Lee Barry's Blog, page 33

Technological Distancing

 From Francis Bacon's Aphorisms:The unassisted hand, and the understanding left to itself, possess but little power. Effects are produced by the means of instruments and helps, which the understanding requires no less than the hand. And as instruments either promote or regulate the motion of the hand, so those that are applied to the mind prompt or protect the understanding.  Someone had recently

On Frames, Framing, and Frameworks

All the entries with fram! from my book of aphorisms Dynaxiom and also in its "child" volume ON.0464. If you want a sense of spirituality to emerge in a piece of music, you have to be willing to surrender to the moment, and apply analysis sparingly--or perfect your craft to the point where it can be made invisible. It's really a balancing act of right and left brain: the right provides the

Flash Mobs (The Athena Effect)

Recently, there was a potentially iconic photo taken in Portland by David Killen called "Naked Athena" ("Athena"). Like the immolated monk in Saigon in 1963, the subject is in an intersection--and like many "iconic" photos, there are other shots of it on Google images, including images that are erroneously associated with it, as in the following screenshot: These mashups made by algorithms are

Urgently Relevant

 I started keeping an electronic journal around 2008, and would frequently save articles that I wanted to read later. One of the articles I saved was titled Written On the Wind by Stewart Brand. It was about the impermanence of digital media, and that we had to make a concerted effort to archive it and to continually migrate it to new media. I realized that the more effort that you put into this

All In The Packaging

Recorded music no longer has the constraints it once had. But over the past two or three decades, we have been nostalgically reintroducing the old formats with the original constraints--for example a digital release with 12-15 songs as would fit on two sides of a vinyl record. I like the idea of serialization, and that may be the format going forward. If The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper or Dark Side of

Reel Life (Cont.)

Live and Let It Die-Off.In the moment of creation, a musician or artist isn't thinking about the implications of it in the future. It's just not a part of the flow. Because if you get too analytical you can't be creative, at least in the beginning.McCartney was considering the mondegreens:"I don't think about the lyric when I sing it. I think it's 'in which we're living', or it could be 'in which

Scoring For Places

Muzak was a form of "noise" in the sense that it was distinct from "real" music (signal)--in the background filling an unnerving silence. Even classical music was used by many people in offices at low volume just to mask dead silences--an insult to the composer in some ways.All places are containers for certain kinds of sounds. Nature itself is a container for the sounds of wildlife. In

Spines (On Books)

The problem with digital media is that it does not automatically display itself and consequently loses the power of the object to bind to memory. When you don't see the spines of books and records you won't remember the power they have in your life. They merely appear in a list on a screen, tethered to their own ability to have enough power to display themselves.***My local library opened just a

On Nostalgia

On NostalgiaThis, and the other “ONs” are the replacement for the old out-dated print edition of Dynaxiom, as well as the next volume in the Continuation series (Green Edition).ON1777. Art is created in the zone between initial idea and vision and its construction in the real world. Sometimes they meet perfectly with no space between them; That's when things are popular. Over time they can move

Flash Mobs

As I was doing the research for a project, I ran across the photograph of the Hindenburg explosion. The photographer Sam Shere probably was the only one there with a camera ready, and consequently, it became an iconic photograph. If smartphones existed then, everyone in the area would have been taking the same photo or video, and singling out one shot would have been a difficult decision.William