and Fredrik Gran is the robot motion artist who also invented the incredibly flexible robot hands that are perfect for holding cello bows and pressing fingerboards.

Still following me? Next, Serene met JC Btaiche at one of those classic Silicon Valley networking dinners that bring founders together. JC is a precocious young CEO—he was only 19 when he founded his fusion startup, Fuse. You probably remember that in December 2022, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory pulled off the first ever net energy gain from a fusion reaction: more energy came out than they put in. In theory, that means unlimited carbon-free energy, which could be our ticket out of the climate crisis. But there’s a catch: when you count all the energy that goes into running the massive lasers and supporting infrastructure needed to pull off that reaction, there’s no net gain at all. We can only benefit from Lawrence Livermore’s breakthrough once the surrounding technology gets far more efficient.

So there’s a global race to build that efficient supporting infrastructure. One of Fuse’s key ideas is to discharge a large bank of massive capacitors all at once to kickstart a fusion reaction. That’s why all those big capacitors were sitting behind the audience at our event—you’ll see the same setups at other leading fusion startups like Helion. JC says Fuse wants to be the SpaceX of fusion: pulling off world-changing “big tech” progress by partnering with everyone who wants to contribute.

Back to our story. JC reached out to Serene and said they were opening their second facility (the first was in Canada) and they wanted a truly memorable opening ceremony. Serene, a startup founder herself who’d already been working on music robots, poured all her obsessive energy into logistics. Charlotte, as the director, did the same. If you’ve ever planned a big creative event, you’re probably wondering: “Two hyper-creative, visionary leaders? That must have been a wild process.” I won’t answer that directly, except to say you’re very wise.

I’m a scientist, and I don’t go for supernatural explanations of how things happen, but I still can’t get over how many coincidences aligned perfectly, at exactly the right time, to pull this whole show together in just a few weeks. At the last minute, we needed high-performance robots—and Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at UC Berkeley, just happened to have exactly what we needed, and got them to us on time. Why does reality sometimes sync up like that, when you need it most?

Back in the 80s and 90s, I used to put on these big, ambitious high-tech experimental music shows, a lot of them in VR. I burned out hard. They were unbelievably expensive, incredibly stressful, and utterly exhausting. I spent years waiting for the future when VR would get cheap and accessible, when lots of people would know how to work with it. But when that future finally arrived, I didn’t feel relieved—I felt like something was missing. It was all too easy now. Back in the early days, every show felt high-stakes. You had to make every single triangle in your 3D scene count, because you could only have so many, even when the real-time graphics computer cost a million dollars. Those early works have a tangible sense of care that you don’t see very often now.

If I’d been craving that old high-stakes, sweat-and-hustle energy that tells you you’re part of something that matters, I got it back with this show. The week leading up to the performance felt just like those early VR days. We pulled all-nighters in rehearsal, something that’s a lot harder for me now than it used to be. At one point, Serene was trapped in her cables and that mathematically-designed gown from Threeasfour, and the robot motion was off by a few critical beats. With a little help to get free, she walked straight to a screen, cranked out 10 minutes of high-speed coding, and suddenly the robots were gliding across the stage again, perfectly in time.

Most of the program was Serene playing classical works. There was a stunning, heartbreaking arrangement of Dido’s Lament for three hands—two from Serene, one from a robot. It’s the closing aria from Henry Purcell’s 1680s opera, and it’s a masterpiece. It’s told from the perspective of a woman who burns herself to death after her lover sails away. I used to think it was just a male fantasy: women love us so much they’ll die without us. But this performance redefined it for me. In the original, Dido sings, “Remember me, remember me. But ah, forget my fate.” It sounded like humanity screaming, the way people do when they think AI is a giant alien invader that’s going to take over everything. But the truth is, Dido never had to kill herself. She would have been fine on her own. And humanity doesn’t need to scream about AI, either. AI is made of us. We can make it safe, as long as we remember who we are.

I played a couple of duets with Serene: a piece by György Ligeti, and an improvisation. I brought three instruments with me: a contrabass flute, because its big curved metal joints looked just like the joints on the robot arms; a glissotar, a new kind of 3D-printed slide saxophone from Hungary; and a Terra, a weird, wonderful synth from Soma, one of my favorite new instrument makers, that looks like a slice of tree trunk with little golden bumps on it. There were moments I felt like I was channeling Sun Ra, that wild experimental pioneer.

Of course I can’t prove to you this show was as magical as I’m saying it was, but you can find clips online and get a sense of it for yourself. Judge for yourself.

When tech makes every part of life infinitely convenient, we end up busy in all the wrong ways, with no meaning to our rush. I fully expect the future to be full of people spending all their time typing endless strings of letters and numbers just to verify their identity, because we’ll use AI to bioengineer flying beetles that mess with Sam Altman’s metal eyeball biometric gadgets. But at our show, where we had all this pressure on us to show up and be present, to be responsible for what we made, we felt busy in the right way—busy with something that mattered. And that’s when a different kind of future peeked through the fog. It’s not dark and dystopian. It’s not phony. It’s ethereal. It sends out aesthetic signals that we feel, even if we can’t name or understand them. That’s what it means to “get smaller,” to step back from trying to control everything.

I was asked to say a few words that night, since I’m known as a talker around Silicon Valley. It only took a few sentences for that audience full of national security officials: “Thank you so much for bringing art into a facility built for national security. Beyond defending life, we have to make a life that’s worth defending.”

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