0731 surface

0731 surface

0730 _d e f r a g

0730 _d e f r a g

a computer maintenance term I haven't heard in 10 years. i assume Windows does it routinely in the background now. don't care enough to find out.

the out of focus thing seen here is shoving my camera right up to the screen as my computer goes through its backup routine before shutting down. it's not defragging anything afaik. i just miss that word.

celebrating Katemas (the birthday of Kate Bush) along with the birthdays of my sister-in-law and our newest friend, Jae-woo, the boy wonder.

woke up this morning to news of a fire in the aforementioned sister-in-law's apartment building next door.. where our friends Tim and Sammy live. They haven't seen my message yet, but we've heard the fire is out. I won't be able to really relax until they answer it.

also, an enormous tornado near Appleton, WI. My brother, who lives in Madison, didn't even know about about it until I told him. Korean news agencies have a long reach indeed.

Just now heard from Tim. He says he didn't know about the fire. Slept through the alarm. These are my friends. I used to only see one 10 o'clock a day, but now I'm asleep by 12:30am and up at 7:30 and usually take a one hour siesta. I'm so old. (no i'm not, i'm only 56.. [young me: that's old dude!])

0729 coalesce

0729 coalesce

last night's film was Alex Cox's Straight to Hell (the director's cut).

wow. 

at about the 10 minute mark I realized that what I was watching was a 2 week bender with dozens of famous punk rockers from the 70s and 80s, a truckload of guns and blanks, a bathtub of blood squibs and they just edited it all together after the pills and money ran out and they all went home to sleep for a month.

my favorite shot is during the big longcoat shootemup at the end where we see, kind of through a doorway in the middle distance, a guy in white pants and a sombrero stumbling, firing a pistol in one hand, and managing not to spill a cup of coffee in the other.

there was a butler in the background of several scenes serving coffee and pills off of a platter dressed in a tuxedo and it's Elvis Costello!

Courtney Love plays a pregnant bank robber and whines and yells throughout. I don't really care for her, but she was good in this.

I recognized Jim Jarmusch, Dennis Hopper (of course he's in this), Grace Jones (who played the most grounded-to-reality character in the film), and of course Joe Strummer, who I think was the best actor of the bunch. (not saying much)

at one point it became The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

it was non-sequitur-iffic fun starring the worst teeth in the world and all the dust, blood and spittle for no reason that you could ever be unable to take your eyes off of.

lots of Pogues music (and the whole band in the cast)

when it was over after ~90 minutes of violent nihilistic chaos that had me laughing at several points, I had to sit there silent in the dark staring past the wall until my soul reentered my body.

I did not have psychotic dreams, but I'm still a little dazed today. 

0728 aperture 2

0728 aperture 2

0727 becominginvisible

0727 becominginvisible

at Misun's behest, she needed a short piece of music "about becoming invisible" for a movement piece she's doing for an acting class

as I was making it, it seemed to be about death. death and becoming invisible are kind of metaphors for each other. 

I like how this turned out. the experimental method used for the visuals took very little effort and time.. luck and serendipity were on my side today. things lined up remarkably well and very little editing was required. I love that.

0726 arcweld

0726 arcweld

0725 within

0725 within

for this I wanted to combine the sensations of being above and below the surface of a body of water, both in sound and visuals

fame and the artist

it occurs to me that I'm very much a "shut up and do something" person in the social media world - in the face-to-face world too, come to think of it. it seems strange to me that I have to distinguish the two, having spent half my life in a world where there was no distinction.

why am I typing this into my blog instead of my personal journal? I suppose a small part of me wants to "influence" the world in some way. when we participate in social media in any way we all know that it's not action in a vacuum and that we intend for others to see it and be affected by it even if in a small way. i imagine a lot of people act online only to feel "real".. in that the things that we do privately, in today's world don't, in a way, really happen. it's ridiculous, but I wonder if that might be part of it. (the tree falling in the woods question: does it make a sound if no one is around to hear it?)

part of the larger experiment of this project is the public-facing aspect to creativity and artistic action. the value of a piece of art, because of its often practical uselessness (unless it's furniture or a decorative weapon, etc.), the intrinsic value of it is unaffected by how many people experience it. If we make something just for us, that's fine. But there is something powerful and multiplying when it reaches and affects many people instead of just one or two. So I see the point in fame, in a way. But that still doesn't make me want to be famous. (notice I haven't mentioned money.. I won't here)

Fame and money (see.. i did.. crap) are two things I don't envy of people because I've felt for a very long time that they corrupt and are very good at ruining lives, and so I don't wish to be part of that messy living. Some famous people seem to have a stand-offish, untrusting relationship with their own fame. Those are often the ones I respect more, not because of that, but because their art seems more important to them than the fame and wealth. They're the ones who are more consistent in their artistic intentions and develop naturally as artists, as opposed to producing work according to what they or their contracted bosses perceive as the will of the paying public. I can think of some famous artists who seem to do both, and they might not even be doing it consciously.

anyway.. I am fully aware that I'll never be a marketable artist and that's fine with me. I'm even sort of ok with people who equate "widely marketable" with "good". Though I think there are a lot of reasons that people "get big" that have nothing to do with their ability or vision. Value is defined as many things to many people. And people "consume" art/music/films/etc. for all sorts of reasons that I personally wish had nothing to do with the valuation of art (that's another matter).

