December 19ths

12/19/2015            

There are times when I think artists have had more interesting lives when you look at them in retrospect. At least from a museum perspective, you get to view an artist’s work in a wing in a museum, curated with other works in the same period. You can’t do that with music because you have to experience each separately.       
            
[12/19/2024: Musical artists who would qualify for being “art history” because they are “artier” artists: David Bowie, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Bryan Ferry, David Byrne, Paul McCartney, Roger Waters (for the music and controversy), Robert Fripp, many producers because they have to consider how to package the work as Art. Who else?]     

12/19/2016            

Dynaxiom: All creative people should keep lists (and work in series). If creative work is in the flow of your life, why not begin the serial process and follow it through? A natural branching occurs the longer you do it. But the objective is not only to gather and glean, but to also cultivate and prune the list, and give it the power to be generative.
            
Sol Lewitt said in one of the very few interviews he gave: “I’m not the same person I was in 1968 or 1978 or 1988,” he said. “I hope I would not be the same 10 years from now if I’m still alive. I’ve changed, and I hope all aspects of life can be accounted for in the thoughts I have and the kind of work I do. It’s a matter of discovering things as you go along that perhaps you didn’t know or realize or think that you might have [within]. As one grows older, one discovers more and more about oneself. It’s all filling out your own self.”
            
What changes are the domains, but the early operating systems are still the framework for everything else to the present, from the blocks to serialization of processes (lists, rules, and so on). 
            
If you don’t have any specific reason to create something, start with Human Universals as abstract frameworks.

Musing On Music: "Discuss serialization" 

12/19/2019

Art Institute: Rodin and Stato 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12/19/2021            

On “Algorithm Jockeys” (“AJs”): Algorithms can be a continuous train to nowhere: Say you’re sitting on a train, looking out the window and you see some interesting architecture. It then starts to feed you ideas on where you could go. I suppose that’s an interesting idea if you haven’t been to a place. But if you couldn’t get off at your stop, it would take you to other stops just because you briefly thought about them before. That’s what I think algorithms actually do—they’re just kind of driving us around to places where we’ve had just a passing interest.
            
In the future when many may wear “corrective” AR glasses (whatever happened to Google Glass?) they will be able to detect what you’re looking at and log the geolocations. As a photographer, I would find this interesting in the scouting of photos. Many times I’ll see things that I want to capture later with an SLR—sometimes how a particular shadow falls at certain times of the day or time of the year. But on the other hand, all ideas about technological conveniences are what led us to the current dystopia, so all roads (and rails) actually lead back to discussions about the dark sides of new technology. But we still fail to have them, most likely because we’re being led down rabbit holes.

Excerpt Library (Technology): “Discuss the effect of algorithmic control” 

12/19/2022

Very often we loop back around to old things (even from millennia ago) and we don’t realize that we’re doing them. I find myself doing that with the internet. I have memories of the early internet and I liked how it worked and so I go back and I use those things, such as blogs on Blogspot (gasp), Google Alerts instead of following people on social media. I get the updates either daily or weekly and that’s fine with me. Perhaps we can go back to the design ethos of Web 1.0 yet using decentralized technologies, such that you could set up your own social media network instead of just a website and it would be federated with lots of other websites. But when you think about that that’s what the internet is. We’re going around in circles in many ways. We’re trying to innovate on something that doesn’t have a capacity for that much innovation. 

12/19/2024

Ever since I’ve been creating music from lyrics with AI, people often say “That doesn’t make sense”. Are pop lyrics supposed to make sense? I like there to be just enough ambiguity or nonsense to create emotional trigger points for the listener. AI music isn’t necessarily DIY either. Most of it doesn’t work out of the box, and it takes a musical intelligence to know how music works. Simply listening to music doesn’t make you a musician. Cranking out AI music is essentially finding music you like to listen to. Musicians are actually better at finding it out of the blue. I think AI music could be an access point for people to discover how that actually works when they play against it and it gives them their own ideas. At that point they’re really not using AI all the time. It’s the ignition of creativity. 

"Are lyrics supposed to make sense?"