INTERESTING TIMES?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 369/ 07 Apr 2025 12:06 

Some 26 years ago (May 1999/ Idealog 58) I opened this column thus: “It's said there's an ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times!" Actually it's been said by me at least twice before….”  

Well, it looks time to trot it out for the fourth time, though nowadays I can check its truth using my old friend ChatGPT: “No record of this phrase (or anything close to it) exists in classical Chinese Literature: the earliest known attribution is from British sources in the 20th Century, a 1936 speech by Sir Austen Chamberlain (brother of Neville) who claimed to have heard it as a Chinese curse but it seems more like a Western invention made to sound exotic or wise.”  So, I’ve been peddling fake news for a quarter of a century, but I don’t feel too guilty as everyone seems to be doing it. 

The financial turmoil created by President Trump’s tariff barrage purports to be against a whole world ripping off the USA through unfair trade, but we all know it’s really about China. Many of us believe Trump has made a monumental blunder that will ultimately help China to economic dominance: The Wall Street Journal expressed it thus “What a fabulous change in fortunes for the Chinese leader. Mr. Trump has taken an ax to the economic cords that were binding the rest of the world into an economic and strategic bloc to rival Beijing – and at precisely the moment many countries finally were starting to re-evaluate their economic relationships with China.” 

I’ve covered semiconductor fab, Taiwan invasions and DeepSeek in recent columns so let’s not go there again, except to guess that Trump’s shenanigans could cause interest rate, futures and bond market chaos that may bring down the intricate house-of-cards finance of the AI bubble corporations (already under siege from IP lawyers). Instead I’d rather talk about how the ‘interesting’ times are affecting my own everyday activities. 

For many years my online presence, apart from my own website, consisted of Flickr for posting photos and Facebook for chatting/arguing/posing with friends. No longer, as my online self has been shattered into a dozen fragments, none of which have quite the same scope or satisfaction as before. Facebook started to deteriorate for me a couple of years ago as old friends left and un-asked-for content increased, but since Zuck did a Musk on it by removing moderation it’s becoming intolerable, and as a result I’ve begun to work on building a following on both BlueSky and SubStack. 

BlueSky is full of left-leaning refugees from the steaming pit that X has become: lots of excellent, sympa content, in fact too much to read it all and unanimous enough to risk boredom. I joined SubStack years ago hoping to get paid for some of my stuff but that didn’t work out so I forgot it until now, when it appears to be changing into something different. It’s becoming a social platform to rival Facebook, an alternative refuge for X-iters and I actually find it more interesting than BlueSky, but with one huge reservation - its structure and user interface remain totally baffling. Is it a mailing list or a website, a forum or… what?  Do I add posts or notes, and where will the comments arrive? My efforts in computer-generated music are now scattered among a host of platforms including SoundCloud, YouTube, NoisePit, BandCamp and GrungeDump (I may have invented one of those) and it remains stubbornly antiviral on all of them. YouTube is still my main source of entertainment, from genial luthiers to hilarious espresso gurus, Rick Beato’s music interviews to Jon Stewart’s Weekly Show. I even watch some movies there cheaper than other paid platforms (recently found ‘Lonesome Dove’ for free). 

The ‘interestingness’ seems to be spreading from online matters to offline. In recent months my Chromebook finally ran out of support (bought a new Asus CX340, cheap, way faster and nicer). BT announced that it was killing off my analog landline early, meaning a new hub, and that my mobile account should be moved to EE. While trying to surf such unwelcome disruptions several websites started playing up – I became adept at navigating poorly-implemented two-factor authentication schemes that trap you into endless loops of passcode tennis, and discovered a new game called ‘hunt the human’ while traversing the maze of AI chatbots that firms now erect in the name of Help…

Shall I end on a cheerful note, that things can only get better? It’s getting ever harder to believe that. Once the DOGE-days are over, assuming some kind of sanity is restored, then the craven way the big Silicon Valley corporations crowded onto Trump’s rattling gravy-train will haunt and taint them for years to come. 

[ Dick Pountain pronounces DOGE as ‘doggie’, like that creepy Shiba Inu dog meme] 

 

KIND OF BLUE(TOOTH)

Dick Pountain /Idealog 368/ 05 Mar 2025 04:38

I’m literally a one-man-band, by which I mean that I make music using an assembly of electro-acoustic gadgets that permit me to do without the collaboration of other human musicians. (I hasten to add that those gadgets do not include drums or cymbals strapped to my legs, like the blokes who used to entertain cinema and theatre queues). 

I love music, from a wide range of genres, and I’m picky about quality reproduction for other peoples’ music I enjoy. I’m far from being a hi-fi nut (and indeed quite sceptical of the excesses they indulge in) but I do run a nice-sounding system based around a Fosi Class D amplifier connected to vintage British speakers, which sucks in music via wire from a vinyl turntable or CD player, and via Bluetooth from my Chromebook, Samsung tablet and smartphone. (I can also listen to those via Bluetooth headphones and earbuds). It would be handy to incorporate the sound from my Panasonic smart TV via Bluetooth too, rather than SPDIF, but the brute refused to pair with my amp so I bought a tiny cheap Bluetooth sender/receiver from Amazon and plugged that into the set’s headphone socket. It worked fine but the cursed TV then hogged the Bluetooth and had to be unpaired before any other source could use  it, so I’ve learned to live with its (actually quite acceptable) Dolby sounds, and so now had a Bluetooth dongle to spare.

