Tod Machover’s parents were a pianist and a computer scientist, so perhaps it’s not very surprising that when the doors of the MIT Media Lab first opened in 1985, Machover was hired as a Professor of Music and Media in charge of the Lab’s Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future group. Among other accomplishments, Machover has invented a device called the “Conductor’s Glove” which permits the user to assert control over an entire music studio, somewhat in the manner of Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report.

Oh, Minority Report—funny resonance, there. Minority Report, of course, was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, the same author who was responsible for the basis of one of Machover’s best-known works, an opera adaptation of Dick’s 1980 masterpiece VALIS.

VALIS may be the work of Dick’s that is the most satisfying combination of Dick’s visionary ideas about technology and the fragile state of reality and his own life, which took a turn towards the messianic in 1974. That year Dick experienced a series of intense visions that were specifically sparked by an emanation of “pink light” glinting off of a Christian fish necklace worn by a woman delivering a package. (For more on Dick’s epiphanic episodes, check out R. Crumb’s comic “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” or, even better, Dick’s Exegesis.)

The core of VALIS is the “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” that is likely Dick’s best approximation of God, which features an Earth satellite that uses “pink laser beams” to transmit information to human beings on Earth and to forge links between humanity and an extraterrestrial species. Among other things, in Dick’s book, VALIS is the entity that enabled humanity to become aware of and take action against the Watergate break-ins executed by the Nixon administration.

As far as personal connections to the work go, Dick named the protagonist of VALIS Horselover Fat, which sounds bizarre but is actually a sneaky reworking of Dick’s own moniker. The name “Philip” means “lover of horses,” and “Dick” is the German word for “fat.”
 

A scene from the 1987 Pompidou Centre production of VALIS
 
In 1987 Tod Machover adapted VALIS as an electronic opera. It was first performed at the Centre Georges Pompidou, with live singers and video installations created by artist Catherine Ikam. Interestingly, you wouldn’t necessarily peg Dick as an opera lover but VALIS actually contains several extended discussions about Wagner’s Parsifal. The New York Times called Machover’s VALIS “the most famous achievement in operatic science fiction,” although one must concede that the competition for that title may not be very stiff.

Machover has spoken of the process of securing the rights to adapt VALIS, which was itself pretty interesting:
 

And it took me a while, but I finally got to Russell Galen who, as you probably know, is Philip K. Dick’s, was his agent and is now in charge of the literary estate. It was really hard to get an appointment and again they usually handle movie rights. I was sort of expecting him to say well, you know, for an opera I don’t know. Anyway, I went in and just said to him I think this is a fantastic book and I’m interested in writing an opera on VALIS and it’s going to sort of take this form, blah, blah, blah. And I totally expected him to say, well, it’s a nice idea but we’re not really interested. Instead he said well, you know you probably don’t know this but I wasn’t only Philip K. Dick’s executor and his agent but we were really close friends. And not only that when he was writing VALIS he was quite depressed a lot of the time and he use to call me about twice a day for a year and a half when he was working on it. And well I had to keep stopping working and I sort of talked to him every day while he was working on that book. Not only that VALIS at that point in ’82, ’83 wasn’t really all that popular, certainly not outside of fairly small Philip K. Dick circles. And he said you know a lot of people have mixed feelings about VALIS. But you know I agree with you, I think it’s his masterpiece and I’d love to see a treatment of it. And you probably don’t realize this, or you didn’t notice, but VALIS was dedicated to me.

 
You can buy an album of the opera, which was released in 1988 by a label called Bridge.

Or you can listen to it here:
 

 
via Open Culture
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Californium’: Finally, the ultimate video game tribute to the worlds of Philip K. Dick
What advertisements for Philip K. Dick’s Ubik spray might look like