“Light Time Delay” is a term-of-art used to express the comms delay between the earth and spacecraft. It’s also the stage name for Kyma artist Théa-Martine Gauthier’s live performance project, recently featured on Modular Seattle’s Modular Nights 13 April 2025, a free monthly event at the Substation venue in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.
Opening with phasey delays and a rumbling sub, evocative of acceleration, the performance explodes into metallic rhythmic analog chirps paired with images evoking navigation, PC board layouts, and gravitational manifolds. Obsessively accelerating loops and fragments of texts close in on us in ever-accelerating spirals until the tension finally resolves into a watery, peaceful texture with floaty vocals, underlaid by ominous sub rumbling, electric frog creaks, and shimmery ringing filter chords over a deep thrumming fundamental, and concluding with a sense of wonder and reflection on the improbability of this experience we call “life”:
The wonder of existence hums and dances in the laughter of newborn stars, each speck of stardust a pattern in the universe’s unyielding creativity. From the first heartbeat of matter to the delicate unfurling of an infants’s tiny hand, creation sings its symphony in stardust spun into stories…
You are awake and aching with beauty, standing at the crossroads of all that ever was and all that will ever be. Everything has led up to this moment, this heartbeat, this singular point of light in the endless dark…
This may be just the thing we needed to hear amidst the unrelenting barrage of news this year.
If Light Time Delay’s setup makes you think of “Mission Control”, there may be a reason: Gauthier is the software architect for NASA/JPL’s High Performance Spaceflight Computing project — developing the next-generation on-board computing system for future deep space robotic and Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) missions.
It turns out some of the requirements for High Performance Spaceflight Computing bear an uncanny similarity to the challenges of real-time musical performances (albeit at a much, much larger scale).
- Handling vast amounts of data generated by instruments and sensors, performing complex calculations and data analysis in real-time.
- Running software that controls various subsystems, such as navigation, communication, power management, and scientific instruments.
- Data communication between the spacecraft and ground control, ensuring that mission data is transmitted efficiently and commands from Earth are received and executed correctly — a task made more challenging by the aforementioned Light Time Delay latency.
- Supporting some autonomous decision-making capabilities, allowing the spacecraft to perform tasks without real-time human intervention, which is crucial for missions far from Earth.
- Fault tolerance and error correction features to ensure reliable operation in the harsh environment of space (or on stage?).
All of this computing power is to support NASA in its mission to answer fundamental questions about life beyond Earth through exploration and science:
- Are we alone?
- What does tomorrow bring?
- How is our universe changing?
“I am so very impressed with Kyma and Pacamara. It’s big brained and I love that.”
—Théa-Martine Gauthier
To coin a phrase: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to use Kyma… but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some Kyma artists actively involved in developing the next-generation High Performance Spaceflight software for NASA!
