Verity James Scheel

Broadly speaking, my interests form two main arches: the artistic and the technical. I am a musician (always a cellist, sometimes a composer, occasionally una poëta) and I am a mathematician/programmer/logician. But itʼs interesting because my pursuits in the visual arts almost emerge more from the programmer side of things, via web/UI design and digital image editing, more than the musical. Nevertheless, I have a deep artistic drive that informs everything I do, and itʼs even helpful to think of language and linguistics as unifying threads through many of my pursuits.

To be more specific, my technical interests are epitomized by Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT), which is a foundational theory of mathematics, as an alternative to set theory. HoTT is great because it shows my interest in not just mathematics but the practice and logic and philosophy of mathematics and the design of programming languages through the lens of Type Theory (which incorporates formal mathematical languages, of course). Plus it includes plenty of (Higher) Category Theory, Topology, all sorts of real advanced math that I struggle to grasp but reach towards all the time.

On the music side, if you know me you probably know I love chamber music (like, thatʼs all I want to do) and I also love Baroque music (which is chamber music too!). My cello personality is oriented towards these more intimate and collaborative forms of expression, and away from the flashy realm of concertos and large orchestral works. Itʼs … complicated. Itʼs worthy of several essays explaining why that is. But relatedly I have also been feeling this need lately to simply explore, to focus on sound in a different way that isnʼt captured by classical means. Sure, the composer asked for ponticello, but which of the 12 kinds of ponticello sound were they going for, and what more can we find? What sounds occur at the edges of music, of tone, of our instruments? This exploration is spurred on by my work in composing, which also is partly responsible for allowing me to take ownership over my life as a performer, interpreter, and arranger. Iʼm also finally(!) starting to dip my toes into electronic music, which is amazing to start now because I havenʼt done it before at all despite being an incredible musician and programmer. One of my longest-term dreams in the music and programming fusion is to find a way to make a 2D (or 2.5D) computer animation that is choreographed to music, representing the way I feel it and the shapes and movements I associate with particular phrases.

Iʼve always been interested in fonts. Oh I donʼt even remember what the program was, but yes I spent my childhood dabbling in the cringiest early-2000s rainbow gradients and wavy text distortion, and I think that was where I first discovered my love of fonts and also design, in the visual arranging of whatever documents I made. The real revival of this occurred when I started getting into web programming: the interactive aspects of design are so important to me, I love making buttons do stuff. I also got into photo editing, my favorite app for it is Snapseed, great UI, but of course I have dreams for my own editing apps (non-linear history please! better mechanisms for comparisons and making decisions). But itʼs not my main thing, I donʼt have a well-defined style of editing, and it shifts with each edit and over time.

As I mentioned above, lingustics is one of the unifying themes of my interests, even though it isnʼt in the foreground in the obvious sense. I donʼt have much formal training in linguistics, but Iʼve picked up a fair bit from my 5 years of Latin education (I read and nearly memorized a Latin grammar book after my first year of it), from reading Wikipedia, and honestly just thinking about things I come across. Iʼve picked up phonetics (including the International Phonetic Alphabet) from Wikipedia – Iʼve sort of taught myself to pronounce certain sounds almost entirely from their descriptions on Wikipedia. I know a little bit of syntax and semantics, but I find existing theories to be questionably motivated and full of holes. Especially putting on my (type-theoretic) programmer hat, it just feels woefully underspecified, simultaneously not rigorous enough as well as too rigorous to allow for the real-world flexibility of interpretation that is necessary. Like, you see how I write – you think a computer could make sense of this?! But I also see linguistics in everything I do: we write programs in languages, sure, but datatypes are their own language, there are a thousand sub-languages embedded into every substantial body of programming; thereʼs a linguistics of UI design that echoes the language of the data behind the scenes; thereʼs a linguistics of the nuances of music, music notation, music performance; thereʼs linguistics in everything I do, because I fixate on representations of knowledge, expanding what we can articulate.

After these core interests, there are also subjects I know a fair bit about. I donʼt call them out to proclaim my expertise on them, but mostly because they also frame how I view the world. Plus thereʼs things that are very much not on the list: I donʼt know or care to know much about biology, for example, but I am sort of into psychology.

I love to analyze society, and in doing so I am called to bring in politics as the lens to view and contextualize these issues – and I continuously teach myself new tools to inform my politial analysis of the world. So I got into psychology at one time in my life, but there is much about the institution of psychology that gives me pause and I seek to retreat from the superficial “pop psychology”, to divest from the problematic frameworks and problematic power structures, and to instead reëngage with the lived experience of the people most affected and to accept life on its own terms. Towards this end I find it imperative to engage with disability justice: disabled voices are not listened to enough in this world despite having some of the most profound and heart-wrenching insights to share, and disability justice is a movement aiming to address shortcomings of the disability rights movement, aiming at justice for the most marginalized, not just the most palatable and able-passing. Of course I also am queer, I live and breathe queerness and consume and read queerness, and thatʼs social, and political too. I probably align most closely with anarchist ideals, but I also donʼt think any particular brand of leftism is particularly important in this moment – I just know I want to always become more radical, to grasp at the roots of issues and not their superficial effects, and I encourage you to do the same, because in our current conditions the debates among ideologies are not so relevant, when there is so much to be done right here right now and when the direction of change is so obvious to those who look, listen, hear, love, and pay attention. Center the most marginalized, stay present for the hard work, this is our path to liberation.

The last branch of my interests I will mention is in mechanical things. Mostly planes and helicopters and other flying things (onithopters! why not). Cars are cool I guess, but they donʼt hold the same level of interest for me. I have a few years worth of Fly RC magazines that I would read obsessively, and I was involved in the FlightGear flight simulator community for 5 years. Fun fact: I copiloted a Cessna 172 once. General robotics and circuitry also interest me – I was on a FRC team for a year, but again I donʼt have a ton of hands-on experience, just general knowledge. Recently Iʼve gotten into accounts doing machining and fabrication on YouTube. I think engineering is refreshingly unforgiving: people always say math is about the right answers, but tell that to the physics of moving systems, where it will break, fall apart, or not do what you want if it isnʼt done properly. You donʼt get to argue with the physics of reality. Engineers and machinists will tell you whatʼs what, what exactly they need to accomplish what, whatʼs impossible. They have had to invent increasingly refined methods of measuring and comparing lengths, because they know exactly why it matters and when it needs to be used! We as a society love to talk about things in the abstract, but thereʼs nothing abstract about dealing with the raw material of the world and working towards a well-defined goal, whether itʼs a tight fit on a pair of mating parts or a passively stable aerial vehicle, or something that needs to hold up for many years under thousands of cycles of use.