Poetry Project

So a very long gap since my last update - not least because there has been a lot of life - processing coming out as  trans, family life, work, other projects etc etc. However the web is changing and I’m keen to start focusing on my own platform a little more. Meantime you can also find me on Mastodon

Anyway back to matters in hand. If you’ve been following me on Mastodon or Instagram then you’ll have seen that every day over the last couple of weeks I’ve been posting short films with very short poems in. I picked up Lemn Sissay’s book “Let the Light Pour In” and his writing a short poem every day resonated with me. I used to write a lot in my 20’s but have gotten out of practice - I’ve only written a handful or so over the last year - but it is something I’d like to get back into doing. & so the poetry project was born.

I wanted to do a little more than just write a short poem - the short film is a) a bit more in keeping with the fact I describe myself as a multimedia artist and b) possibly going to reach a slightly wider audience than just a poem (but let’s face it I don’t think I’m heading for megastardom with this project :-) ). It’s also forcing me to improve skills I know need work.

& so - I set off making a short film each day - less than 1 minute , because that’s the limit on instagram - not quite worked out what Mastodon gets up to with video but I’ve had no problem posting them (no one follows links on any social media so they need to be “in post”). I’ve not worried about being “obvious” but more just getting up to speed and finding a sustainable workflow. I’ve rapidly improved skills - I now understand what I’m doing with colour grading in DaVinci for example - not just turning controls until it looks ok!. What I really like is that it is giving a focus to film making. It’s also nice writing small bits of music - making good use of my skills and pushing me creatively

So what’s next? Well I’m going to ease off on the one a day part - it’s hard work but I believe I can make is sustainable however I feel like spending a little more time on each one is going to be beneficial, even after two weeks they risk being path of least resistance rather than pushing my creativity (which is the goal). I’m also thinking it would be nice to tackle some longer pieces (probably not in vertical format video either)

Most importantly - I’m getting a lot out of this - it’s pushing me creatively, technically and I’m having a lot of fun doing it. And it sure beats raging about the state of the world on my morning walk!

A photograph of Tuesday

You may have noticed a slowing of the blog. The truth is I’m not a creature of the heat & creative projects have slowed down considerably. In the interim I’ve gathered together a poem and some images from the city of Tuesday (which is a vague undirected project I have going on)

She liked to sit by the window and watch
The others had become bored of it long before she was born 
That view into another world 
Another time 

No one quite knew 
But not here 
Not now 

She liked to watch the people scurrying about 
And scurry they did because it was almost always raining 
downpours, drizzle
grey skies
collars of coats pulled up, 
brims of hats pulled down 

It had taken her a while, and a pair of binoculars 
to work out that it was always tuesday 

Over on the right, a newsstand 
She can’t make out much 
the words blur, like when you try to read in a dream
but ‘tuesday’,
always clear 

She likes watching the rhythms of the city 
such a contrast to the 
blue country skies and whirling birds
out of  the other windows of the house 

She watches them heading to work in the morning 
running errands during the day 
sitting in the steamed up windows of the cafe 
across the way 
then home in the evening, 
braced against the rain 

There are faces she recognizes 
and she times her day around them
a mug of coffee 
in the old wooden chair by the strange window 

One lady she always waits for 
most days, not all 
heading to the cafe about half past ten 
her face worn with care 
her clothes showing signs of age

there is something in that face 
makes her want to hold her 
faces pressed together 
hands on the back of heads 
holding her 
whispering 
it will be all right 
it will be all right 

26 June 2022

AI and Creativity

There has been a lot of noise in the creative industries about AI of late. A number of large scale machine learning projects - GPT, DALL-E (& Craiyon), Midjourney etc. have been producing results that seem way beyond what a lot of generative systems have been able to make before. Even allowing for hype, over excitement and noise - what these things do is pretty interesting. One of the big sources of ‘panic’ has been the idea that creative artists are seeing the start of their own replacement by machines. Now - while I think what is happening is *really* interesting - I think we are a long way from that but let me talk about what I think is actually happening first.

