Beauty Care
General Service and Spaghetti Westernized
Mark Rushton’s Perseverance in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
This week’s topics:
Beauty Care and other new music
Leaving Instagram
Compact Discs As Art Objects
AI Humor
Beauty Care
Beauty Care is a 2 minute slice of processed kalimba I broadcast in a live stream on YouTube this week. Lots of space and clicks. I’ve been using my late father’s collection of old car owner’s manuals as thumbnails.
Other recordings include Going For a Drive (processed kalimba), Hall of Broken Mirrors (sloppier processed kalimba), General Service (processed repeating piano arpeggio), and Spaghetti Westernized (processed “strings” with a Mellotron effect).
If you want to follow along, subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Leaving Instagram
Like all of Zuckerborg’s platforms, I think Instagram is ruined and dying.
It’s now filled with ads, recommendations that are surely “pay for play”, and a constantly “out of sequence” timeline.
I see posts by people I follow that show many days later in my feed.
Engagement seems to have completely tanked. Or maybe we’re being throttled for ransom.
It was fun for a while, I guess. In the past few months, I mostly posted processed photos with music I selected playing in the background. I might make one last post, but I’m done with doing anything else there.
Because I like to occasionally post stuff, I’m now using Substack Notes if you want to follow along.
Compact Discs As Art Objects
I plan to bring back compact discs of my albums, or possibly compact discs of playlists of my music, as an option in the near future.
Instead of making something like the above - typical albums in jewel cases and plastic wrapping - I’m thinking of creating an “art object”. I’m still working it out in my head. It’ll probably involve the thermal ribbon printer, spun-bonded olefin, acrylic ink, and other collage methods. That might be a fun livestream video.
I had to buy an external CD burner! My desktop and laptop don’t have that sort of thing built-in anymore.
Because I dislike the easily breakable plastic jewel cases, I’m going to experiment first with “shatterproof compact disc boxes”, a polypropylene variation. I’ve also got to get some disc labels, too.
The whole thing is an experiment. I have all the audio files and artwork sitting on a hard drive. Might as well offer them as one-offs. I can add the CD option to my Bandcamp and the Mark Rushton Gallery.
AI Humor
I love how the TikTok kids ruined McDonald’s attempt at an “AI order taker” through IBM. McDonald’s has threatened to come back in December with something more evil from Google. I’m sure the TikTok kids will be ready and waiting. Bring on the comedy!
When you think about it, no wonder the politicians want to ban TikTok.
I occasionally read comment sections filled with artists and musicians who have been programmed to think that the technology is somehow going to get better, and that we all need to understand how to use it.
Who is this “we” that you’re talking about?
Everything “AI” seems to do is trouble. It should be mocked and ridiculed as the tech scam that it obviously is.
I did like Ron Jeffries’ take.
I’m too busy making real things. Unique things.
Artists got misled for years with nonsense like VR headset and NFTs.
And Adobe subscriptions! Ha! I never had one of those. I use freeware.