Hi everyone,

Greetings from my Pomera DM30. In the past few letters, I had partially been typing on here, on this keyboard with e-ink display that saves text files to an SD card, but I also spent a lot of time editing on the computer. I want to make my process more direct. And obvious. As designer John Chris Jones said in the 70s, reflecting on his experiments in publishing on microfiche and xerox, "Once it`s typed, it's published." How can we use these already light and fast technologies in more personal and human ways?

Photograph of a Pomera DM30, a small computer-like device made in Japan that has an e-ink display that is intended to be a distraction-free writing environment, on a bed. The corner of a laptop is seen in the upper right.

A mourning dove sits on a branch, seen from behind, it looks to the left. It is brown and lightly speckled with big dark, circular eyes.

Every couple days, usually in the morning, I have been hearing a mourning dove. Their sound is very distinct... it's soft but pronounced, like coo-oo-oo... or coo-OO-oo-oo...

The sound of the mourning dove is an instant memory trigger for me. I am reminded of childhood, of growing up near a forest and waking up in the morning, looking out the window, looking for the dove.

A mourning dove seen close-up from one side. Its circular dark eye has light blue around it like a halo.
The dove looks too

Last summer I recalled mourning doves for a project. I knew I wanted some common but special being to be the mascot of an application I was creating the visual design for.

Mourning doves have some relation to pigeons, but truth be told, they are more special than pigeons. They are slightly smaller in size and somehow more elegantly shaped and proportioned.

They also have this beautiful light cyan blue ring around their eyes. Like makeup, like a glow. So interesting their eyes are so pronounced, since I mostly know them mostly for their sound.

Two images: one of a mouring dove eye and the other a screenshot of a smalin video of Clair de Lune

The application, which is available in beta version for Android (iOS maybe coming some other time), is called Oracle Alarm. It is essentially a smart alarm clock that uses a neural network to compose a completely new melody every time it's set to go off. It was concepted by artist Harm van den Dorpel, who handed it off to me and Dan Brewster (Soft) to create or produce. I liked the idea that a mourning dove could be the oracle, the one who knew everything—past, present, and future. The master of the melodies was this modest but special bird, of course. Every morning, you could hear a new tune. Tune as fortune.

I called the app "beta" because I actually ideally envisioned it as a stand-alone object, not as an app. I know objects are hard to produce, but I like the idea of not having to interact with the whole ecosystem of your phone when you're dealing with something as important yet delicate as sleep. You might also not need to look at anything major at all to set an alarm. Maybe there would be no need for the mourning dove reference in the actual object. Maybe when you are setting it up for the first time, though, a mourning dove "coo" sound could greet you. And on the box of the product, you would see a mourning dove printed on it, with its blue haloed dark circular eye gazing knowingly.

Another inspiration for this project was the visual video created by smalin / Stephen Malinowski (musanim.com) for Claude DeBussy's Clair de Lune, which I know I mentioned in the last email. Many of smalin's videos are like this, but I feel this one is quite special in its slowness.

I liked having a visual representation of this oracle, this fortune, this completely new melody to start your day. It was like a fingerprint of the song. And I thought, since it is an app for now, we might as well use colors to convey that special fingerprint or fortune.

Design mockup of a phone app that shows three different screens with a black background with different colored blocks. To the left is a rounded square of the face of a mourning dove, looking over the designs.

But lately I don't wake up with an alarm. I have been careful not to set meetings too early. My dreams have begun to proliferate, maybe like the cherry blossoms now in spring.

I still haven't used Oracle Alarm myself, as I don't have an Android, but if any of you do, would you mind letting me know what it's like to get a new tune every morning? That is, if you're still using alarms.

Low-res cherry blossoms with yellow text at bottom that reads '[emotional music plays]'

Still from Larissa Pham's dancedancedance.html.

I interviewed Larissa for a forthcoming episode of HTML Energy this past week, and she said something like, "I'm seeing this time in quarantine as an opportunity to engage with boredom. I haven't had this type of time since I was a teengaer. But now I have it again. This poem is about the nostalgia that comes every year so strongly with the cherry blossoms, and wanting to capture it. It's so brief, that little window of time."

Maybe you noticed I changed the format of this email. That is to reflect that I mostly typed it on a Pomera with just a little editing (mostly adding pictures and links in post-production). The design is also inspired by this private blog for my friends I kept over the summer (so please don't share hehe) during my travels in Japan and Korea I simply called "Pomera"..

Anyway, I hope you are all well, and that you have enjoyed this email, which has been approximately () words in length.

Sending peace and warmth and mystery,

Laurel

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