December 22nds

 

12/22/1999 
            
Cable installed. Now this is the way to surf the internet! 

12/22/2000 
            
Out to see film, Billy Elliot, Britain’s version of the Hollywood formula movie. If I were to pick a tyrannical working class father against an artsy son movie it would be October Sky. 

12/22/2016

I’m still not sold on the idea to stop making objects, but perhaps they should not be kept around, but rather be put in places where they have no intimate connection to the lives of the artists. This has an interesting connection to the whole idea of Minimalism, to be coldly detached from emotion and devotion, that results in objects such as white and black paintings, plain white cubes, and so on, that only exist in public and not in private collections of people with no connection with the artist.

[12/22/2024: This is an argument in favor of art being representative requiring no explanation, but I think artists tire of it. If everything you do is some literal representation of the world, why not just make stills from surveillance cameras? That’s quite interesting actually: photorealist paintings made from webcam stills. The explanation of that process is what would make them more interesting. If people see them first as decorative landscapes, the fact that they have a digital source makes them all the more interesting. But they still stand alone as paintings, and if it’s hanging on a wall in 100 years, that person won’t know it’s a webcam shot. I stopped making physical art in 2019].

***

Rhythm now essentially emerges from the sound file or sample, rather than the playing of a rhythm on a tangible object. The result is a complete abstraction of rhythm into Beat, made possible almost completely from software and computer files. In some ways, this is like the video feedback loop that has no direct connection between digital (manual, using the hands) and data that can’t be physically “handled”. The only real instruments now are software and hardware. 

12/22/2024

If you’ve always made paintings, you should continue making them; If you always played an instrument and/or written music, you should continue. Just because there’s a new technology that emerges doesn’t mean you stop doing what you did before. They’re not like a washer and dryer obviating a washboard and hanging things on a clothesline. But these days, people buy the AI juggernaut stories.

***

AI music is like opening the hood of a car—you see an engine, but if you attempt to access a part, a carburetor, it doesn’t exist. It’s one prefabricated sealed molded piece. It’s a “sculpture” of an engine, perhaps as Charles Ray would make. 

12/22/2025 

I'm still wondering if I'll ever go back to ambient music. I was just reading an interview with Frank Gehry, who always had interesting aesthetic insights. He was always interested in the spaces between things and that buildings were collections of rooms. But it's a bit of a self-indulgence where we love the individual experience of something as Madeleine moments, but the general public has different expectations and collective experiences. They don't allow themselves the ability to think like this. So ambient music is this kind of daydreaming or film-watching. The reason I decamped was because I didn't want to just daydream--I wanted to construct from bits and fragments.