May 12ths

 

5/12/2008

If you can’t find a ‘spiritual’ core in making any art (meaning accessible at some human level (good or bad) don’t bother doing it. 

[I bothered to make work 2008-2020, some of it in retrospect not spiritual in any way].

5/12/2025: I made only one painting since 2020, a paint-over of a work from 2012. I’m still anti-object which is why I prefer scoring music and creating digital art. Physical art has to hold meaning long enough for it to remain relevant enough to hang on a wall for years. Physical art is also visible to fewer people in its entirety: If a work is in a private collection there may only be a photograph of it that the public sees, whereas audio recordings are a kind of digital photograph that can still have a negative (score) and can be “reconstituted”. I’m not against making art, but it’s an object that has to be stored if not otherwise displayed. Music manuscripts create whole libraries but now many of them are digitized. If you have a PDF of everything, at least you have that. MIDI and XML are more archival if they are on servers that will be maintained over centuries]. 

5/12/2026: If you're always making new work--even if digital or generated with AI, it still needs curation and organization for it to have any shape. That's why art will eventually need a practice if you're going to keep creating. Making art every day without a practice is too fungible].

 5/12/2012

The ability to read and write music notation has precipitously devolved from the skill set of people involved with any type of organization of sound, i.e. audio art and/or music. But in cases where some type of 'score' is required, standard notation is still the tool of choice.

5/12/2021

Guitar Video No. 24 (Tessellation) A DADGAD piece in 5/8 one minute long (60 seconds at 1/8th note=300 for a total of 60 bars, plus an ending bar). It can also be played in standard tuning, or double-drop D (DADGBD) 

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An AI-generated analysis of a video riff, Containers of Music: 

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[5/12/2026: The instruments in AI music aren't containers at all because we don't have any idea of what they are. In real music, we can know what kind of guitar it was and the musicians can speak to that. With AI none of that exists and it seems almost insignificant].