Here is an experiment using just the diary entries from a particular day--in this case, today, March 16. First I go through the entries sequentially and extract words and phrases that are musical and begin to form verses and choruses. The "from time to time" line became a repeating phrase, perhaps sung as a background voice, or sung antiphonally. Then I choose other lines based on the established groove. You can play around with the order, and eventually, it begins to gather meaning. Once you have the song structure, you can swap out lines with other words; you don't ultimately have to use the original text at all. You can also use ChatGPT to find other words and phrases to complete the lyric. In essence what you're doing is using your own algorithm for writing lyrics and songs, which to me is more interesting and satisfying.
From Time To Time Sometimes I try To map out the sequence of the on-screen portrayal of reality We are suffused in the space of the past Cloud travel encourages discovery Original order of extracted lines with the same rhythms in the words: i t was designed to map out the sequence of the on-screen portrayal of reality encourages discovery To Garfield Park The boundary of the tropical and a Chicago March critical mass and begins to decline we are also suffused in the space of the past from time to time A generative treatment run against the loop sometimes I try Cloud Travel Japanese Emperor makes a rare appearance. The world must be ending the power of nature always wins settle the score Stadium Tower in New Orleans zipping past the windows
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3/14/2001
Reading Serious Play by Michael Schrage. It was cheap and ubiquitous spreadsheet software that led to the notion that you can play and model endlessly. 20 years later, we are drowning in those sentiments, i.e. too many options and not enough real life impact of any import. Amateur CAD signifies a growing democratization of design. "Design experiences" are more important than the actual design objects. I 3/14/2006 Article in New York Times about the "black hole" of digital art. If the object itself and its intended context (print, recording, installation) are not preserved, cataloged, and kept active in future generations [it is lost forever]. It also talked about the "3D" effect of art, i.e. its ability to be experienced beyond its digital nature. Brian Eno: Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing, which it isn't after several long days' work.
Is there ever a "fire" in composition? A rule of thumb for completing a symphony would be to write a minute of music a day. That can be hard on some days when you might have lots of 16th notes at fast tempos. Old Master composers needed a different kind of fire to get through those days scratching with a calligraphy pen into a score--including the staves.
Web at 25: While there is no year zero for television, the first TVs were produced around 1958. TV25 would have been 1983, not far off from the birth of the Internet. 1989 was also the year of the Velvet Revolution and the Tiananmen Square Uprising, all of which took place without an Internet.
What is different? The Arab Spring was attributed partly to Twitter and Facebook, but this connection is tenuous at best. Broadcast television (aside from the Iron Curtain) was largely democratic, yet people had no direct connection to the airwaves—they were not being watched or tracked by the airwaves. You could be seen on camera but those images were only fleeting and not saved as data. The real revolution is in the storage of digital information. With more people typing at keyboards and entering data onto hard drives the real revolution is in the ubiquity and permanence of memory, and how digital memories can be continuously reshaped and put into different contexts. Hypertext was the next mini-revolution, linking bits of context that could never have been done before, without researching source information, footnotes and bibliographies. The power of the Internet is to instill the idea of opportunity. Those opportunities are not infinite. With so many people having the same ideas, the Internet cancels itself out. *** Studio: Worked on "City" piece (Urban Biota). The sonic landscape of a city has its own ecology of "organisms": the screeching sounds of metal against metal, background hum from power lines, buzzing neon, passing elevated trains, and pneumatic machinery—the natural sounds of a city landscape that become a quotidian experience, yet unobtrusive and perhaps has a calming effect. (This was mixed to not interfere with the top layer of attention).
A track from Ancient AI (2017), driven by an "Another One Bites The Dust" bass vibe.
As I've been continuing with my "History Overlay" project, I'm now going out on photo shoots to the same locations on the same day of the month specifically for the overlay effect. It's hit-and-miss because you don't know what the overlay effect will be until you can get it into Photoshop. Sometimes they don't work, but it's interesting when they do. The primary rule is that you use only the Overlay transfer mode.
