Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

  [View Gallery]   The first images are photos of the TV that I took as I was watching various commemorations and footage of the event. When I got downtown, I started taking pictures of buildings that serve as a snapshot memory.  On 911, they had closed the office at about 10:30 and I started to walk around to take photos. I had gotten my first camera about a month before, and I wasn't completely familiar with it, so most of the photos were overexposed. Later on I inverted them, which is a look that I liked. So I thought that I would take overexposed pictures and then invert them in the same fashion.   

Improvisation is a form of spontaneous composition that uses predetermined structural elements, usually chords and scales. Jazz improvisation is understood as being free-form, but is controlled with rules. In Arabic music, there is Taqsim, guided by a different system of rules for improvisation—and similarly with Indian Raga. The eastern versions of improvisation have an additional cultural element that is more important than the West’s focus on improvisation for art’s sake. Interestingly, Taqsim may possibly have some connection with algorithms (simply a series of rules or instructions). The word algorithm is eponymous with Algoritmi, a Persian mathematician. The fact that jazz musicians can relate to physics (and vice versa) is perhaps not just coincidental!             The curious thing about improvisation in anything is that there are always some rules or constraints that are not universal, e.g. a jazz player would be confused by the rules of Taqsi...

 

   Early 70s Genesis treatment:   

 Fast and Slow

Technology is always a part of the flow. (Once you have a skill and you've used it for decades you can always hop back on the bike, unlike many things we have done with computers. You can learn software, but the software is always requiring updating your knowledge of its new functions. If you want to develop skill for a lifetime, choose the more manual skills that don't involve tools that are always changing. Even new power tools will get in the way if using your manual skill because you have to stop and devote attention to them. I have yet to learn the Dorico software which replaced Finale. If for some reason Finale stopped working I could still continue writing manually, but it would be going back to the stone age, and I'd have to trade my creative time with software training. So the happy medium is to have just enough skill with a range of new and old tools. Most artists need some kind of handicap assistance. AI is another tool that assists, just as MIDI did for me in th...

 

  Stills of Strange Days (1995) and Metropolis *** AI Gens:  Seed:  

 

  Hans Namath photo of Jackson Pollock over Rubens' The Death of Decius Mus   AI Gens: