1031 unease

1031 unease

1030 numerals

1030 numerals

After seeing Go Hye-jin's current exhibition "Phantom Studies"

I have a thing about interactive art, particularly involving installations that have motion detection and allow people to wave their arms in front of a large screen to change the images or sound. It's been around for decades, but it seems to be everywhere. It's very common for government funded exhibitions presumably bc the people who decide these things think it will draw kids and art illiterate adults. And fair enough. Every serious artist was once a kid who was at some point knocked out by something flashy and impressive which sparked their interest and they went on to deepen their involvement, etc. I get it. The ones I have a problem with are "serious" artists who use it in "seriously" themed works.

I've seen interactive elements shoved into good concepts, eclipsing the substance of the work and having little if any relevance to what point the artist is trying to get across. Like putting a swing set in St. Peter's cathedral. The kids will love it. To some, it's kind of condescending. It's chocolate sprinkles on caviar. Are two dumb analogies are enough? Ok.

BUT having said that...

Go hye-jin's Phantom Studies solves this problem by allowing the audience to become part of the visual experience in a somewhat passive way. A repurposed stethoscope becomes a contact microphone placed, naturally, over your heart causes the generative visuals projected on the wall to pulsate with your heartbeat. This instantly draws one into the work as a collaborator rather than "look! My hand is pushing the colors around!" as is so often the case. She has invited us to become part of the work without obscuring the mood or message she's conveying. The work is subtly augmented, rather than replaced, by the person, who is poetically offering (donating?) their heart to the piece, allowing us to passively contribute without inviting us to be "creative" participants while maintaining the spirit and intentions of the work. The key here, i think, is the choice of the heartbeat contact microphone instead of some motion capturing mechanism which without fail gets between the art and the audience as it becomes a toy rather than a conduit for thought and emotion. Ms. Go understands this problem and has brilliantly solved it in a rather poetic way here.

I definitely plan to incorporate interactive elements into my future works now that she's demonstrated a way to do it that actually doesn't disrupt the audience's apprehension of the work. It requires careful consideration, like the other elements, of course. I suspect there will always be some distraction caused by the tech, but perhaps once it becomes less of a novelty, then it will settle in as more of an accepted part of the medium and no one will give it a second thought.

Imagine the first audiences to hear a phonograph, or see a film projected on a wall.. some must've thought it was pure witchcraft.

1029 form

1029 form

visual form 

is something I paid little attention to until I tried painting in 2017

and now this project has heightened it considerably

now when I look at things like company logos, architecture, patterns of brickwork, etc. anything that was designed, really..

I have more of an opinion about what I see

some look "better" to me than others and I sometimes understand why I think so

all in all it's a good thing - it opens a new world within the world to me

even the "bad" or "meh" designs I look at don't really spoil my view

they just serve to highlight the "good" designs

and personal taste definitely plays a part in this

before, I never saw the beauty and power that simple form holds to the eye

I've known about form in music and other temporal structures, but now my eyes are open

and the enrichment of experiencing the world increases the more I explore powerful simple forms, juxtapositions, contrasts, light, color, etc.

sometimes I just stare in adoration at a perfect square or circle, too humble to mess with it's immaculacy. 

1028 docks

1028 docks

1027 wall

1027 wall

1026 grid_

1026 grid_

1025 pneuma

1025 pneuma

this one took 7.5 hours. most of that time was me learning new things in Max, but still.. 

in my opinion, the result was not worth the time put in. i think it's shit. the visuals are boring and unoriginal, and the music seems really disconnected to the visuals and the title is the only cool thing about it - referring to the windy horns. what are those about anyway? it sounds like batman on the toilet.

today kind of sucks.

1024 network

1024 network

another step one the road to MaxMSP Jitter proficiency

I'll stop mentioning it from now on. Three times is sufficient.

1023 walk_

1023 walk_

second go at using Max MSP for visuals. The visual component of Max is called Jitter.

