Obsessions : Day 040

Personal expression sells.

I derive my client work from pre-existing personal work. Ideas are neither good nor bad, but are merely awaiting to be positioned, and to find their ideal home.

Personal tastes have always been a starting point for any work worth creating; therefore I have (essentially) close personal relationships with my clients and with the work itself. I only seek out commissions I would consider pursuing over a longer term – endorsements of what we can make happen together. That’s because usually, personal selling is 95 % of the work.

There is nothing I loathe more than boredom. For this reason, I rarely find myself bored.

I keep a library of ideas on my computer hard drive. Over time, this has proven to become a really useful system. Largely, this permits reappropriation – borrowing from oneself – and believe me, thievery is the sincerest form of flattery. Thus, I keep an archive going at all times: an image gallery of screens, sounds, designs, interactive toys, movies. These are a continual reminder of where I want to go.

The library serves continually as a visual reference in client meetings:
• For inspiration in motion design
• For deployment in writing
• For deployment in music

Everything that is anything, must also be a system unto itself, in the interests of making it teachable. That way, we can leave things better than the way we found them.

I have always been fascinated with the concept of a perfect system:
• Everything I do emanates from reusable ideas,
• Reusable bites of code
• Reusable words
• Everything must be permitted to lead to something else
• Everything must be permitted to evolve, and to lead to something better

Forward movement is the only movement worth pursuing in the long run, and therefore, also in the short run. So maybe it’s better to sacrifice the short run for the long run, and to make wiser decisions in the present.

Personally, this requires a continual assessment of where I want to go. Everything we do is poetry in motion. I have no-one to teach but myself at the moment.

Life is a continuous workshop.

Posted by Eric Scott at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some of my work is predominantly about loneliness. We write about what we know. I was born alone, have lived alone, and assume that even when we die, we die, probably, alone. Grim, to some, maybe. To me, this is simply fact, and it lacks any particular charge – it is as potentially helpful, as it is hindering, as beliefs go.

The other viewpoint that guides my work is that principally, we are all good beings, and that we are all simply capable of great things.

So, my creative goal is the make sure that neither viewpoint overshadows the other.

Posted by Eric Scott at 06:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, the main reason I do any of this is that I want to leave the world a better place than the way I found it.

But what is Day For Night? That’s some question. Nobody knows for sure.

But my bet is that it’s something to do with my fascination with music.

Every time I sit down at a computer, I start typing, hoping that I will figure out something more than I knew the day before – about what Day For Night truly means. But it’s more of a today kind of thing; like what does Day For Night mean today?

I’ll come up with descriptors and definitions. Positioning statements.
Grandiose stuff, like: “DayForNight.com! An Ordering System – and a System of Order.”
Sooo clever ...Get it? The Day For Night obsession with cataloguing and numbering, meets the demand to satisfying B2B and B2C commercial ends.
Or “Day For Night. Design From The Inside Out.” I must admit to quite liking that one, which was given to us in J.J. Abrams’ description of what he feels I do.

Obsession, good word. But doing that kind of positioning thing gets me going for about twenty minutes, until I realize that it’s a mistake – while invariably all are true statements, or variations, they’re still getting a little off the point.

Originally, the purpose of publishing some of my theses – under the collective title Obsession – is to document the process of Day For Night and its workings, from creation through output; even to clarify relationships between some of my post-Situationist influences: Jamie Reid, Malcolm McLaren. Factory Records, Design by Peter Saville. Rob Gretton, The Durutti Column...and who can forget Tony Wilson. It seems only natural to raise questions about these figures, in light of my lofty ideals.

Consistently these individuals and their works have inspired and triggered my output stages. Filtered through me, everything – music, values, inspiration, comedy, art, noise, nature, animals, people, tribalism, like-mindedness, archival strategies, typography, order systems, chaos, the spectacle...and ultimately, even Situationism – eventually becomes Day For Night.

These figures have inspired me during my drive to inspire others – to put their lives into action and find consistency of purpose; to seek out and pursue worthy ideals. In my case, all objectives relate to my continuing fascination with musical and artistic expression, and especially, the contrasts between a human lightness and a reclusive darkness.

It also seems appropriate to mention, here, that I often work alone to achieve these ends.

But then something happens – I show and share around these things with others – my VIP list – and much appears to be connected. Over time, these creations have attracted the kinds of people and businesses who want to give me money to develop these kinds of things for them too, so Day For Night has effectively become a modest business, after pleasure.

Posted by Eric Scott at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You know the ones – when your mind simply will not focus, and everything you feel like saying is best summarized by that 4-bar phrase from the song that passes through your head, just long enough to create an impression and then disappear, before a different one from a different song, takes its place. On those nights, I feel scattered.

And tonight is one of those nights.

I am sitting on the studio floor; no, make that the sofa, and then, occasionally the stuffed chair in the corner – most comfortable – using a makeshift ottoman (an office chair that swivels uncontrollably under the weight of my legs as I continually reposition them to shift my weight.)

There are over two dozen CDs on the floor next to the sofa and the player. I used to be sitting in the office next door, but after 14 hours in there, I've relocated everything to – a different room; because I just won't stop yet. The stacks around me grow more chaotic, as the surfeit of my wandering musical attention seeks company with Freeform, Sun Electric, Bisk, David Toop (both in the literary and audio realms, as my copy of “Ocean Of Sound” sits as reference beside the CD Screen Ceremonies, which hasn't left my bedside since 1995. Later, I explain to Patty that it's the only disc I've established an on-demand sleep-response to; conditioned during my recovery from a bout of surgery, and under the drowsy influence of Percocet some years ago.)

As my thoughts race, somehow some of them still make their way into the Olympus MP3 dictaphone, which stores individual files of my musical ideas, business meeting notes, and my occasional verbal diarrhea. At one point, I record a monologue of uninterrupted thought, about the frustrations of being one half of a business, and I use up 18 solid minutes without taking a breath. Nearby, a copy of the All-Music Guide To Electronica gets a repeated flicking-through as one name or sound bite conjures up another, and these references become a roadmap to tonight's musical journey.

Today I realize that I have become a glutton for music ephemera, while I cut, copy and paste paragraphs like these, adjusting my thoughts onscreen, and attempt to grasp the symbiotic space of creation – where harmony of word and mind become one. Tonight, this impression never actually does come, but so many new ideas do so along the way, and all of these get noted down in its place.

My reference piles up higher; quickly I add my copy of the Designers Republic book 3D->2D and Kim Hiorthoy's manifesto, Tree Weekend. I am inspired by sheer abstraction, and some of life's more complex responsibilities evaporate, or at least, fade just slightly while I’m in this space.

+ + +

I am repeatedly distracted by the silence coming from my studio; if I could clone myself now, I'd also be in there finishing up Mousse, the track which was borne in the wee hours of last night when I attempted to record a mere 2-bar riff – within minutes, what I had begun had descended into musical chaos, an amalgam of 9 unmixed layers of Rhythm Factory. This logistical nightmare, employing a range of 3 keyboard sounds and several happy accidents -- I found I'd left the track's record-mode in overdub instead of replace) so I know that I have a lot of cleaning up to do.

This absorbs into my conflict, over which I exercise restraint of judgment, because I know that all will come to fruition, but only when the time is right.

There are some nights, when I am scattered like this. Many of them. And when I get up in the morning, everything gets put right again, before another day begins.

Posted by Eric Scott at 06:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)