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.

Universe Expansion and Black Holes

Now, a bit of a thought about black holes. If nothing can come out, then it doesn't seem right that anything can go in, either...

If light cannot can escape a black hole, then nothing can, as no information can escape. If nothing can escape a black hole then its volume is essentially nothingness, the edge of the universe itself. If so, nothing can enter a black hole either, such that all things would be deflected to spin around its event horizon, tantalisingly spiralling towards an infinitely close relationship with the hole, the nothing, the edge of the universe.

If this were the case then black holes could never grow, it seems, although black holes can radiate and shrink, burning off their gravitational energy. Perhaps their size can grow, but only their radius, as all matter and energy would be on the periphery of these bodies, nothing inside. It would be the radius, the surface that would grow or shrink. An analogy for this would be a bubble, which can grow or shrink, but it is the radius which is made of the bubble-stuff that grows, not the air inside (which in our example, is nothingness).

The edge would hold all of the mass too. The space inside wouldn't exist, and when the black hole was formed, all of the mass would have been pushed to the outer edge where it would forever remain.

There would be nothing beyond the event horizon, and no possibility of things falling into it, just a scatter of energy at its border. This shell can grow and shrink, appearing as if the hole in the centre was growing and shrinking, but it would be the shell that changes in mass and size.

This vision reminded me of the early universe. If a black hole, the sphere of nothing, is the edge of the universe, then it could have been there during the big-bang. Perhaps, when the universe expanded, it expanded with a hole at its centre, like a black hole. This would be nothing, so undetectable. What we know as the universe would instead be a spherical shell in shape. This is of course, a well considered possibility already but I'll explore this idea a little.

What implications would this have? How would a smoothly expanding universe in three dimensions differ from a similar one but wrapped onto the surface of an expanding sphere?

All things would appear in the same way in terms of the type of expansion. Each galaxy or other object would move apart evenly from each other.

For each net increase in expansion, the size of the universe would increase by the surface area of a growing sphere.

This would be a wrap-around universe, so we could see ourselves distantly, just as we can wrap around the Earth and reach ourselves again. Constraints related to the speed of light, the detectable edge of the universe may limit the possibilities to test for this.

The End of the World

There's a lot of doom around at the moment, but there's nothing to fear...

Every so often an apocalyptic cult or idea appears, from the End Time to Ragnarok, to the Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and many more. Why?

People of every time always seem to consider their times are fearful or degraded, and no matter how fearful or degraded the present world may appear, whenever you are reading this, let us make one thing clear; the world is not ending and will never end. Humanity and the creatures and plants of the world we all need will be preserved.

Societies reflect the psychology of the constituents of that society. A group of people behave as one, and we can talk and feel about groups, whether political groups, socio-economic or racial groups, or countries, like we talk and feel about individuals. We can think of countries as individuals, having personalities. One country might seem confident and bombastic, one humble, one open, one oppressive. Countries, like any group of people end up having a personality, one that is a massive aggregate of everyone in that country. Even the animal and plant life of a country contribute to its psychology, as creatures like bears and snakes, heat and cold, cacti and snow, affect how the population behaves and feels, and how the state then relates to other countries, and how we feel about the personalities of other countries.

All groups of people end up reflecting the psychology of the individuals in that group, and all of humanity ends up reflecting the psychology of everyone. This means that humanity as a whole is a complicated beast, but it also means that humanity is as self-preserving as each of the individual selves that make it up. Part of humanity might destroy the planet and itself, just as some humans self-harm, but other parts of humanity work to rebuild and care and preserve the world, just as people work hard to rebuild and care for themselves. Humanity would only be at threat if everyone became suicidal or homicidal, which never happens.

Any species that has become suicidal or murderous no longer exists, for obvious reasons! But life is clearly self-preserving across all species divides. Are there any historical examples of self-genocide by a species? No, a species could not evolve to become self-genocidal.

As a species, our greatest enemy is fear, as this emotion can lead to unnecessary anxiety and potential self, and therefore social, harm. All people have an apocalyptic streak inside, a romantic notion of a neat end, normally a happy ending after a great and terrible crisis. One reason for this might be that these fears are present as warnings of possible disaster, to cause us to take self-preserving action, or to ironically create more stable societies as people peacefully prepare for an ending rather than destructively fight for survival until the last person. Whatever the reason for apocalyptic feelings, the notion of an apocalypse can create fantastical fears about disasters which are not warranted, and certainly nothing to do with the real world.

The will and personality of the people in charge of nations, and those with influence in our hierarchical society will have more influence and control over its destiny. The personality of a leader can shape the personality of their nation and social groups to a greater extent than the other members of the populace, but even in cases where that leader is violent and suicidal, such as Adolf Hitler in his final months, the remainder of society adjusts and prevents as much harm as the other members also prevent.

Thus, we can relax. Humanity will exist for a million years, a billion, or until humankind evolves into whatever myriad forms it is destined to evolve into.

The Münchhausen Trilemma Problem

Like you, I enjoy browsing the 'unsolved problems' bits in Wikipedia and solving them in an evening. Don't we all?