--

-d&d dream-

I had a dream last night between 430am (after waking and kicking off the comforter and falling back asleep) and 715 when I woke up again. It involved me talking to young people I met who were talking about playing D&D. We bonded on the game and I reached to my left where there was inexplicably a metal shelf in the middle of what looked like a college campus quadrangle. The shelf was full of my maps, rulebooks, dice bags, miniatures, stacks of magazines and assorted cardboard gaming aids and tons of related books to tabletop RPGs. I grabbed an oversized Dungeon Master's Guide from 2e and showed them, admitting that when we played in our early teens, we didn't really bother reading and following all the rules and guidelines, so our campaigns were heavily "homebrews" and  "house rules", mostly out of ignorance and impatience to just get to it and have fun. Later, I was carrying a huge stack of these things through the streets of town near campus when I realized that my arms weren't tired. I looked at my stack and it was only 1 or 2 things, and I panicked. Whirling around, I saw on the sidewalk behind me was a long trail of strewn things that I'd dropped, most of which had blown away in the wind - lost forever. I was so frantic and forlorn that I rushed about saving everything I could grab. I was so upset that I panicked myself awake.

I've been having dreams related to this for many years. They're usually me wandering the streets looking for stores where they sold gaming products, and finding shelves filled with old, musty rpg maps and stuff and being so excited that waking up was a let down. This is a pattern I've noticed.. my memorable dreams seem to either illustrate my fears or my desires in some way. I've been calling these recurring dreams my "happy store dreams". This qualifies without actually involving a store, but only a shelf which was clearly a borrowed prop from my happy store dreams. Also, the motif of college campuses is a big recurring thing in my dreams.

The strange thing to me, is that I don't even play d&d anymore. The last game I played at a table was around 1997. I'm still interested in the game and I clearly remember loving it when I was 13. Now I'm 56 and I'm content with the anticipation of playing. maybe I don't want to risk having the game spoiled by other people. I've met people who play and I know they'd be awesome (Courtney, Josh(?), Michael, Rebecca, et al.) but I've also met people who play that I'm pretty sure I would flee from after one session. I don't know. Maybe I prefer the anticipation of d&d to the actual thing. I'm content to laugh at myself for all this and go back to what I know I love to do. 

oh yeah.. i don't really go in for telepathic woo woo crap, but this is fun: while I was having that dream, my brother emailed me at 539am asking me a question about d&d campaigns I ran in the early 80s. I'll go answer it now.

1022 mem28

1022 mem28

1021 archmage

1021 archmage

1020 control

1020 control

I have voted in the 2026 U.S. midterm elections. I checked to see if one of the options was to wrap it around a brick, but it isn't. I guess a mail-in ballot will have to do. I hope it doesn't end up strewn on the shoulder of Rt. 31.

It was a good opportunity to survey some Illinois candidates and it was refreshing to see comparatively fewer elderly white males on the ballot. Not that they're all bad.. but the current structures of power need to break if we're going to survive all this nonsense.

that's about as political as I want to get on this blog.

1019 granular

1019 granular

1018 public

1018 public

1017 condense

1017 condense

1016 maxxam

1016 maxxam

the feeble results of my first go at using MaxMSP for visuals. 

1015 six stills

1015 six stills

1014 demograph

1014 demograph

1013 oncheoncheon

1013 oncheoncheon

violin virtuoso Patrick Quinn Carle sent me the source video from his recent bike ride through Oncheoncheon. Collaaaaab!

Patrick was a wind in my sails when I did 365 songs in 2013 as well. What a mensch this guy is!

I dl'ed Max MSP finally and spent some time building simple things. It's a pretty steep learning mountain, but I'm going to love every step of the way. The Pure Data experience is enough to get me through the door, but it's definitely a much larger world. I'm in. 

1012 qpwoeiru

 1012 qpwoeiru

nonsense can be calmingly amusing;

didn't dl Max MSP Trial yesterday bc I was dealing w a storage space issue and it became a whole annoying thing. i have to have a certain amount of ducks in a line before I move forward into anything - possibly more than most people. that's a pretty lame cover for procrastination, i admit, but it's definitely not as lazy as it sounds. Here's another: I'm a pleasure delayer. I did the annoying storage management thing before rewarding myself with diving happily into Max, which I'm super giddy about. what the hell is wrong with me?

so now I'm going to procrastinate the storage maintenance thing by putting a pin in it and download Max MSP Trial right.... now.