My hypothesis is what this systems are are “memories” possibly very similar to the ones in our own minds. Now, you might object, that’s all very well but they’re surely doing a lot of processing? They seem to understand language? And that I would argue is indeed the most interesting part:

We tend to  think of memories as objects, something like photographs or files in an archive or something, but that’s not really how our own memories seem to work. What if a memory system generalises and synthesises. We already know that a lot of what we take as the smooth function of the brain is largely a fiction - our vision only really can see a tiny part of our field of view in actual precision detail , our brain mostly fills in the periphery. Our “consciousness” is not the continuous experience  we think it is - some like Metzinger argue that it is in fact largely a fiction too. A memory that’s a series of snapshots wouldn’t be that helpful either. “Get me all the images of tigers” is far less use that “retrieve all the instances of a situation with these features” where “these features” include a large striped animal with teeth and claws in front of you.

This has some interesting implications - if memory can do this generalisation and synthesis then it’s doing a lot of heavy lifting in our brains. The fact that GPT seems so adept with language would suggest that we don’t learn language in any way close to all the language teaching systems we try to use - we learn language by generalising memories of the way people use it around us.

I would also suggest that this implies that the images and texts generated by these models are akin to dreams - the free running , meaning free associations our memories make freed of conscience, narrative or intent.

This has some very exciting implications - from the mundane: we should learn languages by immersing ourselves in them, watching films in a language, spending time with people who only talk that language, listening and watching  people speaking it  to the more exotic - perhaps we ARE closer to building intelligences than we thought. By adding intent, narrative , filters we can shape these memory machines to produce something useful

There are some other interesting corollaries - we are currently building these memories by shoving as much of the internet as possible into them, unfiltered without any value labels or reflection. In true tech bro style , more and bigger is better. Now colour me cynical but I don’t think that’s the best way to learn stuff and perhaps smaller models with some ability to weigh the value of the input and reflect on value might be better. Secondly - we still need to factor in conscience , intent and narrative - at least two of those are a long way off tech bro radars too. There is definitely space here for some interesting research and probably interesting commercial companies working in the spaces left by the insane capitalist desires fed by VC and valley culture.

Are these systems going to replace us creatives? No. As they currently exist they are cultural samplers something that this blog post was originally going to be about and to which I will return - the cutup of the Dadists and Burroughs writ large.

Slow Progress

When you are learning a new thing progress can be very uneven. With Blender I’ve reached a point where I’m comfortable with the basics and now as I’m trying to keep raising my game and improve my work there are quite a lot of separate things I need to learn. This has left me with a bunch of unfinished pieces all of which are out of my reach to finish. Some of this is technical - I’ve learned enough to be bothered by things that a couple of weeks ago would have been “good enough” but now need fixing. Some of this is new things to learn - I’m lazy and things I could model I’d rather have generated by scripts and some of it is a new thing for me - a lack of visual art skills to complete a picture. I can half see it in my mind but I can’t quite articulate it with my fingers. It will come. But it’s frustrating not to be able to make it work just yet.

But I guess - that’s why people have sketchbooks! To explore and work on ideas to develop them until you can realise them! So here are a couple of bits. Neither is a complete work but both are helping me explore an aesthetic I’m trying to evolve. The first came from a tweet - the author had mistyped “pride moth” instead of Pride Month. The author had drawn/made a moth in response to this. I’ve been meaning to try out Ian Huberts moths technique so was the start. Meantime I’m trying to work on a whole bunch of separate things:

1. I’ve had an idea since the start of the first lockdown - a music drone project (probably an album but it might be a thing I can do live too). There is a mood in the heat of summer: yellow fields, church bells and empty villages. Deep drones, haunting solo violin. I’d read a book on the plague and also a few years ago the book Harvest by Jim Crace. Somewhere in all of that there is a shape I’m trying to realise - and the imagery in these two things is definitely thinking towards that

2. Like a lot of people working at the moment - the whole ‘new weird’ thing appeals to me. I like all the obvious things : hookland, wicker man, Aickman, M John Harrison, MR James you know the kind of thing. But I’m also I guess trying to find my own take on it. I like ‘disturbing’ and ‘bleak’ rather than out right horror. I don’t really want to look to the past too much. I’ll know when I find it!

