Visual Feedback Loops

Digital art has yet to earn bonafides in the art world, although I see more and more of it at big international art shows. But working digitally, at some part of the creative process, is tremendously useful for generating ideas, even if the final work is not digital.

I'm really interested in running things in and out of other domains to transform the work. I like to think of this process as a 'projection' of one medium onto another--like photographing an object, then making a drawing or painting from the photograph. Physical objects may or may not arise from mechanical drawings or sketches, but it is interesting to subsequently create them.

The late sculptor Tony Smith was known to produce drawings of his sculptures after they were installed as a way to fully consummate the idea. We see provisional drawings in isolation and think of them as coming first in a sequence, but they can be produced non-linearly.

Many artists work from indeterminate concepts, as opposed to a fixed plan (like mechanical or architectural drawings), so the thinking about the work as it is being made is constantly changing, all the way up until the work is finished, at which point the artist realizes, "That's what I was thinking and doing." Understanding the process usually comes in hindsight, and only matures after many years or decades. Sometimes making another version of it helps you to understand it better, or to fully put it to rest.

A thorough exploration of ideas usually involves taking into consideration every possible aspect to see if they augment or further clarify concepts or ramify into other ideas. Digital transformation is the perfect tool for this process, and I frequently use smartphone apps as "idea projectors".

Smartphone apps such as Decim8 are useful and interesting in suggesting new iterations that can be ported onto other surfaces. Treatments can be done in Photoshop as well, but Photoshop has few constraints, whereas apps have them baked in, or are too difficult to use.

The ubiquity of the smartphone allows you to run transformations at your leisure, or when something boring is on TV. I truly believe that smartphones and tablets are the new artist journal and sketchbook, although they do not replace it. (Paper can always be digitized and be used to make digital transformations or translations.)

The digital transformation of this pencil drawing creates the illusion of a possible painting that may or may not have the visual impact of the digital version. They can work on their own as pieces of art but here they are used as maquettes, as they 'pose' to be converted to pixels, and then translated to other mediums.

Carbon Tax (original work in pencil)

 

Transformation #1

Transformation #2

Lost in Translation?

After a work on paper is transformed it tends to cast a shadow on the original, which becomes relegated to a prosaic provisional drawing or sketch--even if they stand alone as works in themselves--and even if the viewer knows the evolution. The drawings become the 'baby teeth' that were left behind as mementos.

Translation to other materials would also result in some transmission loss, as the colors and textures that appear on a backlit screen hit against the constraints of a different gamut altogether. These digital mockups are done quickly and abundantly, and most of them don't have any artistic value--but some are visually exciting and worthy of consideration for an entirely new work, which is a compelling prospect and keeps the sparks flying.

On Working Incrementally

I am often asked how I can do so many things, and include some type of a sleep cycle.

Everything we do is incremental in some way. Activities that involve making something are almost always reliant on a series of linear or non-linear action chains, sometimes taking place in a period of weeks, months or years.

The work of artist Chuck Close is a prime example of an incremental process. In fact this process was his primary modus operandi, giving him an easy way to make and finish huge pieces based on simple methods and processes, reduced to simply making a series of marks on a surface assiduously every day for years on end.

But this is not to say works of art can't be made quickly. Japanese brush painting, snapshot photography and even pop songs are incremental in the sense that there may be an incubation period or preparatory period that precedes the actual creative act: brushes are organized and staged, cameras are armed, batteries charged, shots are scouted, lyrics are hewn over cups of coffee and cigarettes--all part of the incremental process.

To work incrementally, adding something in dribs and drabs, is an affirmation of life, filling the black/white void with the appearance of something.

We all work incrementally whether we like it or not. To do it intentionally is a way of making the passage of time a tangible, palpable and sometimes beautiful thing. To simply be a passive watcher of time is to be satisfied with a black void, a penultimate stage of death.

Make something every day--and life lives on for you.

Rough Grooved Surface

 

Artwork From the Album
Rhythm By Addition
(hover over the image to launch player)

Release Date: October 14, 2011

There are 3 parallel meters used: 3/4, 12/8 and 6/8+3/4. A common characteristic in African music is a 12/8 meter that can be related to on various levels. In Western music meter gets divided or simplified into a basic meter and syncopation is used for rhythmic complexity. Since African music is not about scored music, different metric layers can be easily added over the top without consideration of how it relates to 12/8.

When Ideas Die With Their Creators

It is seldom the case that ideas continue to belong to the progenitor. And why would we want them to?