1011 quintet

1011 quintet

lovely Sunday

disk drive storage maintenance project ongoing.. moving things around, deleting duplicate files on bloated backup drives and elsewhere

my trumpet came back from the shop in great shape and in ONE DAY instead of the 6 they scheduled. they rock. my valves do not stick anymore and since it's an old worn instrument (23 years of punishingly bad fingering habits), now I need to mix heavy and thin valve oil and poof.. fixed. huge life quality improvement.

I think today is the day I dl the 30 day trial of Max MSP. I've been studying up and I think I'm ready to wade into a new ocean. I'm pretty adept at Pure Data, but it's a lake compared to Max. Let's get wet!

my wife said as she was leaving for her weekly acting class, (para) "I'm totally living the life of a New York 20-something artsy type." Acting classes, part time waitressing, painting, coffeeshops, and living with a bum musician. That's my lady.

1010 assemblage

1010 assemblage

assemblage. I first heard that word (as pronounced ah-sem-BLAZH) when Misun returned from an art workshop where they put together sculptures of everyday items that all together make sense as one thing. That's what these things are, I think. I'd better get ready to number them. My friend Noah made a good case for naming things what they are, instead of a guiding word title; the difference between a title and a label. I'm swinging toward titles for when the visuals and the music are somehow enriched by a third indicator, a one-word poem to tie it all together. And using labels for when the thing is purely abstract and meaning is secondary to being simply a thing to hear and see.

i've been doing this sort of thing since around 2021 - using out of focus footage and making abstract things out of them through compositing and combining them with music. I think quiet your eyes qualifies, and anomaly 2 definitely counts. I know other people do this sort of thing, but it's a format that is vaguely defined (if defined at all) enough to allow for a lot of variation/permutation. Today it occurred to me that I love to do it and it's a lot like what I was painting when I tried painting in 2017-2018 for a few months.. working with color, form, composition, space and time. I really enjoy it and it's something that I look at later on and am proud of. This is kind of rare for me. I am quite familiar with the feeling of nauseous (if  mild) disgust at the results of my own past work. I don't get that with this assemblage style digital compositing of abstract images, playing with the visual artifacts of cheap digital cameras struggling in low light and unresolvable perspectives. All that snowy noise that composites into colorful granular spray. I know it can be done with super high ISO film because I did it in the 90s in Chicago with an old SLR, going to dark bars and shooting crowds watching shows. I'd set up my monopod and try not to get thrown out of the place. I loved the grainy result. The ambiguity of the partially resolved image appeals to me. It leaves much to the imagination and not knowing what is actually being photographed allows for us to leave behind representation and all the mental connections we have to the subject. We are forced to view the image in terms of color, line, movement, and the context provided by the music. I like this. 

i had the idea last night to make (after this year's work is done) a single long-form piece which could take months to assemble instead of presenting the work of one day in a standalone short piece. I'd do the music first to provide tone and structure to the overall thing, then build out the visuals over a long period of time, sometimes a day's work would contribute only a brief moment onscreen - a fraction of the overall work. i'm imagining something that would last between 5 and 10 minutes. Possibly something that could be submitted to short film festivals in the experimental category.

my filmmaker friend Sebastien has suggested I show my work to experimental film festival curators around the world.. at first I waved off the notion [imposter syndrome, etc.] noting that our mutual friend Pip, who is an experimental film auteur and knows just about all there is to know about experimental film history, technique and everything, should see my work, but I replied "ah, Pip wouldn't like my digital stuff, it's not nearly as respectable as the real film, etching into negatives and cutting and splicing by razor and tape stuff." Even I think digital is kind of cheating. 

There I go again. I'm going to forget all that self sabotage and just do what I want to do - what makes me happy, whatever I can look at and listen to and smile at and be glad I did it. That's always been my aligning compass. Not awards, money, fans, adoration, or being #1 at anything. I've only ever been interested in the intrinsic value of making music and, by extension more recently, a/v art: the joy that it gives me in the process.

goodness this has become long. it's all me trying to clarify it for myself.

