(noting – remembering 9/11 20 years ago)

Painting by Hiroshi Sugimoto

My friend Nitzan said the other day I need a medium hack.

Only in the age of a computer where mediums have become flexible – art in their own right – that we can even talk about medium hacks. Medium hack is changing the medium that we are using in order to change what we are creating.

What is a Medium?

Mediums, for me are like different environments. People behave differently in different environments. I as a writer write differently in different editors. I as a reader read differently in different reading devises.

In water I move differently than when I am on land.

When I am having dinner with my family I behave differently than when I have dinner with my friends.

Now what is context and what is medium. Perhaps the dinner party is an example of context not medium, and I should say I behave differently when I have dinner with my family versus when I go to the park with my family.

This is a good question – what is context versus medium?

Mediums and Art and Music and Such

And I think one of the features of the computational age is to conflate medium with context.

In my painting group this week, the facilitator was talking about how painting is different from writing. I blogged about this the other day. Her opinion is that writing can have many drafts where as painting can have one draft. And this changes the experience of writing versus painting.

This is true. I am currently trying to finish up a poetry manuscript and I am drowning under my drafts.

Writing in this way is like music. It unfolds over time.

The notation for music makes me treat it like writing. A piece of music can sound differently depending on who plays it, how fast it is played, how loud / soft (dynamic range) … In this way playing a music composition is sort of like representational painting. Jazz or improvisation would be more akin to abstraction.

The thing is sometimes in improve it does not work… until the end … when everything comes together

I like markdown

(I wrote this blog post in Ulysses- it renders without paragraphs which is driving me insane)

Apparently it did render in paragraphs! the preview was wrong