Last night I went to the symphony and it was It very robotic evening! I'll explain:

It was the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilton Thomas, and they did Mahler # 3,5, 7, 9 and 10. Thomas provided a lot of commentary throughout, so non-experts like me could be appreciate the music better. It was truly beautiful and amazing.

The whole thing was videotaped for a DVD, and there were five gigantic, robotic cameras. Two of them were on the perimeter of the stage and those were operated by actual people. The other three were operated by remote control, by people backstage in a control room. Of those three, one of them was between the first row and the front of the stage, on a track. This camera was in almost constant motion, going back and forth. Sometimes the lens was pointed at the audience, and sometimes it turned around and pointed at the performers. Another camera was on a gigantic crane about 50-60 feet long. Every now and then it would swoop over the stage to capture all of the musicians, and a few times it actually lowered itself, and the lens extended a bit, in order to capture one of the musicians who was doing a solo. There was also a camera on a really high poll that just went up and down.

I saw all of these robots moving around in a very smooth and graceful manner, and it made me think of Ray Bradbury. After a while it actually seemed like they were responding to the music and enjoying it too.

Do you want to know what I did during the intermission? I read Ray Bradbury! Just by chance, in my jacket pocket, I had a booklet that was written for school teachers, and it's a reprint of "There Will Come Soft Rains", his most "robotic" story that is full of all kinds of robots and not a single person.

To make it a truly Bradburyan situation, the whole oechestra and audience should have been absent, leaving the robot cameras to conduct their dance on their own...