I have been asked why I work with such unstable technology, such as wireless sensing, for my performance and dance pieces. I also ask myself that often. My answer is usually something along the lines of, “Any technology can fail.” Other times I say, “I have no idea.” There was a performance while I was at grad school at Arizona State University in which a live band was playing on stage with dancers. The microphone ended up not working so you could barely hear the singer. The microphone has been around since 1876 (according to Wikipedia) how can it fail? I have seen lights not come on or stay on, sound systems shutoff and MANY operator errors. I feel that the technology I use is no less stable than some of the things we use daily. Granted it has been a horrible technology dance season for me and many of my co-workers don’t let me near their iPods, cell phones or cameras, I still have faith. I mean it was all of my stable technology that failed me for the recent dance concert with the Nancy Hauser Dance Company. The first night of tech I could not get my computer to output sound. The second night of tech, I could run sound out of my computer but my Bluetooth mic would not record into my computer. The “unstable” part of my whole setup, the wireless sensing system and Max/MSP patch I had programmed, worked just great!With all the failed attempts (it worked fine at home), I decided to bring back a solo I created while at ASU, entitled “Well Meet Again.” This piece involved a video projector - another “stable” technology. I pulled out my projector (I bought one year ago to test it and make sure it was ok) to find that it had these two annoying thick lines through the middle of the image. I thought great, it’s the lamp (a $350 expense), but I thought to myself, “I barely have used this darn thing, it can’t be the lamp.” My dear husband did some research while I finished editing the dance for camera piece I was creating for the performance. He found some information online about how dust gets on the DLP chip of many projectors and causes symptoms similar to what mine was doing. With that, he opened up the projector, sprayed some compressed air from one of those little canisters you get a computer stores, and voila, it was fixed. After all that, my technology did not fail me through the run of the show, but we did have sound difficulties one of the nights for pieces other than mine. At about the same time, at work, we kept having issues with our coffee maker. It was one of those nifty thermal carafe coffee makers that kept your coffee warm all day. It kept getting clogged and dumping coffee all over our kitchen table. Finally, we had enough and decided it was time for the darn thing to go. We now have a much nicer coffee maker. It does not have a thermal carafe but it is programmable and makes a damn good cup of coffee.So the next time you see someone messing around with “unstable” technology, remember that ALL technology will fail at some point. Also, remember to Save Early and Save Often, back up all of your data and do something analog from time to time.