If people think that my work simply isn't good, that's fine. It has never stopped me from doing it and it never will stop. So why even post online if only ~6 people seem to actually like what I do?

I suppose I'm affected by the idea of leaving something behind that will outlive me (though I'm not convinced things that go online are any more permanent than I am). I'm also driven by the "publish or perish" idea from academia, the riddle of  "if a tree falls in the woods..", and... yes... those ~6 dear people. 

0724 distill

0724 distill

0723 _c o nv e r g e_

0723 _c o nv e r g e_

last night I arbitrarily chose Clockwatchers (1997, Jill Sprecher) which I'd never seen.

So good. Kind of reminded me of something by Jacque Tati and had to see if it was before or after Office Space. it was before.

Really funny but not in the way that films at that time did humor, which I really loved about this. I also loved that this film spent a lot of time on the characters thinking about their boring, boxed-in lives. Lesser movies would have established that they hate their lives and by the second act they'd do something nutty about fixing that. Not this one. It struck me that inactivity was the way we dealt with this. And I vividly remember those times. I had at least 2 temp jobs through Manpower Temp Agency right at the time this film was being made. They weren't as oppressive as the credit company our quartet of protagonists are stagnating in, but I get it. I totally (gen x word) relate to everything that happens to the characters in this wonderfully realized film. 

Today I thought about it more (as is always the case the day after a movie night) and something suddenly dawned on me:

at this moment there is a cassette sitting in my tape recorder in my studio room of voice journals from 1997! I pressed play and it began "today is my last day at my day job at the CAP and we're going out to celebrate tonight". It goes through a bunch of short recordings of talking to my coworkers who had come out to the bar and wish me well after my last official day at the office. That was my last office day job in Chicago. Wild.

I didn't consciously choose Clockwatchers last night.. it just happened to line up that way. Fun. Ok. I allow that there was probably subconscious stuff motivating that choice.

It's a happy thing that here I am, having recently left the last day job I'll ever have (probably) and I have stuck to the ideals of what a good life is even to this day. I used to make lists of how the "perfect day" would go for me and today's routine is nearly identical to those lists from 30 years ago. 

Anyway, I'm going to listen to that tape all the way through now..

0722 unease

0722 unease

0721 cryptii

0721 cryptii

some days the work of being human requires thought shepherding

i did today's piece with about 70% of the focus i normally put in

the other 30% was all over the place for no good reason

even this morning's meditation was harder than it should've been

i've been meditating each morning in the last 2 weeks or so

emotional equanimity, better sleep quality, even keel throughout the day

but once in a while, something unexpected makes me almost cry

probably andropause 

0720 S r_9 0

0720 S r_9 0

a (the?) radioactive isotope of Strontium, #38 on the table 

0719 clarify

0719 clarify

(obviously feeling much better today. probably due to having survived a performance last night I had been nervous about)

up at 5:50am with an idea to use in PureData

started with a piano improvisation

went with take 2

tightened it up

added a barely audible pad

sent MIDI data from piano track into Pd

made a separate abstraction for each note pitch

captured it ~10 times in various pixellations & color treatments with OBS

composited & edited in Davinci

titled it

0718 eggshells

0718 eggshells

hesitance to even reach for my phone that some new horror should leap out at me

that is a normal day

today, for unrelated reasons, that hesitance becomes a skin-crawling fear

sometimes I see the places of the world as more fragile than ever and the world and everyone in it a field of eggshells under the feet of monsters

the next day not so

0717 some other now

0717 some other now

0716 bunsen

0716 bunsen

I left ableton out of things today and stuck with cubase.

There was no significant latency in transmitting MIDI signals from Cubase to PureData. Cubase rocks.

One step closer to being able to perform this stuff live with reactive visuals, which, I've decided, IS something I want to do and will at some point. maybe streaming online first?

anyway, the medium is the message, right Marshall?

watched a thing where BYETONE states his minimalist manifesto of sorts. I dig and agree and it totally put me back on philosophically solid ground about my guilty EDM/IDM performance dreams. But right now, my stuff could admittedly be called SDM  (stupid dance music), but it's getting better overall. Besides, I don't really care.. I'm simply doing what I love, and that's one of the few things I'm serious about. 

