On Searching and Finding

 

Chicago Skyline (2002)

The following words are entries in Dynaxiom, sans numbering--something intentionally hidden. There is great power in searching and finding and stumbling on other things in the process.

Search
Hidden
Obscure
Discover
Lost
Stumble

The systems we rely upon depend on the systems that have been in place for millennia. This is what discoveries usually are: the realization that we've experienced something for the first time that had always been there.

Even if something is partially faded or obsolesced in culture, there's sufficient ground for exploration and discovery. Discovering just one thing you didn't know about before can be revelatory in one's life.

Attempting to copy something usually leads to your own discoveries; That’s how inspiration works. It may be wrong in certain respects, but it’s always the inexact copies that are interesting because you see the mistaken attempts—and in the process, something entirely new emerges that is subtly connected to the original. This is how synthesis happens organically.

It's not that you did something. It's that you discovered (found) it--and not because you were looking for something to find for your own ego gratification, i.e. "Look what I found!". You were simply on the walk and it presented itself. An artist makes herself available for creative opportunity.

This year, Easter falls on April Fool's Day. (4/1/2018)

If you went to college, you probably discovered a few interests outside your area of study, which stay with you for life.

Louis XIV's Jason Hill: "I had to find the white blues guys to get to the black blues guys who were doing it better". This is how inspiration works: you discover the copy, which leads you back to the original influences. (This is how one discovers classical music as well.) You can never expect that people will appreciate music history if they don't see the context. When you tell people that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused riots at its premiere--then they listen more closely.

The preferable path for making something is to proceed linearly from idea to tools--although tools (or instruments) can redirect the ideas. It is also possible to start linearly from use of tools for the purpose of revealing an idea that was perhaps hidden. But tools to provoke ideas is an 'artificial' creativity because the tools will eventually impose their own limitations in situations where you might not want them. Then you'll have to go back to starting with ideas.

Knowing how to use art implements won’t make a successful artist any more than someone who doesn't know how to use them. The equivalent in music is baroque string music a la Vivaldi. It's remarkable how this is, in some circles, still the standard for what good music is supposed to sound like. In fact, music that doesn't sound like that can be just as rigorously produced. Take for example minimalism, where the idea is refined to the point where meticulously executed small detail is completely hidden. The details were all thought through meticulously, and were deemed to not contribute to the resultant idea. Skill doesn't always have to be visible.

Don't just make art, expect to make discoveries and have insights at the same time.

Somewhere someone is first discovering something.

A spiritual path is predicated on the faith that some things are simply hidden from view because of the illusion of space and time.

An era's technologies will always be the bones and fossils for future study and discovery.

Very often I discover what a piece is about after it's done. Knowledge is in the doing and finishing. When things take a long time to resolve, a kind of 'amnesia' occurs, and you just go with a mix of short term memory, the wisdom inherent in the original idea, and the deadline to make a finished work.  On Finishing

There's a joy in creativity frequently hidden by ‘production', to simply make something for the sake of itself.

Dreams are a form of synchronicity with consciousness. They are there like the stars hidden in the daytime sky.

Science becomes all the things that we thought were hidden or unknown.

If you compressed all the information on the internet, it would be very small. Ideas might be expressed in different ways but are saying the same thing or asking the same questions with the same answers. AI will be a way for the internet to become wise. You'd go to seek exformation, not information.

Synchronicity is recursive by its very nature: seeking begets finding, finding begets seeking, ad infinitum. Synchronicity also requires a place to occur. That's why virtual worlds can't compare to the real world.

Music is always looking for shortcuts. Rock 'n' Roll was an attempt at a shortcut.

When looking at paintings in museums or galleries the trace of your eye is the same as the trace of attention in reading a novel or watching a film or listening to music. Looking, as well as reading or listening, is a form of mindful watching.

Reading non-fiction can sometimes be a "scanning for a connection": You already have a base of knowledge and you're looking for points to connect.

Following interesting happy accidents sometimes makes more sense than what you initially set out to do. You have to give yourself the freedom to see what you're not looking for.

How deeply do you look? Some people don't care about looking at art because there isn't always clear information on the surface. Reading is a form of looking. There can be clear information, but in some ways, it's at the same level as looking at art. Both have some information and the question is whether the information is absorbed and applied. That's something that we have to make an effort to do; It's never automatic. Fake news operates on the condition that people really aren't looking in the first place, but rather locating information that they can easily recognize. 'Recognizable information' is essentially a 'style' that we like.

It's more interesting to conceal intent, in hopes that the viewer might discover it. People tend to like things once they've been challenged to understand, and feel smarter once they have.

The feeling is that life is (or should be) recursively predictable and sequential, right down to every thought and action. If you think too much about artistic integrity, you might not get anything done, or make any new discoveries because every step has to both follow and lead. Curiosity is inherently discursive and meandering, just as a river winds as opposed to flowing in straight lines.

In some ways, the digital realm has made us blind to minute details, while exaggerating others. High-resolution imagery that is backlit is a different perceptual phenomenon than looking at catch-lights made with a one-hair brush with under natural light in a museum. Something gets lost in bit depth, both at high and low resolution.

When we have no reason to look, we don't really see anything, or operate on the belief we have seen everything, and are looking for something to challenge that belief.

It's happened many times where I thought I lost a part of something, then discovered the missing piece. It reminds me that I am sometimes superstitious, or looking for patterns of meaning in seemingly random events.

When we go to museums and art galleries, we are essentially looking at centuries and millennia worth of the search for meaning.

The internet has created an interesting paradox of being able to find anything, except for the specific things you are looking for. Some things are meant to be mysteries.

If you're looking for science in art you won't always find it--and vice-versa.

Music in general has a core spiritual element to it. What gets in the way is the effect of style and genre, which tends to hide or obscure the spiritual elements. Lyrics have a way of making the superficial elements less opaque. Jazz in its more purely improvisatory forms, without regard to musical structure or theory, such as free jazz, is not music for listening but rather one of communion.

Words should speak to you. One has to ask, "Is there anything in them that hasn't been said before?" Singing someone else's words is different than singing your own. I've noticed this when writing music to any kinds of words: The meaning of the words can sometimes disappear, or are overcome by the power of the foreground activity--the spoken word. Reading a passage from someone else's book and a passage from your own can be almost the same activity, but the process of thought, expression of thought through the spoken word, writing down the thoughts, then singing them, can obscure the initial thought process. In music, very often words are there simply as placeholders for words that are singable: There is no thought process whatsoever for the writer, but can emerge for the reader/listener. This is when they begin to speak and begin to say something.

If you are an 'idea person', ideas are in the flow of your life, and you need to learn how to deal with that as a force pushing against you. Every new idea pushes all the other ones away, or sometimes obscures them. The first thing you need to do is tether it to something else: a series, collection, category etc. such that it doesn't disappear. Ideally, an idea should take on some type of shape within a short period of time.

The biggest isn't always the most visible. Depending on where you are, lots of smaller objects can obscure one large prominent one.

Old genres of music always come back if there is enough interest by younger generations. Some may have just discovered Weather Report and Return to Forever, and some older generations as well. What was interesting once can be interesting again.