Saw this on the sidewalk while out for a walk the other day. Beautiful.
Category: Digital Art
Last week, I joined the online arts community/store Redbubble, and there are now 17 of my artworks up for sale as prints, posters or greeting cards. I have already documented some of my process of making these works, but you can also find more details in the descriptions for each image and in my public profile statement.
This has been a year in the works so far. I’m excited to see what kind of response my work gets, and my profile is only going to grow in interest as I get further into learning Processing 2.0 and using databending techniques.
I’ve been thinking about practices for setting up successful live improvisation for two Ableton Live users. Coming from a background of performing in jazz and wind ensembles, there are significant differences to take into account: the “instruments” here are much more sophisticated and can produce an huge range of sounds, styles and tones. Improvisation must occur on multiple levels as a more textured composition emerges.
From my experiences over the past year improvising with another Ableton Live user, I think I can conclude the following:
- There is a tendency, even a desire, to be subsumed by the processes happening on the screen. At the top is the music and sound being produced; much as the actions of your improvisation partner are not always clear to you or in your perception, and you only focus on his/her musical contribution, so your own actions can be subsumed under the end musical results. The body and machine are integrated, and the product is what matters most.
- While one is improvising, one is primarily in a reactionary state and not an active state of thinking. This is true in most forms of improvisation, as years of study and practice on an instrument must make the performance of music as spontaneous as possible. It feels even more reactionary in Ableton, though, as more active forms of production, like the preparation of samples, instruments and other sound palettes are too time intensive to be done in the midst of an improvisation.
- Because of this, preparation of sound material and some sense of pre-arrangement of different instruments and samples is necessary for one to be successful in a group improvisation with DAW’s like Ableton.
On another note, I have found that working with Ableton Live in some ways mirrors my work with the Gnoetry 0.2 computer poetry program. The sense of being subsumed into the process unfolding on the screen is sometimes quite total. It is a part of the compositional thought process, and my own thought and decision-making is combined with the prosthetic cognitive tool on my screen and at my fingertips via my keyboard and mouse.
I plan to continue this writing on the connections between compositional practices and strategies in different digital art forms on an ongoing basis. My experience alternating between projects in digital music, digital poetry and digital art over the past year has helped me to see some of the similarities and differences clearly enough, I hope, to make some useful connections.
For almost a year now I’ve been learning to use Ableton Live 8 to create electronic music. Last month, I finally polished off my first two compositions. which you can now listen too on my SoundCloud stream. They feature a few short samples from bpNichol’s “Ballads of the Restless Are” and Christian Bök’s “Aria of the Three-Horned Enemy” (one of my favorite sound poems), both available in their original forms at PennSound.
My intentions are to start collaborating soon with Tyler Carter on some original sound poetry compositions, or at least some sort of collaborative poetry/text art that is written and produced for a musical composition, i.e., it is not written for any page, but to be performed.
Check out my compositions “Bubble Honey” and “Grind Slider, for bpNichol.” Leave some comments if you like, or if you don’t. It’s amateur hour, after all, so any feedback is good.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/users/60222535″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
Update:
The migraine situation has improved quite a bit recently. While the new medication I am on to prevent migraines, depakote, doesn’t seem to work very well relative to its side effects (weight gain, drowsiness, dullness, stomach pain, mixes badly with alcohol or caffeine), I have been put on a nasal steroid and Zyrtec for allergies and have not had a migraine or even a headache in the past three weeks. I am hoping the continued treatment for allergies can stop my chronic migraines for good and get me back to just the occasional episode. Relpax seems to be doing a good job with those.
Original Post:
So I’m still dealing with chronic migraines, the headaches along with all of the other fantastic symptoms that surround it–nausea, disorientation, lack of focus, sinus pressure, light sensitivity, depression, a worse memory than usual, the occasional beatitude, soreness throughout my body similar to what follows seizures, almost no sense of time.
The meds I’m on might be a problem too, since it seems the nortriptyline isn’t helping to prevent them much anymore, and the side effects are becoming more pronounced. A visit to the neurologist this week might improve this at least. It’s hard to tell what the eletriptan is doing to my head too.
Anyway, I wrote a poem about migraine. Maybe I’ll make a habit of it. Maybe not. Writing about my life and my feelings doesn’t usually turn out too well, but here goes.
MIGRAINE
My head has been cloned on top of itself.
Each eye has its own head each with its other eye.
Like a Ven diagram where it all overlaps?
There is no easy way to describe it.
Looking, I see.
Seeing, I understand.
It is suffering.
There is a cause to it.
There will be an end to it.
The man rubs his head into the pavement.
Children had drawn a beautiful landscape in chalk all over it.
The man rubs the landscape into him, inside his head is a chalk transporter.
People watch but they cannot help him.
The man opens a portal in his suffering and falls in.
There is no record of this event.
I’m just about finished with my first series of GIMP art images, made with GIMP version 2.6 for Ubuntu Linux 12.04. Using only the filters which come loaded with the program, I apply different filters and settings intuitively until I am satisfied with each image. It is very much exploratory, obsessive and satisfying work.
I started this series with a single image downloaded from some Google Image search – don’t remember what I searched for. This is what I usually do now. Maybe I feel like looking at images of furniture or living rooms, or maybe it’s Craigslist pictures. I find an image and begin to work on it.
Here’s y8vis1t5l6tn5jrg:
I turned it after a while into this:
I’m not really satisfied with this image any more, but I liked a lot of the shapes I was seeing at high magnification, so I grabbed 30 or so screenshots from it to work with as a series. I’ve produce about 20 finished works and I think the series is done.
Here’s Numbers 10, 20 and 4, with HQ closeups:
I’ll be posting more. If you like them, let me know. I may be uploading them for sale soon.
Sometimes an image just captures the eye and I have to do something with it. An image of the newly emerging SARS Coronavirus from a BBC article this week looked beautiful to me, so I googled and found a larger image of it to work with:
After the continuous application and reapplication of filters, I turned it into what you see below. The full resolution image is very large, so I have a low-res version of the whole image along with some screenshots of the work at full resolution so you may see the details.
I’ve begun learning a programming language again. This time its Processing, and I’m finally getting serious about it. I just received a copy of Matt Pearson’s Genarative Art last month, but I’m working through the examples in Generative Design: Visualize, Program and Create with Processing by Hartmut Bohnacker, Benedikt Gross, Julia Laub and Claudius Lazzeroni first.
These self-portraits were the result of applying sketch P_4_3_2_01 (with text and character attributes tweaked a bit in the code) to a profile picture of mine. As the process used was typographic, and this is a self-portrait, I used my first name as the text to be repeated. The shapes of the large letters, stacked into elongated cylinders, distort the features and colors of my face into strangely evocative curves and knives. The images captured from the processing session were then enlarged and passed through many filters until they came out as they have.
I haven’t learned enough to really create my own generative art / digital poetry code, but tweaking other people’s code has always been the best way for me to figure out what’s going on in the code. I’ll keep plugging away, and coding my heart out.
Enjoy!
Note: They look better at full size, so click on them to view them at 100%.
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