Grey Technology Dream

I had a dream about a Lego space probe, heading for Mars as part of a school science project. It was dependent on all of its systems, and if one should fail (I imagined the failure of one of the axis aligned gyros) the whole probe would fail. I named this effect as black redundancy, a slight fault incapacitating the rest of the object when most of it was functional, and related it to computer programming where a tiny error or mutation in the machine code would be fatal to the integrity of the program.

I spoke to a dream character that biology was different, analogue in this respect, that it never truly breaks or is truly fully functional. I termed this white redundancy. I envisaged grey technology; machines with semi-redundancy, where the working parts of a machine would keep working when the broken parts were broken, that breakages would be detected and worked around automatically.

Essentially this was machinery that was much more tolerant of errors, particularly relating this to digital ones in computer code that might cause a crash. That the machines would behave biologically, and the wounded probe would do its best using the working functions. I called this grey technology and defined it as semi-redundancy of independent systems. I rushed home to publish this online.

In the dream I could not share the idea, prevented from working by children in my room, then a larger bullying child who I eventually threw out of the room, but he returned with a gang, and vicious animals to hammer down at my door and prevent me from typing. I felt that the dream was about the prevention of achievement of good work and good ideas by social commitments, or trivial things, but whatever that meant, at least now, I can publish the grey technology concept.

The Specialist, the Anti-Artist

Artists often become specialists, gradually becoming better and better at their chosen technique to the point of mastery, yet this, like any restriction, is a death of creativity, and thus the death of artistry. In such artists, their technique becomes less and less creative as it becomes more and more focused and refined (consider, for example, a hyper-realistic portrait painter). The philosophy at work is that the subject is what is creative in such artists, not the technique, yet frequently this too becomes more and more restricted because as artists attain their mastery they tend to specialise in subjects as well as in their craft, specialising in portraits, or trees, or animals, limiting both their subject and their technique, always moving down a narrower and narrower tunnel as they work over the years, more and more constricted, mechanical, blind. At this point, is the artist creative at all? More to the point, does and artist need to be creative?

The answer is of course, yes, yes! The point of art is creativity, to discover new things and to push humanity towards new ideals. If art is about humanity, communication between people, then the artist must be an explorer and curious, a communicator or feelings and ideas. To specialise is to become more mechanical, as machine-like as our hyper-realistic portrait painter. A camera or computer can never be an artist, they can only communicate what it means to be a camera or a computer, which is of interest only to other cameras (or academics, the killers of art by analysis).

The artist is an explorer, and what he or she explores is the new, the future, things that are now unseen. The only way this can be accomplished is creatively. Specialisation limits creativity, and at its most extreme is a hindrance, not an aid.

If art is about creativity, how can an artist learn? Advancement is ruling in and ruling out, evolution, and mastery of technique is important if an artist is to create good quality work, yet an artist must always be aware of the limitations of specialisation. In short, the ideal artist is master of all techniques, and able to pick and choose the best one for each situation.

It is always more creative, and a greater display of ability, to be good at several techniques than to master any one.

Creativity

Or why creative ideas are unpopular, and popular ideas are uncreative!

Governments eschew the value of having a creative economy, the value of creativity. Free thinking and creative acting has great benefits. Revolutionary ideas demand it, and can transform the world drastically for the better. Yet, governments rarely actually mean that they would actually like creative ideas. For a start, creative ideas are always and necessarily subversive, and always and necessarily unpopular.

Even in art, projects often list in their success criteria for an idea or submission that it is creative, which is rarely true. Someone, at some point, must after all judge which idea is the most creative. The result must surely be the least fashionable and least popular, criteria which are rarely selected for, and even more rarely desirable. Sometimes, briefs or specifications for art projects request that a proposal is creative and engages the public, which is impossible. Creativity and public engagement are opposites. The more creative you are, the more out of step with median opinion. That's what being creative means.

The creative idea is any idea that differs from consensus. The more creative the idea, the more it differs from the consensus view. This also shows why creativity is related to madness because a mad idea is also an idea that differs from consensus.

This understanding has important implications for artists, as art is an industry driven by creativity. An artist must choose between a creative idea, which is unpopular, or a popular idea that is uncreative. People tend to need a degree of popularity to survive. There are many more uncreative artists successfully creating their mediocre, mainstream paintings, objects, designs, than genuinely creative artists.

One must also ask, what benefit does the supremely creative idea have, if it is unpopular with everyone? Of course, ideas and tastes change, and one important factor of art is in driving trends. Art creates new, unpopular, ideas, which become popular. This is why creativity is important, it is the embryo of the future. Change is inevitable, and the creative idea determines what things change into.