The so-named Münchhausen trilemma proves that proving a truth is impossible. We can assume that the authors didn't notice the irony in this statement! That aside, this philosophical argument is goes along the lines of every fact, on its own, can only be shown as true when relative to other facts that are equally suspect. There are a few variations on the number and type of exact possibilities, but the fundamental argument is that truths are either self-proving or depend on other truths that depend on others ad infinitum. It is a bit like an enquiring child answering your every answer with "Why?" and you discovering that you can continue forever.

I wanted to examine this and considered mathematics. Consider 1+1=2. How do we know that sum is true?

Mathematics is an abstraction of reality. When we say "one plus one", each "one" there referred at some point to one actual object, and the maths is true if and only if one real object partnered with another makes two objects (which it clearly does, but of course this text is also abstract, so you'll need to find two actual things to confirm my bold claim). In a pure abstract sense, one plus one only equals two if it is related to reality.

However abstracted mathematics has become, it exists only as a tool to describe or utilise reality. If maths never did this, so that it became purely abstracted, then any conclusions it made would be untestable, and any conclusions would be as true or false as any other, that is, meaningless! But maths is never purely abstracted, and even the most obscure theorems ultimately relate to the world or are used in describing the world in some way.

there were and probably still are today highly abstracted forms of maths that are probably useless nonsense right now, that one day might be useful. George Boole's logic was perhaps too abstracted in its day to relate to any form of reality, and perhaps meaningless and its truths self-dependant, until the invention of actual real-world computers which use boolean logic. At that point the truth of Boole's logic snapped into actual reality.

Ultimately, the truth validity of mathematics is related explicitly to the truth validity of the universe as a whole, as much as we can each personally test it. This argument can be applied to the Münchhausen trilemma too. Truth is only as valid as it can be personally tested, and as such is tied up with belief.

Now we come to truth itself, and what we mean by it. Often, as in much of philosophy, the answer comes down to the word definition of "truth" and "belief".

Knowledge is relative and unique to every perspective because it is a collection of data from different points (the universe) to a singular point (us), and this data might change en-route. As such, information about the universe is different for each observer, and so always personal. Remember that information about the universe that we have only needs to be slightly different, any different at all, to be unique, and if knowledge unique then knowledge is relative, not absolute.

The notion of truth generally implies absolute knowledge, rather than a personal belief, and that's because humans are social creatures and generally groups of us know things and share information. As as result of this gossip, a consensus emerges of what is true and factual. This is convenient, as it saves us testing everything, but the consensus is only an approximate social belief, not intended to be an exact reflection of everything, or even an exact reflection of anything. If our experiences are unique then the only complete truth is our personal belief. If we see a ghost and nobody else does then society confirms that ghosts don't exist, but to us they do.

What of machines that can test things? Are these not independent of humanity and so judgeless infallible tools that measure what is true and what is not? Can't we determine what is true using a machine? A machine that analyses any aspect of the universe is no different from another person that also does this (people can be reliable judges too!). The result of a machine might reinforce, or destroy, a particular belief we have, but it can't define truth any more than another person could, merely offer an opinion to contribute towards our beliefs. Like any observer, a machine's sensor has a unique and limited view of the universe.

So the ultimate solution to the Münchhausen trilemma problem (also known as Agrippa's trilemma problem) is that a certain truth is true if we believe it to be, and that no further proof is necessary.

Replication and Decay

We start in a pure state, but only near pure for purity is infinity and conveys nothing, if one thing is infinite then all things are infinite. Purity replicates, or moves which is replication through time. Inevitably, errors creep in during replication from tiny and essentially random fluctuations and these create information. Just one blip is a steady sea creates some information. The amount of information is proportional to the mix of purity to error.

The information is random and most of the information is meaningless, but some information can, by chance, self organise or form stable structures. Some information is by chance able to replicate itself, its structures, and this is naturally selected over the random noise and begins to proliferate. During replication errors occur, as always, and so things seemingly eventually evolve into a state of chaos where errors dominate. However, as described by this idea, this factor can create the ability to form new unexpected stable structures on a larger scale.

Thus, with only one force for replication, or even motion, and a random disturbance, structures of complexity should arise. These structures should be stable and able to replicate, and during replication errors must creep in. For any replicating structure, errors would be necessary, because a pure and error free state could not evolve into existence itself.

Or could it? Perhaps a random error could push an object into a perfect form, like an uneven copper disc accidentally honed into a perfect circle, but that perfect form, being error free would be trapped in its state for all time. As a perfect form it would not change, have no sense of time or decay or be able to replicate itself. It would effectively be a pure infinite object in at least one dimension or to at least one degree, which would convey nothing, like the infinitely pure state, and if one thing is infinite then all things are infinite. A perfect form cannot exist or evolve at any point then.

On a related matter, can correct information accidentally be regained? This depends on what is meant by correct information. There is only former information. There might also be more stable or less stable patterns, but is it relevant which is better than another, or which comes before or after another?

Let us think about replication more.