3. Another project I’m working on is more “urban” - I’ll say less about this one because it’s basically a set of mental images - but the building in the vertical picture is working towards this. The music for this project is more beat oriented and follows on from the piece from 4 years a go

junklight · The Edges Of Buildings

The Prepared Mind

Robert Fripp talks about being “available for the music” and this was very much the case this weekend where some what unexpectedly I made a new EP of music and accompanying artwork. Normally my releases come from some initial concept or constraints but in this case I was pottering about on Saturday slightly disrupted because my teenage daughter was out and about and I needed to be available to go and collect her at a moments notice…… I’d been listening to Taylor Deupree , watching the (absolutely superb - loved the book, love the TV series) Essex Serpent and flicking through a book of Anselem Keifers work. Restless I sat down at my ‘live rig’ and pretty much recorded this EP as is.

What I think of as my ‘live rig’ is the part of my music setup I intend to use when I get around to playing live (I’m still a bit cautious about Covid to be organising anything but actually playing out is definitely on my short to medium term plans at this point.) Pleasingly I’m getting to the point where I can make music with it without a ton of preparation and patching. The music is a bit more of what you might call “modern” ambient in style than my usual stuff - although it does swell into a soundscape in the last section. I’m really pleased with it (which is unusual for me - usually I hate releases by this point and put them out so I don’t need to hear them again)

The art work was similarly “unconsidered”. The idea of flat landscapes (Essex Serpent!) somehow ended up with this curious fragment of land in a display case. The display case triggered thoughts of those “local” museums you find full of fascinating hyper-local history and random artefacts from pre-history to the inevitable impact of the industrial revolution on the local area. This led to a couple more ideas - a wooden relief map and a couple more display cases.

The display cases turned out to be beyond my current skill levels or time availability - a little wooden chapel in a display case and a 3d scan of one of my dresses in a full length case. Scanning cloth turns out to be harder than expected. Need to come back to this one.

The map turned out to be more interesting. I’d originally had in mind those clumsy hand made relief maps you might see in said museum but then I dropped the garish colours and added a bit more of the elements I might look for in landscape photography and ended up making a set of images that became the art work for the release. I also animated it a bit and made the short promotional film

The name refers to something that crosses my mind from time to time: I’m not a nostalgic person or even one who dwells on the past but like everyone else: as I’ve gotten older the collection of people who were here and are now no longer grows. We accumulate ghosts, echoes of the lives of others, remembered even now they are gone.

You can download the EP from the link above and just enter ‘0’ to download it for free! it comes with a PDF of completely different images from the ones here. (as do all my released. PDF booklets are important in digital releases)

Dancer on the plateau

junklight · Dancer On The Plateau

Until yesterday this had been a frustrating week creatively. I’m working pretty hard (fuel costs are currently 1/2 our rent!!! Plus children/university etc) and art wise - I’ve got a couple of short video projects on the go that are quite a way beyond my current skills and need a lot of learning. All of which is fine but doesn’t really provide any sense of accomplishment or  even forward motion. And then yesterday evening the latest Disquiet Junto project dropped….

Disquiet Junto is a weekly prompt for making music. There is a superb community over on lines (one of the best I’ve come across online full of lovely generous people) and I find external creative prompts quite a rewarding way of learning and taking me out of my comfort zone for creative projects. I’ve not taken part that much recently just because I’ve had a lot on (and also 3d which is my current focus is ALL out of my comfort zone :-) )

However this weeks prompt is to make a piece of techno music at 10bpm. As it happens I already did a project like that (see the bottom of this post) and found it a fascinating challenge. 10 BPM is VERY VERY slow. Like NOTHING happens for seconds. Techno depends on quite a lot of repetition and forward momentum. And some how, especially after a tweet from Marc Weidenbaum that runs Disquiet, I found myself making another piece.