Cover Versions and Perfectionism

Music artists tend to get to an age when they record cover versions, and I always saw that as a sign of a lack of creativity. There is another trend that affects artists too, wanting to update past work. That is something I can relate to.

This applies to visual artists too. Gradually as you learn, you improve, get better, better, and suddenly reach a step, when you look back at your earlier work and think... I could have done that so much better now. Of course, it's difficult to repaint a work, the feeling would be lost, but in many craft areas, such as framing and presentation, it's all too tempting to want to remake something. My first Love Reliquary was very much a learning process; my first attempt at gilding and many other things, so last year I decided to remake it, build a second one. Not only did the second one take half the time, it looks twice as good.

The thing is, this can be a never ending task, so every choice must be weighed.

Now, I find myself unlucky enough to look back in horror at much of my old work and how I've presented it. I want to reframe, restore and neaten my old artwork, at least 300 of them! As you might expect, rather than being a fun task it's an obsessive perfectionist nightmare, but it must be done.

We can't always run ahead, sometimes we must pause, reassess, neaten, perfect what we have. Legacy isn't only an artists' last work, but a lifetime's worth

Painting in 2017

It is 2017 and painting as an art form is at a great nadir. The proliferation of images due to a technological revolution, plus a swarm of decorative paintings, have discredited painting, and 2D images in general, as a force for great emotional communication.

Music too is suffering. Drama and dance, as yet immune to digitisation, are the dominant art forms. Even poetry recital is resurgent, an art form that is at least 3000 years old(!) has supplanted one that is merely a few hundred.

Yet the storm driven by technology, by the impact of social media, but ten years old, is abating.

The brain operates using images; these will always constitute art. Painting is superior to photography and digital art because it is difficult. What is easy is ubiquitous, any idiot can do it. Less people can do what is difficult, and the most difficult things are the domain of genius. It is for this reason that painting will not only survive digitisation, but forever be an important art form.

The New Renaissance

If the history of art tells us anything, if the history of science does, is that discoveries never end, and that new, vast worlds are always unexpected. I would imagine that in 1840, visual artists had considered their art refined to the ultimate degree, yet it was merely the start of what we call Modern Art, due to photography.

Now, as then we stand on the cusp of a new dawn. The Internet marks the start of a new epoch for humanity. What makes people different from animals is that we can learn and teach. Chimpanzees can learn skills, like breaking a nut with tool for example, by watching other chimps, but if that chain is broken, the knowledge is lost and a chimp must become an inventor again to relearn a skill that countless forbears has learned countless times. Humans did this at first, but soon, information stuck. Speech was developed, stories could be passed on, and knowledge through the generations and to other tribes. This was first first epoch of intelligent life. Written language was the next great leap, then printing which led to mass literacy, then electric communication which permitted the instant conveyance of the latest ideas, and now the Internet, allowing collaboration and the instant access of the best knowledge, the latest information instantly.

This new epoch has and will change humanity forever, and will change art too. The peaks of exceptional humans of the past are now sanded smooth by waves of people, vast numbers of great people who can now share ideas instantly. This is the age of the genius, which makes it harder for exceptional people to excel, but being exceptional was never easy.

In visual art, the twentieth century was all about exploring the palette, the genres of art from pure abstraction, to realism. From surrealism to symbolism, from craft to conceptualisation. In music, this was largely done by Bach's time, in that the scales and chords were then known; of course, music changed too in the twentieth century with serialism and other developments, but the basic structures and rules were set centuries ago, as they were in literature and drama millennia ago.

Leonardo da Vinci argued that visual art is superior to the other arts because it communicates with the most sacred of organs, the eye. Holiness aside, humans communicate primarily with vision. Like other primates we learn be seeing other, empathic communication. Other senses are secondary to vision. Television is vastly more popular than radio. Music can touch emotions instantly, but it struggles to communicate intellectual information. Images are how the brain operates. How often have you dreamed a sound? Or a smell? Or a touch? Or a poem? Images are the key to the way our minds work, and art is about mind touching mind.

Thus, visual artists can now at last rejoice! Here we stand upon the crest of a dawn, and one that is yet to be seized. It is ironic that the new soup of information creates apathy, rather than opportunity. From soups, islands must rise. The foam will disperse!

The visual arts are set to begin, at last. There has been no Bach of visual art, no Mozart, no Beethoven. Visual artists have become specialists in their narrow genre, this is the doom of the innovator, but now the time of innovation is ended, and yet few see this. As in any art, especially one so very badly trained as painting, people spend a long time exploring and not building, although to build palaces we must first know all of our materials.

