About

I'm a psychologist by training, and most of my professional life has been spent in fairly recognizable psychological roles: clinician, researcher, professor, supervisor, and consultant. TESSERRA doesn't fit as neatly into any of those categories.

There is also a creative side of my life that has usually existed somewhat separately from my professional work. I started writing music on the piano when I was around six. I never particularly enjoyed reading music and generally preferred learning by ear, improvising, and figuring things out for myself. Over the years I picked up guitar, string bass, and mandolin and continued writing music.

As my career and family life grew, I spent less time making music, although the desire to create never really disappeared. For a long time I had relatively few places where that part of me could interact freely with my interests in psychology, research, technology, and human experience.

TESSERRA provided a very different kind of creative space.

I didn't begin the project with a plan to develop a formal framework. The early work was highly exploratory and considerably more symbolic than Synnoema is today. I was experimenting with ways of recording experiences, memories, dreams, recurring images, emotional patterns, and other things that seemed to acquire meaning through their relationships over time. I was also experimenting with AI in ways that made it possible to develop and explore ideas much more quickly than I had been able to before.

That early period produced a lot of ideas. Some developed into important parts of the project. Others were revised substantially or abandoned altogether.

What became increasingly interesting to me were the problems that appeared through the process of building it. How do we know when two experiences really belong together? When does a recurring similarity become a pattern? How much of what we see comes from the experience itself, and how much comes from the person—or system—organizing it?

Those questions eventually contributed to Synnoema and to the much more methodical work I'm doing now.

So TESSERRA occupies an unusual space for me. It draws on my training as a psychologist and researcher, but it isn't simply an extension of my professional work. It also gives me room to create, experiment, build things, follow unusual questions, and see where they lead.