Some people come away from technology conferences with ideas for businesses. Scotto Moore came away from one with an idea for a book, which evolved into a play -- which opens in Seattle next week.

And it's a pretty fascinating concept, exploring what happens when an inventor develops a cult following for her digital emotions, or "emoticlips," as she calls them. Moore, a software program manager and playwright -- whom many people in the Seattle tech community know as the artist-in-residence Ignite Seattle -- spoke with us this week about the play, "When I Come To My Senses, I'm Alive!" which runs April 23-May 22 at the Annex Theatre.

Q: What's your background, and how did this play come about?

Scotto Moore

Moore: I'm a senior program manager for a software/media company in Seattle, but I also have a degree in theater, so I spend my daytime hours working in the technology industry, and I've been a staff member and a company member at Annex Theatre for many years. A few years ago, Annex produced my first full-length play, which was a big science-fiction fantasy piece called "interlace [falling star]." It encouraged me to write more science fiction for the stage, because there isn't a ton of it. A lot of times when you see science fiction on stage it's done from the perspective of camp, or it's really retro-futurism. There's not a lot of straight-up science fiction that comes out.

Q: What's the idea behind the play?

Moore: I wanted to take the fantasy element out and just write something that was very much technically science fiction. It's not far future, it's just five minutes in the future, so to speak. It's very much (asking) if one little invention had come about, what would today's world be like. In this case this inventor comes up with the technology for recording emotional states as discrete digital pieces of information. She calls them emoticlips.

And she develops kind of a cult following of people who download her instructions for how to build a receiver kit, and they can play these clips back and it stimulates the same part of the brain that was active in her when she was recording the clips. And so they have these emotional experiences that are similar to what she was experiencing. They're not completely identical, because everybody's brain is different -- you store memories in your brain as actual chemical differences, and so there's slight differences, but her fans get up to some very clever stuff, like stringing together entire playlists of her emoticlips to create completely novel experiences that even she didn't think up when she was recording them in the first place.

Q: How realistic is this as a possibility?

Moore: There's a lot of stories lately in particular about brain computer interfaces. You see these helmet designs that look pretty futuristic but they enable you to do a kind of entrainment to control technology. That's the most recent example I can think of -- like, learn to play pinball without moving your hands, or learn to type, there's all sorts of applications for that kind of brain computer interface. This is just a different kind of brain computer interface, which she, in the play, refers to as "charting the emotional genome." For her, she perceives it as more poetry than science.

Q: So how did you come up with the idea?

Moore: A couple years ago, I was invited to go to ETech to do an Ignite talk there. It was the first and only time I had been to a really significant tech conference like that, and I just was overwhelmed with all the ideas that were floating around. There wasn't anything specific that I can remember, there wasn't a specific presenter, but rather this huge amount of stimulus about the future.

I remember sitting by the pool on the last day, trying to digest it all, and I came up with a very elaborate book idea that integrated the video games and the brain computer interfaces, and the popular media piece of it. That was a big one. It's important to the story that she develops a fan base of people on the Internet, because she then tries to leverage support from a television network to build her project out, and there was a lot of talk about novel forms of connecting with fans, and so on. At the end of the day that book became too big to write, there were just too many ideas and so I sort of ripped this one story line out and tried to put it on stage, and so that's how I got there.