New Year || New Project || New Skills
Happy New Year to everyone who finds this page. THANK YOU to my ongoing Executive Producers who are the subscribers to my Bandcamp page. This work is possible because you continue with monthly patronage.
Because of the pandemic, it will be a long time before I’m able to perform live and in-person, as I did for over two decades. This is a massive transition for me. For my whole career, I’ve taught myself new skills and evolved with technology and so, truly, the only difference this time around is that I’ve dedicated myself to an intentional daily practice.
The programs I am learning are Procreate (drawing, digital collage), Pro Tools (sound design, music making and editing) and Adobe Premiere (video editing.) I wanted to create for myself a daily arts practice that would involve all three of these programs and, as a side-effect, create a larger body of work that I could look back on and see progress.
I am living alone through this pandemic, and I have friends and family and you and my work to keep me from loneliness. My whole life, I am the person I’ve been spending the most time with, it’s just now that there’s no longer much distraction from myself. So the first week of this project, I’ve been taking stark looking selfies—sort of a “proof of life” documentation and then creating collages with pictures I take on a walk that day, something of daily life, or a picture from past days.
Then I create around one-minute of sound/music. Like the telephone game, I start each new sound/piece on the last note of the previous one. Then I bring all of this into the video editing suite and teach myself new ways of manipulating them there. It’s a time consuming process, and I have nothing else going on right now, so consuming time is EXACTLY the thing I need.
I hope it brings you some joy or some distraction or some meditation.
I love you and am glad you are with me on this weird, strange journey of life, in general, and of my life, in particular.
I’ll post once per week with a summation video and artifacts.