Last time I tackled this idea I filled the space with sound. This time I tried to do something I’m very poor at in my work - leave space. To try and let the music breathe. Once again I’ve been very influenced by Dylan Carlson and his astonishing guitar playing. It takes incredible skill and judgement to only play a few notes. The famous writing credit on Trio by King Crimson for Bill Bruford for choosing NOT to play the drums on the piece being a case in point.

The art work follows the same principle - there are only the 5 elements - the landscape, the bone (a wonderful 3d scan by Brad Short, the moon, the light.

The title continues on from the original 10bpm piece I made 4 years ago. That references the writer Charles Stross’s take on H P Lovecrafts imagery. Lovecraft invented a whole world of inter dimensional horror that resonates with a lot of people but was also a horrible old racist so I tend to find the re-interpretations of his work far more interesting (and my favourite take on these particular elements is The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson). Here we visit the Plateau of Leng

Play this piece so loud your room shakes, play it really quietly - it seems to work really well as both. Anyway I had a lot of fun making both the music and the picture and I got that sense of satisfaction after all……

junklight · The Sleeper In The Pyramid

Being Queer

I’m 55. I’ve known I’m Bisexual and Non-Binary all my life. So why am I talking about it now? Isn’t that just going to make people uncomfortable?

Well here’s the thing: I basically presented as a Cis Het Man for 20+ years because it was easier to go with the flow, my career choices presented enough challenges without making things harder, without rocking the boat. And part of that was having very few examples in society, very few role models of what someone like me looks like. How it works. And now I have a choice, to stay hidden, it not being a secret but also not quite myself either or be part of what I needed in my life

I had a cardiac arrest a few years ago. My chances of survival were scarily slim - around 5% as best I can work out. For me I’ve taken that as my life being in “extra time”. A chance to do the things I want to do, not the things I was doing because it was expected to. Around the same time I left the company I’d been one of the founders of. While I learned a great deal I also made a lot of mistakes and perhaps being a CTO isn’t what I’m cut out for (my opinion on that changes though). Because of all this AND Covid  lockdown the last few years have been a time of reflection: what am I doing with my life? Who am I.

In particular the non binary part of my life has come to the fore. I’ve always known I am like this but I didn’t have a good way of thinking about it. When I was younger most of the “information” around was what I now know to be anti-gay propaganda: “cross dressing” “transvestite” all loaded words for behaviours that were still criminal not that many years earlier. I didn’t really even talk to people about it because I was led to believe it was some kind of perversion - that there was probably something wrong with me that shouldn’t be talked about. I guess growing up in a small town didn’t help and the whole “life is for other people not you” kind of attitude still fairly prevalent in a lot of Northern towns in the UK.

But, thanks to the spreading LBGTQ+ movement, I’ve come to have language to think and talk about who am I. And more importantly what it means to me. I’ve always struggled with “Male” culture, it’s not me at all. One intriguing (to me) aspect of that is it makes sense of how I struggled with gay culture when I was younger - it was very male and not what I was looking for at all.

So:  I love skirts, dresses, makeup, doing my hair, matching accessories, jewellery. I don’t want stilted conversations about cars and sheds and football   but all this is hard to talk about without falling into stereotypes. And that is also an important part of the “non binary” thing. For me the rules of gender are stupid - why should we police the population into two camps depending on their reproductive mechanisms. It seems weird. I guess though my sexuality comes into this too because I don’t really see that difference in who I’m attracted to - I like people, I don’t really care what shape their bits are - you can have lots of fun no matter which parts they have!

What does all this mean? I’m increasingly comfortable being myself, and it must be said noticeably happier. I’m getting braver about going out wearing skits and dresses (non of my clothes are now what you’d call ‘male’ clothes but some things are more noticeable than others) I’m stopping myself from policing my own behaviour to be “male” (as you start thinking about this stuff actively it is astonishing the amount of active policing of gender that is in our every day culture - and in ourselves. For me being non-binary is largely learning to  stop caring about fitting in as “A Man” and being my natural self) but I also want to talk about it - it’s really helpful to see how other people have understood these things, how they think about it.

