Lee Barry's Blog, page 10

September Again

 What’s interesting about the diaries is that I get to revisit things I was thinking about before, like various ideas I had for music and a lot of those things I eventually finished. (Keeping a diary is a good thing because it’s a motivator and it lets things stand out and lays bare a lot of things that you had been thinking about and can revisit). At the time of the Clinton scandal in

The Art of Combination

 I have always worked combinatorially, i.e., each creative act is somehow connected to others, either spontaneously (when I am aware of them) or later when I associate them with existing works. This works the same for my music as well as art projects. I also have always kept lists of ideas, titles, strategies, and so on, which I go back to very often. Electronic notebooks, such as Evernote

Musical Readymades

 What I realize is that all generators are a form of gaslighting your creative powers. I think the way I want to go is to use them in an ironic context, but I think that would be the reflexive reaction, as opposed to organic craft. AI generators are generators of postmodernist approaches, which would of course include satire and irony. Yesterday I was revisiting an Ellsworth Kelly work that

OEM Culture

AI, in general, hasn’t yet impacted the future of music, at least not in an aesthetic sense, but that could be a possibility, as could the blockchain, such as turning samples on and off. But that will essentially be the avant-garde, not pop music. The problem I have with new technologies is they just barely overlap with artistic expression as has been defined through history. We’ve already

The Effect of Tools On Creativity

  Tools are the most basic form of technology, but tools can very often be confused with creativity, or obfuscate creativity. In music, focusing on the gear and the sounds may result in a good piece of music, but creativity doesn’t require that many tools—at least in the beginning. I write exclusively on an acoustic guitar, and sometimes a bass—anything that doesn’t have to be plugged

On Beauty And Elegance

 What is the relationship between beauty and elegance? Le Corbusier is the perfect example of an artist/architect driven by the idea of a “new order”. So much so that the French fascists appropriated his ideas. He was known to rail against Victorian decoration, which he felt was devoid of order, obfuscating beauty and elegance. I’ve always liked the six Pictures of Nothing lectures by the

To Fold, To Spindle, To Manipulate

 We don’t necessarily need AI for art-making, although it can be a new way of transforming and manipulating images. We’ve been doing this with Adobe After Effects for 30 years now. AI is just a continuation of art-making as it has been for millennia. Artists still make paintings, pottery, textiles, works on paper, glass sculpture, metal work, and so on. If you go to large international art

Chiasmi

  Chiasmus: a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form; e.g. ‘Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.’.A riff on a diary entry 8/18/2005:Social commentary works in art only when a majority of the opposition is willing to change their

What's In An Aspect Ratio?

 I recently saw the film, Mommy by French-Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan, who used various aspect ratios as subtle visual/narrative device. Most of the film is shot in a 1:1 square aspect ratio, apparently as a metaphor for the narrowed horizons of their lives. In other more jubilant moments it switches to widescreen, and adjusts accordingly to the shifting tensions. The film is terrible

If 2024 Was 1964

 What will 2020’s music sound like? Popular technologies will drive it, and most likely will be shaped with AI, as that seems to now be the cool “guitar” everyone wants in the shop window. In 1964, this same question was probably asked, and by the end of the 60s, music was vastly different, primarily because of advances in electronics and recording technology, and also generally by postwar