1009 trem

1009 trem

visuals:

coffee mug reflections

music: 

quirky organ, bouncing rhythms and oval high tones

trumpet in shop; practicing with old C trumpet and hoping I don't lose my pitch matching intuition. if I do, I'll have 3 days to regain it and even then no guarantees that the valves won't still stick.

whatcanyado?

1008 1_9_8_2 top 100 songs and my trumpet issue

1008 1_9_8_2

and now i'm going to see if i can get ai to make me a shuffled mix of the top 100 songs from 1982.. the year I fell in love with pop music. before that it was just catchy tunes that adults liked. in 82 the music on the radio was a paradise to me. I actually understood what the songs were about and the feelings meant something to me.. or at least I would latch onto the parts that I thought I understood and could relate to.

i was 11~12 yo. 

my standout favs of that year:

• Centerfold
• Jack & Diane
• Hard to Say I'm Sorry
• Rosanna
• Who Can it Be Now?
• Pac Man Fever
• Don't Stop Believin'
• I Love Rock 'n' Roll
• Abracadabra

those are the ones i recall loving when i was a kid.. there are a bunch in that 100 that I was too young, uncool, or too white to click with at the time.

--

took my horn to the shop today. they'll clean it up but I doubt it'll fix the slow valve problem, so I'm going to have to think about a new trumpet. ideally, another Bach Strad, but I'll be I'll have to go to the U.S. for that. I'm not getting a used one. Call me old fashioned.

I can see myself getting a lesser, cheaper and used horn that works until I get to the States in the meantime. But the valve problem is akin to being a basketball player with a shoe with a partially detached sole. Nope. I don't suck that bad, and it's not like I can tell the audience, "hey sorry about all the smeared notes - two of my valves are sticking." Nope.

1007 facets

1007 facets

day 5 with Niki

she let me pet her several times today, and I was able to put on her walking harness myself, which is important today bc I'll have to walk her this evening as Misun will be at work. It'll be fine.

Robert and Sunny came by yesterday and they are natural animal whisperers. Tips were given and taken.

Rosa is coming today for notes on the first draft of the music for her installation videos. Today it's the first of four. I deliberately did 2 widely different styles so that she would hopefully be forced to criticize one over the other. Or both. I used to be prickly about criticism, but since having worked on films, I value criticism over praise. It really streamlines the flow toward what the client wants, especially in the beginning. So I hope she's ruthlessly picky at this stage. There is still plenty of time to get it right. 

1006 interconnect

1006 interconnect

as complex as the video appears, the entirety of the PureData code that drives what is seen is pictured here. surprisingly little code.

(oo, just spotted a benign error in there. there shouldn't be a bypassing connector around the colorRGB object.. i'm not going to "fix" it.)

learned something from this:

I thought that video render file size has more to do with how many pixels are moving (changing values) over time. relatively little data compression going on here, so larger file size than usual. I thought it was about DaVinci Resolve crunching numbers to perform lots of crazy compositing of several layers, but there was none of that for this. every frame of this is straight out of PureData visual output window and through OBS for a little filtering, but then on to DaVinci. I think I better understand resulting file sizes now.

the 720p render is 465MB

the 1080p is 1.13GB

i almost called it "interlinked" but to me it evokes the replicant test in Blade Runner 2049. love that film. 

1005 asphalt & Niki

1005 asphalt

this is a little repetitive, but no looping.

we are dog-sitting indefinitely. this is day 3. slow adjustments. the poor thing is pretty confused. 

here she is hanging with me while I compose. I guess soft piano sounds appeal to her. maybe I'll keep things consonant for a while. isn't she gorgeous? her name is Niki.

1004 work

1004 work

the challenge on this was to NOT ape the KOYAANISQATSI music by Philip Glass but still make it somehow fit the visual information. hopefully it leads the viewer-listener to a different angle, and not dwell on the insistent repetitiveness of mechanized industry and humans' roles in all that. what that angle is is really up to you.

maybe it's a step beyond the obvious looped percussiveness of Glass - perhaps some advanced form of whatever psychosis the brain and body undergo after decades of doing the same shit every day. 

a calcified numbness? a muted cry? 

maybe something else.

1003 7_segment

1003 7_segment

1002 m o s a i c

1002 m o s a i c

1001 splash 2

1001 splash 2