If this makes you uncomfortable - then so be it. There are many people like me who just want to be their natural selves and not fit into whatever culture deems “appropriate”. If your view is that we should all fit in then we probably aren’t going to get on anyway. But in these difficult times, as the UK and US seem to be sliding into authoritarianism, it feels more important that those of us who are creative , different , care about others , think about things , do show our faces however briefly (the nearly dying thing has made me super aware we can be here on minute, gone the next - our life is no-one else’s but our own. We owe it to humanity to live our best lives. We really do)

Moon things

Just a quickie in passing….

A picture in book led me to draw a quick image of a sphere in a beam of light first thing this morning. As ever one idea led to the next and I quickly made a little animation I liked the look of. In particular it reminded me a tiny bit of the first story in Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics with the moon orbiting so close the ground you could jump up to it. I left it rendering and it came out as this…. (It has a sound track too so turn the sound on) 

It seems like a companion piece to this which I made some weeks ago experimenting with sculpting using my iPad and Apple Pencil (something I need to get back to. I might not be great at it but it’s lots of fun!) 

These are both quite influenced by my watching the live stream from Nautilus live  which I quite like just leaving on when they are exploring. I love the light from the submersible and the things they discover in that little splash of light in the darkness, things looming  up that no one has ever seen before. (They also seem like really nice people and the conversation they have while exploring can be quite cool) 

The sound track for both come  from a long micro sound improvisation that I did ages ago. I used to make tons of micro sound music and a new hardware setup led me back to old spaces which were nice to explore again. I think the ‘sci-fi’ sound works really well here. In particular in this mornings little video.

These feel like they are part of a bigger theme. So I’m counting them as sketches for something that will emerge one day. 

Abstraction

Abstraction 

My partner frequently points out that my photographs are very representational while my music is very abstract (& since she makes far more abstract pictures & likes more structured music this “isn’t as good” since everything she does is better than the way I do it ;-) ). 

As I’ve started developing my visual skills with Blender and other 3d software I’ve been musing on this a bit. Just as my music making has shaped the way I listen to the world around me I’ve started seeing things in a fresh light. I’ve begun to collect images I like and make photographs that are intended as source or reference material rather than an end result in themselves. However I’m mentally struggling with that leap into abstraction. 

So I set myself an exercise - to just doodle until it turned into something and see if that freed me up a bit. And here is an image I made that I quite like….

In doing this I realise that one feature of a lot of my 3d work is that they often have complex and deep backstories (like insanely deep sometimes. I’ve got a two minute video of a “corridor”, a bit house of leaves style, in my basement that has enough back story for a vast space opera and I’ve thought of several stories set in that universe. I intend to explore this a bit before putting the video up). It’s kind of odd to not think that deeply about an image but just to follow the form and composition while still looking for “the feeling”. Which I guess is far closer to the way my music comes about. In fact my favourite pieces just appear from doing not thinking. I guess I’m just not as confident in my visual skills. I write software for a living and after nearly forty years writing code I find I write better and faster when I just do it than when I carefully think about it. I’m just not used to visual work as to be able to trust what I’m doing. 

I’m not displeased with the result though so I’ll keep exploring……

Soundscapes and pedals

junklight · The Mouth That Feeds

If you pay any attention to my creative output (and in firehose of “content” we all now live in I’d be surprised if you do) then you’d know I’m not only quite a big fan of Robert Fripp but I keep coming back to the soundscape/frippertronics form as part of my own music making. Like a lot of musicians my gear is always in flux, chopping, changing , rearranging. Always looking for that “just right” configuration that let’s the music flow.

For making soundscapes I’ve had all kinds of setups. From (quite a lot of different) self written code to plugins and software to various pieces of hardware. A while ago it dawned on me, as a non guitar player, that guitarists are just as bad as us modular synthesists with their pedals and that guitar pedals were a whole new world to explore. And so to my latest soundscaping setup….

