One frustrating thing about the procedural drawing tool I’m using is that it doesn’t let you store an image as multiple independent layers. As a reaction to this, I’m trying to work with some of the transformation tools in GIMP to give a sense of three dimensional perspective.

Original sketch below. You can see I made a mistake of not projecting out the purple shading with with bottom node of the black central prong structure.

Oh Mother, please relieve my foolish pride
I’m choking in the river that’s my mirror
remind me that true virtues lie inside
simplicity the thing to make them clearer

Oh Sister, teach me to always be kind
and call me out for selfishness and envy
this fog of jealousy will make me blind
if bitterness of lonely heart don’t end me

And Brother, hold me to my every vow
(a man’s commands are naught if he’s a liar)
and when I’m fucking up please tell me how
while fending off my cowardice with fire

For if I’m very lucky then one day you’ll be my child
and I want so very badly to deserve you
if maniacs and bureaucrats are undoing the world
through dedicated acts we may preserve you

Steve Morrell playing the harmonica for his son.

Steve is an old friend of mine, and a great harmonica teacher and player. Taught by Paul Butterfield, Steve was a successful musician in his day before disability got the upper hand. He is now living in his home town of Stamford, CT, where he is producing music that he hopes to release soon.

One of the many tragedies of Steve’s life is his estrangement from his only son. Steve doesn’t have a computer and doesn’t know how to use the Internet. But when I last visited Steve, I asked him to play a bit for his son, on the off chance that it would one day reach him. It was the least I could do, after all Steve has given me over the years. I wonder if it will work.

Sketch N Draw procedural drawing, imported into GIMP for gradient background and a drawn intermediate layer with Wacom tablet. Not thrilled about the muddiness in the bottom half, but its hard to do controlled application of brushes in Sketch N Draw since it doesn’t have layering.

Incidentally, I notice that most of these pictures look quite different depending on the monitor that views them. My laptop monitor has a much worse color display than the external LG monitor that I have hooked up to it, for example. I suppose this is one of the hazards of digital art, generally.

There is a lot of sophisticated art that uses highly muted colors. I suppose this is meant to convey a kind of subtlety or contemplation or maturity. Screw that. Juvenile saturation for the win. Sensitivity to “clashing” is just a phase.

Big predators eat the weak of grazing herbivores. Scavengers chew those bones. Hiding rodents gather seeds until snatched by hawks. Worms blissfully migrate through the mulch; shrubs burst from their excrement.

Consider the ecosystem of which humanity is a part.

Some people build towers. Others farm and sell their produce to lawyers who battle over the definition of justice so that soldiers will act in such and such a way. All this is to ensure that the organism that is the state will have regular bowel movements and breathe easily and be fed despite its own complex environment: other states. States guarding their burrows with claws. States gathering into herds and packs. States hearing music played by prophets that make them rabid or docile. States who sell their their voices for food like minstrels.

There are men like ants who build hives to dig for iron. Men like spiders to weave webs to catch wanderers. Men like beavers to dam rivers. Men like proteins that spin strands of chemicals into new strands of chemicals. Chemicals made into laws or played as music in the courts of lions or passed to new enzymes to form the membrane of a spore. Spores that launch into the breeze, latch onto a dead tree, and grow from that richness of decay into a pale crust of life, inert until harvested and cooked in a broth by a historian or a pharmaceutical company or an oil rig.

When we conceive of ourselves apart from all of this, no wonder we are so often disappointed. We are blessed to be part of a wondrous Nature.

You may
be the end of me
But when it began
you set fire to me

And I
protect myself by
keeping my distance
but tugging the line

And so
what we will soon get
are four empty hands
two sighs of regret

I
would rather die
than live a life as weakly as the insulated chorus

What will it take to gather
your bursting hearts and souls prismatic?
we’ll grapple with the dreams that matter
pull them back from heaven to the earth

Unrelenting unrelenting
crusades against the automatic
wills on fire and painting spattered
music sleeting wrath and shining mirth

Please
don’t hesitate
we’re fading aging embers in a hearth that’s unprotected from the rain

And as thunder lacks duration
we must become the storm itself
if we are to outlast circumstance and reap the wealth of precious youth again

Experimenting with the ideas discussed here.

In class we are discussing the possibility of ‘information’ as a point of reduction across multiple domains. I’m the reductionist visigoth in the room.

This sort of art tries to prove something by breaking something.

Drawing is expressive in a way that complicates the ‘informational’ story. A product of a complex neurocomputational and manual process is going to appear more organic. Working with pure algorithm, stochasticity, and imagery maybe makes a stronger point. (Though there were ‘choices’ involved nevertheless.)

Recall that conceptual art is art that is a concept or idea. The execution is perfunctory, the artifact is secondary. (I’m alluding to Joseph Kosuth here)

Concepts are generally not visually appealing in themselves. Though I would maintain that conceptual art can greatly enhance a physical space, some people have criticized conceptual art for this reason. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that a lot of people don’t like conceptual art because it is ugly.

With the digitalization of art, we have the option to operate at a different, deeper layer. Art can be defined by its information content.

This is different from saying that art can be data. In fact, most of the drawings on this site are just data. They are rendered for you by your monitors.

But information is something else. The definition of ‘information’ is up for grabs, but I am using it in a sense that is abstracted from Claude Shannon. Information is, in this conception, the revelation of an unknown (probabilistic) event. The page is loaded, the pixels revealed–what are they? Here they are. Information.

Information is a choice between options. It is a selection among differences. When the variable is repeated, the information can itself present a series of differences. Heads Heads Tails Heads Tails Tails.

However, since perception is bounded by context and attention, information can be reflected at multiple levels of abstraction for the same data. So, for example, there is compositional difference in the amount of brightness contrast in one side of an image or another. There is difference in texture at the collision of two brushes. There is a difference in color. There is a representation of something. There is abstraction. There is the destabilization of a representation into an abstraction. All of these events are possible within a single (static) image. (Even more is possible with animation, of course; it adds a whole new dimension of events.)

Perhaps this is similar to the idea that a single document can contain several narratives, nested and interlinked.

The most famous kind of informational art is the fractal, which is special because the information available at various levels of analysis is self-similar. Fractals are pretty precisely because they contain less information than you might think just by looking at them, and in so doing express recursivity as an event in the possible arrangement of information.

But there are a lot of other options. Exploration of this space of options could be called ‘informational art’.

What do you think?