I tried plugging this into my various electric guitars via an adapter, to play them wirelessly: it works but is totally unusable due to latency. Meanwhile in another corner of my music room stands the very analog, one-man-band conglomeration through which I play those guitars: two acoustic, two electric, one bass switched into a small Marshall amplifier that’s encrusted with five effects pedals and a small Zoom drum machine. This is all connected via standard ¼” jack cables, and It’s only taken barely 15 years to arrive at a satisfactory topology, the brainstem of which is a 3-channel passive audio mixer, barely bigger than a Yorkie Bar, which the late-lamented Maplin emporia used to flog for £20 (I bought two). One channel is taken up by the drum machine, a second one by the multi-effects box which the other instruments go through, so one channel remained empty and it was simply irresistible to plug in the Bluetooth dongle. Paired with my Samsung tablet, a whole new world opened up... 

Among the pedals is an Akai Headrush echo/looper I bought 20 years ago after seeing KT Tunstall play one on the telly – this lets me store and replay short clips of music and overdub them with more layers. By logging on to Spotify on the Samsung I can play any tune and store a chunk of it into the Headrush to play over and add to – great fun with slices of Bill Frisell or Julian Lage, or Ron Carter bass riffs. I also have Volcanic Mobile’s MIDI Sequencer for creating backing clips using its piano or brass sounds, and also my own Algorhythmics programmatic system (which I’ve described here before). I can compose parts using BandLab, a popular free Android DAW, with sampled instruments other than guitars. In fact any software that can make a noise on my tablet, phone or Chromebook can now be routed into my guitar amp and chunks saved and looped to play over – which even includes my various voice synths and text-to-speech readers, or mic recordings.

However what I really wanted was to create original soundscapes for use as backdrops to improvise over, an ability that I discovered quite by chance in Pegboard (https://semitune.com/pegboard/). Its publishers Semitune describe this app as “an advanced mobile polyphonic wavetable synthesizer with a virtual analog filter, 12 standard modules and 6 effects modules.” It’s driven by two separate wavetable oscillators that you can customise via a graphic interface in which you drag envelope shapes and make them evolve over time in complex ways for really rich sounds. Play them back via an onscreen keyboard, either piano-style or an array of accordion-style touch buttons whose layout you can alter to represent a chosen scale or mode. Pegboard isn’t a sequencer so you can’t save whole tunes, just the sounds themselves, but that’s perfect for my purpose, to play short phrases into my looper (it can also work as a MIDI controller, a feature I’ve yet to master).Pegboard is free to play with but you must upgrade to Pro for £18.99 to save sounds, which I very quickly did. Think of my guitar as a pen and Pegboard sounds as washes I draw over to make sound pictures for my one-man band’s audience of one…

[You can see Dick Pountain’s one-man-band rig at https://www.facebook.com/share/v/15xD1dS1UD/ ]

 

  

DEEPCHEEK?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 367/ 06 Feb 2025 09:12

I used to think that a monthly column was a fairly relaxed schedule compared to, say, a daily newspaper, but no longer. I’d decided to do this one about how China upset the USA by doing AI on the cheap, but now every ten minutes I feel a need to check online for whatever new geopolitical atrocity has just overshadowed that. Nevertheless I’ll start with a nod to the original plan, how China pulled down the knickers of the US AI bubbleheads.  

I won’t dive deep into tech details of how Deepseek succeeded in doing what ChatGPT does for a fraction of the price, or how it rocketed to the top of Apple’s mobile-app store hit parade, nor how it did so by parasitising the US AI bros’ own data in just the same morally and legally unsavoury way they got it from us in the first place. No, instead I’d prefer to harp on about something I’ve been harping on about for at least 20 years, namely how the whole AI industry deludes itself because, being lead by sci-fi-addled nerds (one of whom now appears to be the de facto POTUS), it has a severely limited grasp of biology and philosophy.

Two columns ago I forcefully expressed my opinion of OpenAI’s plans for continued expansion in order to achieve AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), which they claim would confer human-level reasoning. One objection was its colossal, antisocial, power requirements, but my real objection is that I don’t believe AGI is even achievable by simply crunching more data. That’s for reasons of biology I’ve explored here many times, namely that though human intelligence expresses itself through language – by manipulating symbols which is all any computer can do – that’s neither its only nor its most important source. 

We’re animals who have been equipped by evolution to succeed at living in a physical world, achieved with the help of many (more than five) senses to sample what’s going on around us. We build, continuously update and maintain a mental model of that world. We have needs – including to eat, drink, reproduce and avoid predators – which are intimately entwined into that model. We’re born with some built-in knowledge about gravity, upness and downness, light and shade, convexity and concavity, that control the model in ways of which we’re not conscious, but which deeply affect our symbolic processing of that world. We’re by no means just ‘rational’. AI has learned how to pretend to be intelligent only by plundering our symbolic representations of the world, texts and pictures, but knows nothing, and can know nothing, of our embodied experience. Sure, it could build imitations of emotions and needs, but they’d just be more static representations, not extracted from the real world by living in it.  