Much as I love Fripps work I have no desire to replicate the sound directly - for me the technique plus the sounds I am drawn to is part of the magic. And hence my current experimentation. The YouTube Chords of Orion often reviews looping gear and in one of his videos commented that the Ditto x4 remanded his goto frippertronics pedal. And I am indeed getting a lot of use from my VERY second hand (that’s not MY dirt on it!!!) one. I’ve wanted an El Capistan from strymon for ages and finally bought one. I love the quality of the sound on it. It gets that decaying analog tape sound just right for me.

The Box of Metal and Particles 2 are there because Alan Sparhawk from Low uses them at the moment. I was listening to Double Negative in the car one evening, I’d already listening and kind of been confused by the distortion and the deconstruction of the songs but that evening the car all the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up, I totally got it. Such an incredible beauty. And seeing Low playing at Manchester Cathedral a while later just confirmed how much Sparhawk is as obsessed with the quality of sound as he (and the rest of the band) are brilliant song writers. Box of Metal is everything I hoped it would be and more and you are just going to have to put up with everything being distorted as fuck for a little while…..

The reverb is Slo by Walrus Audio - can’t remember why I got it - someone mentioned in passing it was a great ambient ‘verb and I picked one up and whoever it was was spot on. So thank you whoever you were.

The Montreal Assembly count to five is eccentric, musical, very much it’s own thing and great fun. I bought it because I have some ideas for something in a vaguely similar vein whenever I finally get back to writing music software of my own

And the track at the top of this post is made with this setup,. Kind of what I hoped “disintegration loops” would have sounded like.

I also made this track which is very much a different side of the same coin……

junklight · The Hand That Bites

And what will I do with this....

A little while ago my partner and I visited Tate Liverpool and saw a Louise Bourgeois exhibition. I’d not really considered her work before and I was really taken with it.. Despite the tone of the exhibition emphasising her struggles in life I really loved the clearly playful and mischievous aspects of her work.

I bought a book about her work while there and in it I really liked the images of cages and frames - displayed in darkness. As part of my learning to draw in Blender I experimented a bit with this form and let it take me where it wanted.

The video above is a current iteration - much mutated. Somehow the metal frames reminded me of skyscrapers and then I guess images from various violent events in the last 20 odd years led me to trying to mutate the frames with simulated fires. I’m not entirely convinced by the results and perhaps this is an idea I’ll come back to.

The video seemed to demand some kind of soundtrack and I came up with the piece on the modular. Only 30 seconds in duration it’s more a mood piece than anything. Like absolutely everything I’ve made since I bought it - it features the Manifold Research Center Tetragrid

Below are a couple of earlier iterations

Dreampool

I came across a YouTube video on the work of Jared Pike . Pike (& others apparently) make renders of strange unreal pools. They use the vocabulary of swimming pools, which as the video says, seem to trigger resonances in a lot of people. The video hypothesises that this is because of childhood memories but it also seems to me that there is something about the play of light in pools that does something for us. As an aside this is not something I’ve ever seen written about. Why do sunrises, sunsets, the play of light between the trees of the forest, the glittering of moonlight on the ocean etc etc stir our emotions (and I know that that’s not just me because so much art is based around this)

I’m currently learning Blender (and 3d in general - I feel that we are at the start of an exciting period in media where the increases in computing power make a lot of things possible. Albeit in the brief period before we pitch headlong into climate catastrophe) and beyond the pure technical skills I’m drawing regularly just to practice. Dreampools seemed an ideal topic.

One of the things that fascinates me about taking a creative topic is how different people interpret it. Despite taking as my starting point a very similar vocabulary as Pike - the tiled walls, the pool , the caustics my images have turned out very much my own.

As I started making them I found themselves having a life of their own. My images triggered other ideas & feelings and I have started exploring. The church image below which is my latest arose because one aspect of these ‘liminal’ (a terribly overused word but the one that’s used in this genre) space photographs that I particular like are those of the abandoned mansions of those rich people who have no taste whats o ever and mixing that with the play of light in a church like space……

Having started to establish a visual vocabulary of my own for these pictures I’m sure I’ll return to them in coming weeks.