Week 11 Studio: Staging the work

Preparing an instrument to run unattended for a stranger, with none of the context you'd normally supply out loud

3 May 2027

Before the studio#

Bring the instrument you’re planning to show in week 12, close to final. Today is the last studio before it has to survive an audience without you standing next to it.

In the studio#

Set it running and leave the room. Come back in two minutes and see what state it’s in — most instruments that have only ever been demoed by their author have at least one silent failure mode that only shows up unattended: a memory leak from an event listener that never unregisters, a decay term that eventually reaches a stuck state, a keyboard focus requirement nobody wrote down. Fix what you find; that’s the whole studio.

Afterwards#

Write the one sentence of instruction a viewer actually needs, if any, and put it where they’ll see it before they touch anything. Everything else you’d normally say out loud has to be either obvious from using the thing, or cut.