We are looking for an apartment, tramping up dark stairwells to lean into rooms, another strange place full of odd smells, another makeshift life exposed.
thank you Terry. This has been rumbling around inside of me for a few weeks, but that statue just was the sign, the opportunity to try to find the real-life relevance.
I'm retired now, as far as what one defines as regular work, but I'm not idle. For some time now I've wanted to get my song lyrics out there, but it's a tough climb. I went to a few poetry readings and discovered that rhymes are frowned upon, some sort of credibility issue. So I started presenting my lyrics as oral exercises at music open mic nights. To my surprise it's worked, it's worked really well. I'm getting requests at these open mic nights. "Do 'Dinosaurs Rule!', do 'Certainly Seems'", it's pretty dang fun.
And a guitarist here in town who's in a local act, with a couple of albums in the can, asked me to come up with some kind of improvisational stuff that he and a few musicians he respects could build musical structures around. No planning, just get up there and go. My first idea we called "Fractured Philosophy". I took famous philosophical quotes and cut them in half putting beginnings in one pile with endings in another. The musicians begin playing without a map and I randomly meshed beginnings and endings from the two piles of quotes. The audience, maybe fifty people, dug it. A friend said it was strangely thought provoking even when what I recited didn't quite make sense. And some times it did make a sort of sense. Anyway, we recorded two of those improvisational pieces yesterday, I'll send them to you when they get mixed.
What was important to me was that folks tell me they've never heard anything like it. In this age of rehashing formulas things that are new, original and off the beaten path are getting squeezed out by an art by numbers dynamic. The AI stuff you've referenced is part of that. Art by computer programs is a dubious proposition if you ask me. The human aspect of art is erased. The best art always has a ton of heart in it. Computers, as cool as they can be, don't have heart. When I recite a philosophical mashup I present it as vitally important, as though it's obviously profound. That's what gives it its humanity. A computer can't do that.
I'd compare "computer art" to finding shapes in clouds. Yeah, you feel that bit of cloud looks like a face, and it may well look like a face. But it's not art. The cloud doesn't impart humanity, you impart humanity on the cloud. It's cool, kinda fun, but it's not art.
Thanks for sharing this @DavidDurham. That sounds like a blast, and I immediately thought of Brain Eno's famous deck of cards called "oblique strategies" which are arguably, a series of prompts. There is plenty of merit to informing your creative process with these urgings, that are like wacky homework assignments where you show the work and break your own patterns and formulas along the way.
"The human aspect of art is erased." thank you for saying that, it points right at the mortifying moment we are at. The media is going crazy about the "unlimited possibilities of AI art" and how this is "game changing." You know what is game changing? A human being going through something with a blank piece of paper to write on, or a guitar to bang on, some paint. That has created "game changing" art for centuries and now our living generation of artists faces being erased by a ChatGPT haiku.
I think real art will survive. The difficult process of survival kind of informs art, struggle is essential it seems. And that's another thing computers don't do: struggle. They either perform a task or they don't. For years now autotune has been a big cheat. People who can't really sing are made into singers through artifice. But there's a backlash forming against this. People are starting to want to hear the actual human voice again. At the end of the day you can't replace heart with a machine. You may be able to make it work for awhile, but heart will eventually win out. That's my hope anyway, though I'll admit that I'm a glass-is-half-full kinda guy.
Oh, I don't know. Art, and artists, seem to prevail when all is said and done. Fads come and go, what was old is new & etc. Don't give in to despair my friend. You are good at what you do, better than good. Keep swingin', hard as it can be, as pointless as it sometimes seems. If we have to take on AI in a fight, let's fight. We'll be standing for something vitally important and if we go down let's go down punching up.
I'm mostly thinking of my writer friends that started out as fact-checkers at magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone. They eventually got small assignments, a few hundred words, not even a byline. Some of them now write about music for the NYT. Those jobs are about to be done by AI. The whole industry of blog posts based on research, paid by the word is how many writers make a living. Not any more.
Now look at music videos - now there is an app, where a musician can dump some footage and the mp3 of the song and VOILA, you have a shitty video for $10. there goes the small budget music video gig for the indie filmmaker. The same for music mastering... and for illustrators this is a huge end of the road if AI will do the work for free with endless revisions.
I will keep going, but will I prevail? Don't feel very good about that. It's already just short of impossible to give music away for free and films for free. All of the channels for monetizing films made by indies shriveled up in the last 2 years.
At this point, I can only keep going because stopping would be much much worse, but this is all in the hands of our society. they could say NO to AI "creative work" tomorrow.
That's the fight then, isn't? And as a friend and a fan I'm simply trying to give you the emotional support you need when you're feeling down. Everything you've said is true. But it's also true that you've developed artistic weapons against all this. I want to encourage you to keep using those weapons, keep fighting, keep believing in yourself like I believe in you. Engage and enlighten as you're able, and you have that ability in spades. Keep swingin'!