Beethoven might be considered a person whose ideas were epochal, but he was merely following the rule book or 'Best Practices' of composition, built on compositional methods blazed by Mozart and his elders.

After Beethoven died his music endured, and the supporting theories continue to be used to this day. What did die was the classical style. Similarly the ideas behind Apple products may continue to exist in theory, but the new company may be as different as the Beethoven symphonies and the Beatles' Abbey Road, similar in some musicological sense, but vastly different culturally.

Not everyone that liked Beethoven liked the Beatles, even though some of the same compositional devices were used. The core ideas might have been there but were really a different idiom altogether.

If music history is a guide, the core ideas engendered corporeally, will most likely not endure ethereally.

Light Cathedrals

They say cities are not about the buildings, but the people. As regards religion, cathedrals can have the effect of reversing that equation: you may not care for the dogma, but the product of what we do as humans soars above the human condition. Some may argue that the communal experience of all believing and acting on the same ideas makes cathedrals possible.

On Cover Art

The old saw that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover seems strange now with e-books because they don't have a cover, per se. Digital music is also bereft of its packaging, which was at one time so central to the music experience: You could see photos of the band, read the lyrics, liner notes. We can still easily access this content on the net, albeit without the cachet that comes with having it nicely printed on a tangible surface--an attribute of information that is dying a slow death.

Cover art for books and music was always a 'push' phenomenon: You didn't have to request it--it was standard equipment. Now one wonders where it might be located. In fact, one can make their own visual experience that goes with the product, but is that a good thing, and who does it? Bjork has good intentions about letting the listener become a part of the creative process, but will they take the time to do it? It is at least a way to encode an aural experience with something deeper and persistent.

Creating something with a tangible object in mind informs the creative process at elemental levels and locates the work in a certain frame of understanding. Writers usually don't think about the cover of a book, but perhaps they should. When a screenplay is derived from a novel someone else is tasked with performing this operation--with varied results. It takes a consensus of pictures conjured in the readers' minds and curates them onto film. It converts the intangibility of imagination into a possible world in which the story was created.

While working on a new set of songs that have an African feel, I am doing a series of art pieces to get the music to 'look' a certain way.

Possible album art for (code name) 'Not Enough Africa':

Here is what this 'sounds' like:



People with synesthesia do this naturally, ergo it is a natural phenomenon--rare--but not an aberration. Creative people do this artificially as a temporary metaphor to lubricate the ideation process, and to operate in tangible way, rather than to work natively digital, which for many people can sometimes seem unmoored from the natural world.

Where's that confounded bridge!

At the theoretical level, song hooks are imbued with clever twists like harmonic modulations, chord 'borrowing' and turnarounds. Now these devices have devolved from the songwriter's toolkit in much the same way Cole Porter Moon-June rhyming schemes became obsolete by the 1960s in favor of new compositional devices that made them frumpy and old hat. The classic bridge is now in this category. Nonetheless I still love to put them in songs.

Bridges (sometimes used synonymously with middle-eight) are difficult to do well because not any musical transition can qualify as a bridge device. They typically appear only once in a composition: If a section is repeated, it technically is not a bridge. Some regard the "life is very short..." phrase in the Beatles' "We Can Work It Out" or the "why she had to go..." phrase in "Yesterday" as bridges, but since they are repeated more than once, they only lead back to verses. Bridges are a kind of one-way trip to the end of the song. (In films it is called the denouement)

Here are some examples. The list was actually longer than this, but as I re-listened to the songs, many of what I thought were bridges were really just transitional material, or B-phrases.

Clocks - Coldplay (Verse is in Eb Mixolydian and the bridge logically borrows from Eb Dorian (III, VII, IV)
Veronica - Elvis Costello ("On the Empress of India..." section)
King For a Day - XTC ("You're only here once so you gotta get it right..." section)
Don't Dream It's Over - Crowded House (Finn's guitar solo)
Chocolate Cake - Crowded House ("And the dogs are on the road, we're all tempting fate...)
Englishman In New York - Sting ("Modesty, propriety, leads to notoriety...") In this live version, the bridge truly leads to somewhere else except back to a verse)
It's Alright For You - The Police (This actually has one long bridge with a little step in front of it: an abrupt modulation at 1:24 leading to a call-response solo by Andy Summers followed by a slide solo. The small step then becomes the outro vamp.)
No Reply - The Beatles ("If I were you I realized that I...")
Psycho Killer - Talking Heads ("Ce que j'ai fais, ce soir la...")

Feel free to send in your bridge examples.