August 21sts

8/21/2017

Total eclipse, Columbia, Illinois. Ever since my early Floyd days I had wanted to experience this. It is the most numinous experience to be under the shadow of the looming moon. It’s a 360-degree “sunset”. I only took a few snaps and didn’t want to be distracted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8/21/2022 

Artificially created work makes for nice prototypes. Sometimes the prototypes can stand alone as art, but it has to function as art, like a readymade. In terms of work, perhaps AI can serve as the artisan, doing the mechanical and repetitive parts, and the Artist can delegate those tasks. But we’ve had that capability since the early days of computers with macros and so on. For art that is more generic, automation could suffice. It’s the art that artists might not want to spend their time on, or they could use the automations as a basis for unique treatments.

[8/21/2025: Yesterday, I watched a video of a live performance by a keyboard player who was interacting with an AI model, where he would play a phrase and the AI would imitate it in real time. They were essentially trading fours. At first, it's kind of interesting, but it's still music, and spins out like any other kind of music. So within, say, a period of two and a half minutes, it starts to get tedious and becomes a form of wanking. I don't think that's what music is. One would think that if you really want to hear improvisatory jazz, you would rather attend a concert where there's actual humans improvising rather than one person collaborating with a machine. Ultimately, art has to function as art, and not just as a novelty. All AI music is currently a novelty more or less. It's more of an unserious toy than a serious way of making art. Art is perceived as being useless and frivolous, so it might as well be a toy. But that philosophy is corrosive to culture if you capitulate to it. Abstract expressionist art was viewed historically as being righteous to lots of other younger artists. You have to wonder what happened to that sentiment with AI-generated color field paintings printed on large format printers.] See 8/21/2024 entry

8/21/2023

Fascinating interview with Andy Partridge. I wasn’t aware of his jazz influence but it was a different kind of jazz influence where the sound of jazz is emulated. It wasn’t that he understood the changes. 

[The best kind of jazz can sometimes be when you're not playing jazz].  

8/21/2024

As I’ve been experimenting with AI-generated music, sometimes I “unplug” it to see how it holds up as a real musical idea, such as playing a guitar or piano against it, or attempting to reduce it to chords and melody–and in the process finding the soul within it–what remains after you strip away the technology. Recordings are illusions of music that can’t always be reduced to traditional music. It’s interesting that this AI-generated piece created an ear worm for days, and I had to go to the piano to figure it out.6 I don’t think it could work outside the illusion of itself. To write a song at the piano or with a guitar is more form-before-function, whereas AI music is made purely from algorithmic function, and you have to unplug it to see if anything is there.

[8/21/2026: AI music is a mixed bag: Some if it can be played acoustically, or can be transcribed, other times it is completely made of plastic]. 

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Video about Joe Barnes, a 99-year-old painter in a New York who makes a color field (he calls them “meditative”) painting every day—sort of like an Ellsworth Kelly—who also lived to almost 100. There’s something about simplicity of form and process that contributes to longevity. 

[He's an interesting example of a person who has the artist archetype, His work is all color field a  la Ellsworth Kelly. Not anyone can get away with flat-color paintings, which relates to the idea of archetypes. You''d have to be like an Ellsworth Kelly, although Kelly came from representational work].