I'll get back into ableton eventually and use it live, probably.. when I'm ableto. 

so serious, I know.

0715 t o n_a

0715 t o n_a

well this one didn't turn out very well, sound quality-wise and it's because of a combination of the following:

• I'm learning (re-learning and going beyond where I was years ago) Ableton Live Lite 12
• my experimenting with sending MIDI messages in time from an ableton MIDI track straight into Pure Data and having that make reactive visuals in real-time
• I have a secret desire to perform my stuff live at some point, and the first step is to do tons of proofs-of-concept and this is a big one
• this WORKED, to my surprise and delight.. kind of... there is a ~120ms latency issue when the signal arrives at Pure Data, which I corrected by moving the MIDI notes to the left by 120ms to compensate. it's more of a workaround than a solution, but there you go.
• I made all the sounds in Ableton, using Analog Lab and my own from-scratch sample drum sounds and performed the whole thing while capturing the sound and real-time images from Pd in OBS
• somewhere in the process, there were uninvited glitches, pops, etc. in the mixdown which I couldn't solve without starting over from scratch in Cubase (like i usually do) so I just mastered it with the pops and ugly shit in it and now its done. So I'm not doing it again.

It's science, right? Education? Experimentation is a tool to improve and boy did I experiment in this one. Some things worked great and some didn't.

I really appreciate the sound stability of Cubase more now and I'll definitely go back to creating all sound in Cubase.. I don't like ableton..yet.. I'll work on it more and maybe things will work out between us in the end.

I do think the live aspect of performance is where Ableton shines, and Cubase does not.. but who knows? If what I'm trying to do in Ableton actually can be done somehow with the gorgeous sound shaping capabilities native in Cubase, maybe I'll do that.

The experiments continue and so does my learning and skill progression.

Also, I had a blast this morning doing all that.

misc. notes for myself later:

• be careful with gaussian blur in OBS, if overused, it looks badly out-of-focus instead of just the right shade of soft. (today looks too out of focus and not very cool)
• don't build a system of live AV production that is so complex that it's flimsy and increases the likelihood of bad results to the point of shoddy. Simplify! And cut the Gordian knot when possible.
• Cubase is for composers.
• Ableton is for loop-head DJs
• is that what you're trying on? because it doesn't come in your size.

0714 _o t r a v

0714 _o t r a v

0713 noir

0713 noir

0712 unspoken

0712 unspoken

text exchanges are not good friend keepers

we are multidimensional communicators

we need to see the nuances, the gestures, the nervous knee bounces, the flash of pain in the eye

to feel the eye contact, the handshakes, the shoulder claps

to hear the uncertain tremors of the voice, the pauses, the emphases, the rise and fall within a breath, the shouts and sudden whispers 

we talk and talk, but we are mostly what is unspoken

0711 opaque

0711 opaque

0710 origami

0710 origami

0709 mayfly

0709 mayfly

0708 torus

0708 torus

so as I'm posting this I'm doing the whole imaginary debate with an imaginary geometry nerd who doesn't think this is a torus. I'm preparing my speech for how this *is* a torus - with variables of nodes, axes of views, and all sorts of numerical mischief going on in PureData, some fixed, some random, some sliding valuation, some data driven by the amplitude of the music, etc., and lots of editing in Davinci between four generations of takes. If I called it "elephant" or "tinfoil", I could avoid this confrontation altogether. If I had drawn a cup of applesauce and called it "apple", no one would have a problem with that.

then I thought, 

I need to step away from the studio before my psyche implodes from pointlessness.

There are interesting, wonderful things outside of this room as well.

0707 divertimental

0707 divertimental

for Dr. Matt Gecko who likes him some actual guitar

the other reason is 75% of my old band Cuttlefish are going to be together in 2 days and I needed to work on my calluses.

this is, without doubt, turning out to be the finest summer of my life

so far

0706 mantra

0706 mantra

made from footage I took of clouds above the East Sea and a tiny dot drawn on a white sheet of paper

0705 glyphs

0705 glyphs

0704 awaited

0704 awaited

0703 unterbahn

0703 unterbahn

mein bruder geht heute zurück zum Madison, WI

fun fun fun auf der

0702 tides

0702 tides

shot this morning at TIDE coffee and roastery here in Busan

0701 canarm

0701 canarm

I saw that 2 astronauts were doing EVA fixes to the Canadian robotic arm on the space station and I grabbed some video and audio from the live radio during the procedure.

appropriately, it's Canada day. The arm is all fixed, apparently.

and it's my birthday.

and it's roughly the halfway point for this project. Let's check the stats so far..

182 pieces

4 hours, 25 minutes running time

at this rate, it will produce ~8.8 hours of material