So perfectly stated. ❤️❤️
thank you Terry. This has been rumbling around inside of me for a few weeks, but that statue just was the sign, the opportunity to try to find the real-life relevance.
I'm retired now, as far as what one defines as regular work, but I'm not idle. For some time now I've wanted to get my song lyrics out there, but it's a tough climb. I went to a few poetry readings and discovered that rhymes are frowned upon, some sort of credibility issue. So I started presenting my lyrics as oral exercises at music open mic nights. To my surprise it's worked, it's worked really well. I'm getting requests at these open mic nights. "Do 'Dinosaurs Rule!', do 'Certainly Seems'", it's pretty dang fun.
And a guitarist here in town who's in a local act, with a couple of albums in the can, asked me to come up with some kind of improvisational stuff that he and a few musicians he respects could build musical structures around. No planning, just get up there and go. My first idea we called "Fractured Philosophy". I took famous philosophical quotes and cut them in half putting beginnings in one pile with endings in another. The musicians begin playing without a map and I randomly meshed beginnings and endings from the two piles of quotes. The audience, maybe fifty people, dug it. A friend said it was strangely thought provoking even when what I recited didn't quite make sense. And some times it did make a sort of sense. Anyway, we recorded two of those improvisational pieces yesterday, I'll send them to you when they get mixed.
What was important to me was that folks tell me they've never heard anything like it. In this age of rehashing formulas things that are new, original and off the beaten path are getting squeezed out by an art by numbers dynamic. The AI stuff you've referenced is part of that. Art by computer programs is a dubious proposition if you ask me. The human aspect of art is erased. The best art always has a ton of heart in it. Computers, as cool as they can be, don't have heart. When I recite a philosophical mashup I present it as vitally important, as though it's obviously profound. That's what gives it its humanity. A computer can't do that.
I'd compare "computer art" to finding shapes in clouds. Yeah, you feel that bit of cloud looks like a face, and it may well look like a face. But it's not art. The cloud doesn't impart humanity, you impart humanity on the cloud. It's cool, kinda fun, but it's not art.
Thanks for sharing this @DavidDurham. That sounds like a blast, and I immediately thought of Brain Eno's famous deck of cards called "oblique strategies" which are arguably, a series of prompts. There is plenty of merit to informing your creative process with these urgings, that are like wacky homework assignments where you show the work and break your own patterns and formulas along the way.
"The human aspect of art is erased." thank you for saying that, it points right at the mortifying moment we are at. The media is going crazy about the "unlimited possibilities of AI art" and how this is "game changing." You know what is game changing? A human being going through something with a blank piece of paper to write on, or a guitar to bang on, some paint. That has created "game changing" art for centuries and now our living generation of artists faces being erased by a ChatGPT haiku.
I think real art will survive. The difficult process of survival kind of informs art, struggle is essential it seems. And that's another thing computers don't do: struggle. They either perform a task or they don't. For years now autotune has been a big cheat. People who can't really sing are made into singers through artifice. But there's a backlash forming against this. People are starting to want to hear the actual human voice again. At the end of the day you can't replace heart with a machine. You may be able to make it work for awhile, but heart will eventually win out. That's my hope anyway, though I'll admit that I'm a glass-is-half-full kinda guy.
I agree, but artists are not in a position to weather this "fad" if that is all that it is. We are dropping like flies.
Oh, I don't know. Art, and artists, seem to prevail when all is said and done. Fads come and go, what was old is new & etc. Don't give in to despair my friend. You are good at what you do, better than good. Keep swingin', hard as it can be, as pointless as it sometimes seems. If we have to take on AI in a fight, let's fight. We'll be standing for something vitally important and if we go down let's go down punching up.
I'm mostly thinking of my writer friends that started out as fact-checkers at magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone. They eventually got small assignments, a few hundred words, not even a byline. Some of them now write about music for the NYT. Those jobs are about to be done by AI. The whole industry of blog posts based on research, paid by the word is how many writers make a living. Not any more.
Now look at music videos - now there is an app, where a musician can dump some footage and the mp3 of the song and VOILA, you have a shitty video for $10. there goes the small budget music video gig for the indie filmmaker. The same for music mastering... and for illustrators this is a huge end of the road if AI will do the work for free with endless revisions.
I will keep going, but will I prevail? Don't feel very good about that. It's already just short of impossible to give music away for free and films for free. All of the channels for monetizing films made by indies shriveled up in the last 2 years.
At this point, I can only keep going because stopping would be much much worse, but this is all in the hands of our society. they could say NO to AI "creative work" tomorrow.
That's the fight then, isn't? And as a friend and a fan I'm simply trying to give you the emotional support you need when you're feeling down. Everything you've said is true. But it's also true that you've developed artistic weapons against all this. I want to encourage you to keep using those weapons, keep fighting, keep believing in yourself like I believe in you. Engage and enlighten as you're able, and you have that ability in spades. Keep swingin'!