What is needed for replication? Is movement replication? Movement needs a change of location but to replicate means to grow, making something new, so movement is not the same as replication. To replicate, extra energy is needed, the same amount as the parent, the thing to be duplicated, and a communication of information about the form of the parent. If the total energy in a system is fixed then replication can only occur by taking energy from elsewhere; either the background, the space into which the replicated thing would appear, or from the parent. Information about the construction of the parent must come from the parent.

The simplest form of replication is division, where one entity splits into two or more parts. This would assume that all parts of the object contain all of the information about it. The lack of complete information in some parts would cause errors when dividing in this way. Cells divide into two parts, and in subsequent twos. Would splits into many parts be as likely as a simple split into two? What might trigger a split?

One large fixed object for all time would be and convey no information, and would be the same as a smaller number of identical objects, so some instabilities must be present inside even single objects, so perhaps the crucial aspect of this are the boundaries between objects, not the objects themselves. It is the space between two objects that makes two objects rather than one, but as earlier stated, one object would be pure meaningless infinity. It is the gaps between objects that create objects. Perhaps it is the shape of these gaps that are the crucial random variational element in the universe.

James Tenney Stochastic Quartet

A poem for today's ArtsLab programme, inspired by, and to accompany music by, James Tenney.

James Tenney Stochastic Quartet

One, two
hues of potatoes
and curious under-dwelling forms
of clay and soft mouth
detritivores
insular cryptic creatures in crypts
wormwood and bile
the sauces of decay
brushed formaldehyde
and steel fingers plucking the wire, the pixie pianist
steel fingers
light, delight
the tiny candle burns for you
brown hues, flickers through yellowed wax
potato earth
one, two.

Composing for Piano

For most of this week I've been working on some piano music, initially for a performance at Chester Cathedral on September 23rd 2016. My first public performance of any sort was in July 2015, at an art preview. Myself with artist Sabine Kussmaul had been asked to do "something" at the opening of an exhibition then, and I asked an artist friend, the enigmatic "Escargot" to help too. I largely improvised music to accompany Snail's automatic stories for that; no pressure, as the result was destined to be "avant-garde" and should merely be expressive, which is simple. Falling over can be expressive, and for an artist always is. An artist doing anything is art. Honest expression is the root of art and the duty of the artist, so to act this way is simple.

Here is a photo from that event a year ago...

The music then evolved, and that performance, named The Anatomy of Emotions, became a series of six piano tunes of about 4 minutes. These tunes grew independently. The last one was a simple single chord melody. The second tune was an improvisation around A minor and E minor, those two tunes were present at that first performance. The others were written for the second performance, and were very simple melodies and arpeggios, each amounting to about two minutes which then repeated with a bit of variation. Earlier this year I released the set as an album, lengthened a few tracks and added a few more in a similar style, some live improvisations.

Now I'm tasked with new music with a similar layout, again to accompany videos by Sabine.

This time I had to write everything from a starting point, and I wanted to create something unified, like a six movement sonata. My self-taught piano playing is far from performance standard, yet I knew that I could improve by inserting a few parts that would train me by virtue of having to play them, but I still felt very lacking in the performance skills that I needed to truly compose the music I'd like. Thus, I must create something with a rough outline but an artistic heart.

The six parts represent different ideas related to architecture; Organic Flow, Old Versus New, Perpetual Change, Death/Collapse, The Night/Healing, Rebirth Connections.

I began with a simple cycling tune that reminded me of perpetual change because it created in my mind the image of a perpetual motion machine. This melody was in D minor and made up of a group of four notes with the emphasis on the last note. I thought of expanding this idea, and made an outline of the "death/collapse" tune use the same melody. For the rest though, something new was needed, so I inverted the melody a bit, making it climb up in D minor, using slightly different notes. Then I created a positive version of the same melody in C major, a happy version. This eventually became the main melody in the final part.

In drama or music, one trick is to create a cresendo, or single moment that summarises the whole, then build towards it. In a limerick it's best to write the first line, then the last, and so in music too, creating the start and then the ending, then make everything pull towards the ending. This is the key. The end is always a destination that should be longed for. Alfred Hitchcock said that he wishes he'd not had the climax in his films, to keep his famously tense audience, tense. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony essentially begins with the famous Ode to Joy, yet the music doesn't start with it, instead lighting a touch paper that drops hints towards it all over the place, such that the audience expects it, unconsciously.

I fear that my conclusion is a little more overt! The seeds of my first piece "Organic Flow" are sad and searching. Old Versus New will be largely improvised on this theme, thus bridging the gaps between it and the slightly different (yet related) perpetual change, the only part in 3/4 time.

I'm still working on a lot of this, and learning apace to read music. A thousand curses that I didn't do this earlier, but we can't change the past. I'd not played a piano at all until 2008 at a friend's house, and only started playing "seriously" last autumn, just as I only started painting "seriously" in January 2007. Memorising the 30 minutes of new music requires a few mental tricks, hindered a little by a performance of The Anatomy of Emotions the week before the premiere of this music, but we can't fail, if we are expressive.

Meanwhile here is a poster for the accompanying art exhibition, which I'll also be submitting some sculptural work to.