Mike and I just wrapped up a sonic experiment. Pong, the electronic music equivalent of Photoshop tennis.

Starting with this bass loop, "played, recorded, and 'verbed out by" Mike, we volleyed back and forth. Adding here. Tweaking there.

After six iterations we were left with this: Blip Blop - A Collaborative Audio Collage.

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Wood S Lot introduced me to the wonderful Artchive with a link to this write-up on Wassily Kandinsky.

"[Wassily Kandinsky's] 'inner necessity' to express his emotional perceptions led to the development of an abstract style of painting that was based on the non-representational properties of color and form. Kandinsky's compositions were the culmination of his efforts to create a "pure painting" that would provide the same emotional power as a musical composition."

Kandinsky's artistic exploration of musical tools, such as melody and rhythm, to create abstract visual "compositions" can be seen in the following thumbnail of his Composition VII. Study the thumbnail before you click to reveal a larger image. Notice the melodic visual structures coupled with the unstructured narrative and the rhythmic nature of the entire piece.



"The creation of [Composition VII] involved over thirty preparatory drawings, watercolors and oil studies. Amazingly, once he had completed the preparatory work, Kandinsky executed the actual painting of Composition VII in less than four days."

The rest of the Composition series can be seen here. Interestingly, the Artchive write-up states that Kandinsky saw Cezanne's Large Bathers as "an example of this clearly laid out, melodic composition with open rhythms."

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Over at Squublog - I on Outsider Art.
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Although sketchy in detail, the visual sentences over at The Elephant's Memory are interesting. "The Elephant's Memory is a pictorial language consisting of more than a hundred and a fifty combinable graphic elements (pictograms and ideograms)"

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"Although authors who took drugs for pure pleasure were the most criticised, they usually did the least harm to themselves. Druggy authors trying to turn themselves into transcendental voyagers virtually always made fools of themselves. And some writers who used substances both to cope and to unwind, found they couldn't handle the stuff, and did themselves harm. Others took the pills and went on working fine. Overall, then, authors were pretty much like everyone else." - Artists and Narcotics.

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I watched as her lip-glossed mouth shouted, lips glistening: "Things are only boring when you're not interested in listening!"

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