Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

   In a continuum of luminance from complete darkness to pure white, the first logical color frequencies are red and orange hues, and I am applying them in various transfer modes over a low-contrast, desaturated base image. I'm interested in the visual perceptual biases with respect to color preferences and choices. The logical answer to the question "After white black and gray, what would be the next logical color?" I am presuming that the answer would be a unanimous--red. This has cultural implications as well, with a wide range of affordances to the appearance of red, and what it may connote, e.g. life and death (when mixed with black) and love/affection (pink) when mixed with white, political ideology/repression, and so on. View all artworks in the Black White and Red series Other designs in BWR ("Arty Apparel") BWR in Car Colors In aerial views of parking lots one typically sees car colors that are some shade of black, shades of gray, silvers,...

Just the Blue Channel of a Jazz Guitar. Catching the morning sun across my L40. #2019 #angles #curves #shadows

Johnnie's Blue 3300x4200 px (11x17 in) Grayscale (blue channel split) Request a Print A popular haunt in Elmwood Park Illinois. I love this angular roadside diner architecture from the 1950s that is still around. Very often even the buildings were built on an angle on the lot. A friend said it reminded him of Hopper's "Nighthawks". It reminds me of Ruscha's "Standard Oil". #2019 #black&white

   Solo piano improvisations in the Lydian mode for all 12 keys, following the circle of fourths. ***    The purpose of the exercise was to see what I could do manually as an improvisation using a constraint (the Lydian Mode), then create an algorithm to do the same thing. Musical improvisation is one of the highest forms of free will. It will show what is pure free will, simply playing anything on the piano for example. Someone who knows how to play will make some kind of coherent music. Someone who has hardly touched a piano may play on the black keys. The acid test is whether it has musical value. AI could be used to do the same thing and would sound like music, as it has a basic instruction. In contrast, the programming to do the same thing seems completely unrewarding. Even though my piano skills are mediocre, and my implicit knowledge of music well-developed, the music that is human-made is good enough for me. If a non-musician can do it bette...

These images are amazingly small, most less than 100KB. The pixel dimensions are only 640x480, although some have been enlarged for printing. The print sizes could not exceed 2 x1.5 inches. This was the point we started down the road to accepting that prints weren't necessary. View Gallery

A page from my paper diary March 1, 2007, in which I was experimenting with the concept of "The Art Machine", i.e. the creative feedback loop between the disciplines. (I think I had just been to an exhibition of Jeff Wall's photographs). What had inspired me was his cinematographic approach to photography--that it was a "frame capture" of a moment in time. I then had the idea that film stills could be transformed into other media, such as sculpture, then back again in the form of a photograph or other 2D forms. "...they give rise to the situationists' detournement, in which your work is altered or recontextualized to create a meaning that opposes its original intention. They are the moments of distraction when one is engaged in a task, the sudden shifts of attention to something apparently irrelevant or disconnected. They are the final acknowledgment the pataphysician makes that the universe is governed by chance, so the words we speak, the things w...

Macrophage V 13.5 x 19 x .75, mixed media on panel. Fifth in the series ("M5").  $555 Inquire Possible Universals, with associated pages in the CONTINUA-TION book: Continua (119) Intertwining (111) Logical notion of part/whole (177) Numerals (counting) (132) Tying material (90) #2019 #text #texture #neodada #layered

An idea which started with an idea on a bass tuned DGDG. All other rhythm and synth tracks were built on top of it. Almost everything in this track is somehow "vintage": the organ part is almost a Booker T riff from the 60s, the synth sounds are early 80s, even the bass I'm using is a 1962 Jazz Bass. It's also a possible track for the "Immortality Ball", May 1, 2046 (to represent Neone's pre-immortality state). Melange by Lee Barry

In the winter months in any city with glass towers, the low angle of the sun reflects off the structures and casts a warm moon-like reflected light into what would have been areas in shadow. The glass panels also project interesting caustic reflections. I'm surprised cities aren't installing heliostats on tops of buildings to direct sunlight into shadowed areas. (Also known as "daylighting").  They did exactly this in the Norwegian city of Rjukan . As it is in a valley, the town is frequently in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. The installation of heliostats bathes the town square. In northern latitudes that are typically overcast, any sunlight should be cherished. #2019 #reflections #refraction

In many ways, the method by which we now compose and record music is very much like the editing of film. Film editing takes the linear experience of real life and rearranges the sequence of events to construct a storyline, and places things in specific contexts (“reel” life). This is much different from real-time performance, where there are no second chances, and the only option is to do it right the first time. You could film a theatrical event and later go back, rearrange the sequence of events, include a soundtrack and you’d have something completely different from the actual performance. By simply adding a sound to a visual event you can change its meaning. Placing one event before another changes the viewer's interpretation of the moment. And in music, making recordings gives us the illusion of things taking place in one moment, but in fact could have taken place days, weeks or even years apart. In the mid to late 1960s, recording technology grew exponentially. When the ...