3/9/2024 Over 1/9/2019 and 3/9/2024 Over 12/9/2006. I had to use the Wayback Machine to locate something I posted on one of my first websites circa 2001 and poked around a bit.
I found my Ideas List. Some of them are still kind of interesting. Snippets of scenes in films, or bits of dialog where you have to determine what the story is about and what the denouement is. [What Shorts are now to some degree] Alternate Local Transport - Private bus line that only makes trips to stores, cleaners, etc. There would be 4 regions, each with its own schedule, picking up passengers to go to the market, where it would stay for 1 hour to 90 minutes and return, dropping people off at their homes. The bus would burn clean fuel and have a large cargo capacity. If there is a prolonged fossil fuel crisis, there will need to be these types of alternatives to cars. [In the future this will be the driverless Uber. But the problem in the US is that the infrastructure isn't maintained enough to support it] Once vast amounts of video, audio and text can be stored on a disk, some media giant should produce a disk for each year 1970-1980 for example. That way when we feel nostalgic (and we all will once we get sick of the vanguard) we can immerse ourselves in the memes of the past. (Boomers will LOVE this come 2010!) [Essentailly YouTube] Portable movie theater that can be transported to neighborhood parks on balmy summer evenings. [We now have the inflatable screens] A band that just stands there and plays a tape of their songs. The philosophy is, "I've already played it and why should I play it again when you really came here to be with the crowd." (Actually, when I think about it this is the way the Beatles were thinking when they stopped touring.) [This is a current rant about legacy bands playing to backing tracks] Invent some type of neck warmer for the bass. It would wrap around with Velcro-like a blood-pressure cuff and would have a heating element powered by batteries. It could also come with a set of heated gloves. [I still think this is a good idea. There's nothing like a warmed-up neck] Instead of sampling music from the past, sample it from the present, and in 20 years it will sound retro. (But how which you know what will be culturally relevant?) Stage an event, (publicity stunt) where a group would construct the face on Mars on Earth. A camera that applies random affects so that you never know what the print will look like. Music released like software, where you can "upgrade" albums or collections, a series of songs that continually develops and unfolds (like a soap opera). [I do this now with videos of released music with "upgrades"] A new job title: "Web salvage technician": collects and archives Web sites that no one longer can maintain. [This is what the Wayback Machine is] Weekly summaries of your own life, things you thought about, plans you've made, but have forgotten about. Idea for character: plays lead role, but you never see them, only hear about them at the end of the story. [This has already been done, but not sure where, It seems to be a universal trope]. Idea for story: a conservative corporate CEO becomes a rock n roll icon. [Ha!] Characters that evolve into other characters and take on the characteristics of those people in ironic ways. Folk news reporting, where anyone with a modicum of investigation skill can cover and report news. [Wildly ironic and prescient] Idea for character: a corrupt cop who's a shareholder in an entertainment company that promotes a band called The Murderers (they actually exist) who are known in the underground for doing snuff concerts and getting away with it. (Will the world ever get this bad?) Yes, it has. Various odors emitted into urban areas such as pine, strawberry, cinnamon, etc. for brief moments. (Possible name: Institute for Local Smells, Urban Potpourri) Edge ideas/activities: those that exert an influence on central ideas stuck in the center. Stories based on want ads--how did the story ultimately unfold? Clothing made completely out of computer screens. [Almost old at this point] Scene for a movie: Heated presidential campaign, underdog plots murder of front runner, front runner kidnapped by a religious cult and killed underdog and winds up winning the election--they made the murder look like an accident. [Our world at the moment. This is the whole idea about Disaster Movies: our imagination for telling stories is the projector on the screen of our world--also called The Collective Unconscious] Story where everyone is a victim of context by virtue of their race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity [Our world at the moment} 3/7/2005:
Photographer Diane Arbus has a show at the Met. She let people politely "gawk" at freaks, dwarves, and sideshow performers. That's one of the unique things about photography— it lets people stare at other people without being impolite. I also like her Axiom: "a photo is a secret about a secret."
An illuminated track from the Ancient AI album (2017). The title is pronounced "panjalora", a made-up name. I've used Joseph Millais images.
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AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
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