On The Evolution of Ideas

The longer you've been working on something solutions will come to you, sometimes years later. It's never the case that things are resolved when you're first working on them. With each piece of art that I've made, I worked on it until I felt that it was resolved. With several pieces in progress, I can keep them all in view and see things I want to add or change. One day you don't see anything that you want to change and it is at that point it's resolved. Similarly, in music, I'll work on mixes by listening to them at low volume in the background while doing something else. And like the art in abeyance, I can identify things I want to change. What I particularly like about music is that once you've written a song that you can play on a guitar or piano--and has a melody and chords--you can re-imagine it in different ways. But for most things, once they're released they're fixed. But in the digital realm, we can endlessly remix and re-arrange after the fact. It's like the denouement in the Barbie movie when Barbie (Barbara) and Ruth Handler meet. Barbie wants to know what she can now become after she doesn't feel like Barbie anymore, but Ruth tells her that ideas live forever. She was nonplussed about how one little idea was so generative. Barbie: "I don't want to be the re-imagining, I want to be the idea". We should want both. (Also, that scene was a perfect "Video 45")

[12/13/2024: It’s now interesting that you can re-imagine (or “restyle”) existing work with AI, so that’s another way to extend a piece indefinitely into the future and makes the idea immortal. The problem with AI is that the original ideas or threads can go missing. The nature of change might be new fabrics with new yarns].