If you are still alive in this crazy world - Happy November 1st 2024.  

This month we embark on a whole new journey in image making.  The question:  Can an image be ambient?
I suppose that some could argue that all images, in our image saturated society, have become ambient with people merely viewing them as clickbait - not spending time on any one image for any amount of time and seldom (if ever) going back to it once it was viewed.   My inspiration this month comes from ambient music.   I've been a fan of so-called ambient music since Brian Eno released Angels In The Architecture; a compilation of ambient (mostly electronic) music artists from that time.   It was released in 1987 on the Editions EG label and included artists, like Brian Eno, Laraaji, Phil Manzanera, Robert Fripp, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Roger Eno, Harold Budd and others.   Of course ambient music has been around long before 1987 but it was not until that time that it really became a genre on it's own defined primarily by electronic music. 

A few months ago I was listening to a music podcast and they presented a newer ambient idea one that is strictly electronic and featured a group called GAS.    The album was simply titled POP and was the creative brainchild of german musician/composer Wolfgang Voigt.    The music was described as what you might hear through a dense woods of the remnants of a techno and classical concert all merged into one ambient rumble.  You might call it manufactured natural ambience. I became intrigued by that notion of manufactured natural ambience and began to wonder if there is such a thing as a manufactured ambient image based on nature subjects.    

Wallpaper.   I remember as a child how much I loved leafing through wallpaper sample books that mom and dad would bring home when they were ready to redo a room.  And I think that may be the direction I'm going.   Can art just be wallpaper something that exists as a background to something else?  Tying into the previous notion of listening to electronic music filtered through a dense woods made me want to try something new.    I've long wanted to be able to manipulate my nature images into some sort of electronic mashup where something completely new would be created.   It may not be clear.   It may be only suggestive or impressionistic.     

I started to think about how I would process such an image,  I found a way of working that lets me get close to what I want to do.   So today starts the new series, simply titled, Experiments For Better Or Worse #1 through....  Some images will be more successful than others in each persons eyes.  I will only post one image a day and have created more images than there are days in the month of November so some will be left out to wait until later.     So without further adieu here is the first image, featuring autumnal colors and some ambient music to go with it.   Please remember what you are looking at is NOT real there are only remnants of a reality that have been blended together in this visual soup.