Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process—right here, every Monday.

As the director of Columbia University's Computer Music Center and the founder of the rhizomatic electronic art/technology/ideas/fun-time group dorkbot, Doug Repetto wears a lot of hats---including this fetching straw one when he works in the garden.

VITAL STATS Occupation: Director of Research, Columbia University Computer Music Center; founder of dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity and organizer of dorkbot-nyc; founder and co-curator of ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show; artist
Location: New York City!
Age: 38
First Job: 7-11 where I was an underage cold cuts cutter (gross), learned how to clean coffee pots with Coke Slurpee mix, watched grumpy old cashiers steal their weekly groceries, and got horrible poison ivy when they made me mow the weeds in the back of the store. I think I made $3/hr.
Best Job: Current "jobs" are pretty great!
Greatest Professional Challenge: Lack of interest in $ vs. need for $.
Salary During 20s: $14-30k.

 Hi, Douglas Repetto. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
Some of them I made up (dorkbot, ArtBots, artist) and just started working. Getting my job at Columbia was luck and coincidence—I had decided to quit my previous gig (at Dartmouth College) to move to NYC and get a job at a record store or something and work on art. Then I happened to see a casual note at the bottom of someone else's email saying that the CMC was looking to hire an art/music hacker type. I contacted them and said you don't know me, but I'm moving to NYC and would love to be involved. It turned out that Brad Garton, the director of the CMC, did know who I was, since he was on a music-dsp (digital signal processing) mailing list I had started years before. So it all came together through lucky accidents. That said, I've found that being involved in lots of different things and participating in your community increases your chance of having lucky accidents!

You wear a lot of hats: teacher, working artist, founder and organizer of Dorkbot. How'd you get so diversified? What ties it all together?
I want to be useful. Making art can seem useless, but it ends up being useful in unexpected ways. Helping to make the world a more interesting place seems to me to be a good thing, so that tends to be my focus. I try to help students find their way, I try to put on shows and organize events that help people share their work with one another. I'm generally not very interested in distinctions between things like genres, disciplines, academic departments, high and low culture, etc. So I end up working with lots of different kinds of people with wildly varying interests. That's exciting.

 How did you get started working with music?
I grew up not understanding that contemporary art, music, film, writing, etc., existed. As a kid I had the idea that I wanted to make music, which seemed to mean that I needed to be a classic rock star, so I spent some years dreaming about Jim Morrison. I wasn't able to take music lessons, so it was mostly just me daydreaming and writing lyrics. In my late teens I read an interview with Sonic Youth in a guitar magazine, and something opened up in my brain. I started to understand that music is not only about being sad and expressing it in a song, and that sound is something you can play with and explore; it's not just a vehicle for bad poetry (although sometimes it is that, and it's wonderful).

When I went to college I met people who said, look, there's this incredible world out there of weirdos working to make the world more interesting, and the great majority of them are not rock stars. I was encouraged to stretch out, to take chances, to play, to experiment. As my interest in music and sound got more abstract I moved away from using only sound, so that these days I work with whatever medium seems to make sense for a given idea.

Did you have any role models along the way?
I had a choir teacher in high school, John Shankweiler, who allowed me to bang on the piano after school, and put up with countless hours of my teenage assoholism. I don't know how or why he did it, but he did, and that changed my life. Then in college, one of my music profs, John Van der Slice, would invite me and a friend over to his house to listen to the strangest music we'd ever heard. I look back now and realize that he had a lot of better things to do than play DJ for a couple of nerdy undergraduates. After grad school Larry Polansky and Jody Diamond, two composers who I barely knew, basically took me into their family and made a home for me and encouraged me to jump into a life of art and music. Pretty much all of the good things that have happened in my life have come via the kindness of strangers. So my hope is that I can be that kind stranger once in a while.

Tell us a little more like Dorkbot. When did you start it, and how did it spread?
In 2000 I had just moved to NYC and I didn't really know anyone. But I knew that there were lots of odd people around doing interesting things, and I wanted to know them! So I started sending out little email announcements to various mailing lists saying, hey, let's meet up and share what we're doing with one another. Art, inventions, technology, whatever. I came up with the goofy name and motto "dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity" as a way to keep things casual and inclusive. dorkbot is just a silly, nonsense word that my friend Joel Fox used to say a lot, and we're all people using electricity in one way or another.

Some of the mailing lists I posted to had international readers, and so people in other cities saw that we were having these meetings. A couple of people in London, Alex Mclean and Saul Albert, wrote and said hey, we're going to start up something similar here, how about if we call it dorkbot-london. It had never really occurred to me that it was something that would happen in other places. Gent and San Francisco started soon after that, and then a little later it just blew up and now there are a gazillion dorkbots. There's no manifesto or guidelines or membership or anything really. It's just an idea and people do with it what they like. The answer is always "yes."

 What is your typical day like?
Every day is different. I travel too much, and my teaching schedule changes a lot from term to term. One constant is that I have an ice coffee (or hopefully something similar, some heathen lands are still unconverted to the ice coffee) between 1-3pm every day. Other than that it's all chaos, all the time. Tons of email, updating various websites, maintaining the studios at the CMC, dorkbot-overlord duties, working on producing shows, hopefully spending some time in my studio working, collaborating with friends, hanging out with my awesome wife, Amy Benson. Fridays in the spring I co-teach an all day electro-sculpture class with Jon Kessler, and that's really a highlight. Depending on the term I'll teach a sound art or programming for artists or similar class a couple evenings a week. We're about to have a baby in January, so who knows what'll happen then! Chaos + chaos = chaos, so it'll be fun.

What are the biggest pleasures of the job(s)? What could you do without?
As a teacher, the best thing is watching students take off into crazy places. Most students kinda noodle around, but once in a while there's someone who just launches and soon I have no idea what they're doing or talking about, and that's exciting. It's also fun to help people do things that they never imagined were possible. Teaching someone to weld, for instance, is wonderful. The main thing I could do without is the constant intrusion of boring technology. Software updates, broken computers, flaky hard drives, email quotas, spam, etc. For someone who's involved with lots of tech, I'm really not very interested in it. Also, I wish I had a garden.

What advice would you give to someone who wanted to do something similar to what you’ve done?
Work really hard, try to be useful, be nice to people, and get lucky.

0 Comments