The palette is set, and now it is time to explore it, and use it to lighten up the great darkness that pervades contemporary society. This is at least my goal. Perhaps it is all of our goals now. As machines replace each function, to create a love art will probably be our destiny as a species.

The Resurrection of Napoleon Bonaparte

My paintings are often quite complex to understand and I find that they really come alive with some explanation, so I've begun to create some videos about them. I thought I'd share my latest one and a few written words too.

Here is The Resurrection of Napoleon Bonaparte, an oil on canvas work from 2016. The spark of the idea came from last 2015, when someone came into the Macc Art Lounge, a pop-up shop in Macclesfield where I had some work on show. They were looking for paintings of The White Nancy, a local monument, and a popular subject for artists, so I volunteered to paint it. The idea captured my imagination, and I looked up the history of the odd shaped building.

It turned out to be a Napoleonic monument, and I found it irresistible to include Napoleon in the sky, charging heroically away to a glorious horizon. The image was so strong that I was determined to include him, yet made of sky, a ghost, an ever presence. The monument on a high hill was such a perfect position for the charging once-emperor. It's almost as though the famous David painting, which I knew well, was made for Bollington.

Much of my art is about art or references other artworks. In the way the music builds upon predecessors, so does visual art, and each painting now, in this so-called "post modern" era, needs these vital guides more than ever. I think "post modern" is a somewhat bold academic name for this current epoch. It implies that visual art has all been discovered, and now we must merely mop-up the visual pieces and explore and reformulate existing discoveries, rather than discover new things - when of course there are vast numbers of undiscovered art genres and classifications out there - when the well-tempered chromatic scale was documented in music by Bach, did he consider music complete?!

However, onward to the painting!

Some technical bits not mentioned in the video. It's oil on canvas in two layers and uses a walnut oil in amber medium for glazing, which gives it an amazing visual quality in real life. Interestingly, David didn't have access, or not much access, to Napoleon, who didn't see the point of realism in art and didn't consider a likeness important at all. So even in David's work (one of the five his studio completed) has only approximate stabs at a likeness, each different.

When I conceived this, a glorious dawn was coming, not a storm. Who knows which was true? I'd like to think the former. Artists might reference the past and its artistic history, connecting with a rich seam of cultural metaphor rooted in nature, yet art should document the present. These are strange times for humanity, but I think, great ones of peace and prosperity, beyond the fearful dawn. In such times artists, not warriors, must become the heroes.

Music & Video Synchronisation

Spent all day working on how to create a text file like this, various frame numbers of events in a piece of music (accurate to a 44100hz sample!). This was very frustrating as I was 384 mysterious samples out for each note. After working at it for many hours, I just added 384 to everything! Although this isn't ideal, it's probably the best solution anyway, as fixing this big might make my existing music out of time with newer tracks.

These frame numbers make it possible to create perfectly synchronised videos to a particular soundtrack. I used something similar for the Challenger video, which I hope to remaster in HD soon. There's a post about how I made that on here somewhere.

I hope to use this to create more videos soon for Cycles & Shadows. It can be time consuming to synchronise videos exactly, but something like Avisynth and Open Office spreadsheets can be combined to make a text-based animation system!

Art and Faith

This is something of a self-prayer, but I thought I'd blog it.

Sometimes in art, in anything where you want to excel, you have to stop comparing yourself to others, and even your own past. As beginners we charge ahead in joyous ignorance, but then we learn about the great things that others have done, and learn from them. After a certain time we must sever that connection too, and make a brave leap, not comparing our work with anything, having only faith in something new and different, releasing the child to the world and its independence. The best art always takes faith.

Art Symphonies

So many new ideas in progress! Such excitement. I've said this before, art should have structure and I'm working on new art shows that create curated structural forms that reflect two-dimensional art works like subtle rhymes in poetry to create new things, new feelings and presentations in shows that are multi-sensory, multi-emotional and multi-media. I aim to combine 2D art, words, music and other senses into experiences that transform and convey in exciting ways. I'm now reformulating all of my works towards this.

In music, fragments are often written here and there, picked up, notes, transformed, and then these simple motifs are expanded. I started to do with in images right at the beginning, inspired then partly by fractals, in paintings like The Migraine Tree, where the eye repeats in different forms throughout the image.

This is internal structure, unified by the eye, which varies. It is always important to see the whole structure of an artwork, and an art exhibition (event, show, creation, there is no adequate word for these things) is exactly the sort of thing that demands a global structure. It is exhibitions that use this global structure which I will develop this year.

This is an extension of a process. All of my exhibitions so far have been themed, and from the start I have instinctively aimed to create structures like this; The Seventh Circle exhibition, for example, divided the venue into Heaven and Hell with a curtain, each half playing different sounds, heavenly and hellish music, each half lit differently too. The Phenomenology of Love extended the concept to create many different areas for the paintings, each lit and sounding differently and with different decor.

From now on I'll fix and then create works specifically for these concepts, and so begin to build a new class of art symphonies.

Clarion Call for Free Music!

Right now I'm working on a new album, currently titled Cycles and Shadows. I've listened to a lot of music over the past year, practised piano a lot, and listened to, written and read a lot of contemporary poetry; and these things have all influence this album which is partly Romantic in style but part highly modern, almost like free-form poetry as music. All of this has inspired me to write a few words about music creation methods, but also contemporary music generally... onward!

The curse of modern music is rhythmic regularity, mechanical regularity due to the digital sequencer and drum machine. This perfect regularity kills expression. This can be useful as a contrast for natural organic rhythms and emotions, but even in such circumstances the cold emotionlessness of regular rhythm would always appear bright, jarring, unnatural compared to an organic performance.

Regular rhythms are felt by all of us and all things, and intercepted by others. In music we use this to synchronise with each other and the emotions of the musician, the composer and the performer. Thus the rhythm forms a base track, like a spinal thread from which the other emotions grow and branch. All organic rhythms are imperfect in terms of exact and accurate timing because biology could never evolve a perfect structure of this form. Evolution demands variety to exist. Evolution demands, if you believe in perfection, imperfection.

Removing the key element of rhythm and replacing it with electronic timing forces all other emotions to strive towards this metallic track, and always be inferior. The only alternative in such a situation is to create digital attachments, new electronic parts that match, but this process can only go so far. A wholly electronic track would be completely emotionally removed from biological rhythms, and the connection between music artist and audience is broken. In such circumstances the creator and the audience alike now become consumers, aspirants to the digital perfection, worshippers of the electronic god.

At this point the creator is no longer a master, but a slave to the machine. This is evident in reality; the club disc-jockeys who manipulate the timing of tracks, blending one into another are not creators, but like rocks in the river of sound, manipulators. The same is true of early electronic musicians such as Tangerine Dream, who manipulate live regular rhythms rather that create. It is the manipulation of this existing digital stream that creates the emotional flow, rather than the composition.

The true art of music is in its creation because art is about human to human communication. Art is not machine to human communication. A machine can tell us nothing about what it is to be human (although it could tell us about what it is like to be a machine! A valueless concept! A rock that informs us about being a rock is not an artist). However, each individual has their own definition of what art is, so perhaps those who consider everything art can consider all art good and then end this argument in an aesthetic bliss!

Art must ultimately be a form of human to human communication through a communication medium, and that medium should be as direct as possible. Pressing the START button on a rhythm machine is creating art only as much as the act of pressing, and then only when that act is known by the listeners. The sound that comes out of the machine is not remotely art! If the machine happened to turn on by itself, would random chance, would fate then be an artist? No! So, in this case it is the act that is the art, not the music. As so it is with electronic music generally.

Manipulating a flow of electronic music then makes the manipulation, not the music, the art. This is also evident; bands since Tangerine Dream focus on the live performance element, and produce large volumes of music because the music content is not the art as much its modulation by the operators. The manipulation is the only emotional content, and so the music is weak, and difficult to discern emotionally.

In terms of sonic quality, music is very mechanical now, and so emotionless and therefore artistically weak; it convey less and less deeply. Even voices are becoming purely electronic. One day perhaps, the music of the early twenty-first century will be seen as twee and emotionally vacant as Victorian poetry, which because of its rhyming structures suffered the exact problems that digital music suffers from today. Victorians of the time didn't think so, however!

The true artist much be empowered to create and express emotionally. The power of classical music comes from the very fact that each player is a human, expressing their own feeling. This is a key revelation. In pop music, the emotional expression comes from the players and the producer, but less people overall than in an orchestra (less people isn't always worse, of course, often the most expressive music is a solo performance).

There is hope. Since the late 20th century, music has become digital. In some ways this quantises emotion and so can be a constraining factor, even now in a "32-bit 96khz" world people talk about the superiority of analogue recording, of course this is true, yet in a simple digital recording of a symphony, the emotion is evident and need not be a constraining factor. Even in a pure digital sequencer, we can move it, we can change it to make it evocative. This has always been the job of the musician, to give some soul to a mechanical instrument.

Digital tools can be used, or developed, to represent emotions, and given evocative voices.

The biggest enemy of expression is fixed temporal regularity, fixed volume, and fixed repetition. No emotion repeats. Such laziness must be avoided.

The root of art is emotion and its birth. It is time to seek and develop new ways to create music in the way that visual art is created; with the concept first, and the music to grow from it like a drama, or temporal sculpture.