Historically computers arrived thanks to advances first in mathematics, and then electronic engineering, so it’s hardly surprising that the intellectual atmosphere in which they’re embedded is more influenced by science fiction than by philosophy, anthropology or cognitive psychology. It may well be too late now for AI practitioners to go back and do the necessary reading, since they’ve reached a level of megalomania that convinces them they already know it all, and have just achieved power over the world’s most powerful nation to prove it. 

Were I to be asked to set the tech bros some homework I’d recommend first of all my favourite philosopher George Santayana and his theory of ‘animal faith’, which enables us to navigate life’s uncertainties by deploying our intrinsic knowledge and not ‘overthinking’. That leads directly into the more modern version by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his discovery of two modes of thought, the fast, imprecise-but-often-good-enough one, and the slow symbolic one which is all that computers can mimic. Then I’d suggest perhaps George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s ‘Metaphors We Live By’ which explores the actual content of our intrinsic embodied knowledge and how it modulates our language. Oddly enough, smartphones are already more embodied than GPTs because they have senses (hearing, sight, touch, spatial orientation) and hunger (for charging). Fortunately they can’t yet reproduce.

Having absorbed all that, then perhaps they might dip into Chris Frith’s ‘Making Up The Mind’, the best explanation I’ve read of how the brain creates and updates the mind using fundamentally Bayesian rather than Cartesian mechanisms. That ought to convince them they don’t (or most likely don’t want to) know it all, but the final step would be by far the most difficult, to get them to take democratic politics seriously and divert their megalomaniac schemes toward improving life for the majority of the population rather than a feckless techno-elitist minority. Of course they may prefer to go to Mars, which would provide a rigorous education in embodiment…

[Dick Pountain hopes that Elon doesn’t read his column]

POD PEOPLE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 366/ 05 Jan 2025 03:05

It’s January, when columnists feel obliged to reflect on the past year and who am I to refuse, though I’ll try to be different by not saying that 2024 was the year of AI. Instead I’m going to say that for me it was the year of the podcast. That’s partly because I got exposed to AI rather early via Stable Diffusion in 2022, and was bored stiff by the end of 2023. But it’s also because online services that had kept me amused for years, like FaceBook and YouTube, started sliding down a sloppily slippery slope into irrelevance during 2024. Feeds filled up with unwanted sponsored guff and AI-generated fluff, real friends abandoned platforms to be replaced by reels and clickbait that spread like digital cockroaches. In response I began to view more podcasts. 

Just as reels were shrinking down to 30 seconds of inane pointlessness, podcasts started expanding into 3-hour epics. Of course our own excellent PC Pro podcasts, crafted by Barry, Tim, Jon, Lee and Rois, adopt a manageable one hour format, probably the optimum length for normal attention spans, but several other podcasts I consume started at that length then got carried away. Back in 2023 an old friend recommended an article about The Velvet Underground, of special interest to me as the first piece I ever had published was about my experience of working at Max’s in New York in 1970 while they were the house band. This piece was on a podcast called “A History Of Rock Music In 500 Songs” by Andrew Hickey, and it was three hours long… 

Rather to my surprise I listened to all of it and was riveted: Hickey’s taste, depth of research, even his bluff Mancunian accent kept me enthralled. This episode on “White Light/White Heat” was only number 164 of the 500 he plans, in chronological order, but I was hooked and started listening from the beginning – number 1 was on Benny Goodman Sextet’s 1939 “Flying Home”, the first record with electric guitar, played by Charlie Christian. Andrew’s early episodes ran around 30 minutes, soon zoomed past the hour and now are regularly split into two or more parts – as for example The Beatles and Rolling Stones – reaching three hours plus. Thanks to his immense research efforts they remain quite engrossing. He’s now at episode 177 and intends to finish with a song from 1999 (which may take another 25 years at his current delivery rate). 

Another mega-podcast I’ve listened to all through is Paul Cooper’s superb “Fall Of Civilisations” about the rise and fall of empires throughout human history. He has an advantage over Andrew Hickey in that they’re fewer of them, mostly long in the past, and he’s covered most of them in 19 episodes. While not an academic historian, Cooper like Hickey has invested huge research effort and is an excellent presenter, making every episode informative and exciting without resorting to sensationalism. Some online niggling about historical accuracy is only to be expected, but his interpretations are largely convincing, not grossly ideological biassed, and the video version of the podcast (free on YouTube) illustrates his arguments with a well-curated montage of photographic, film and literary evidence on par with the work of Adam Curtis. Turns out that my favourite dead empires were the Nabataean and the Pagan.

Cooper’s series, available in both audio and video, raises the question of when is a podcast actually a vlog, but I don’t much care. Among my favourites is a series of 80+ YouTube interviews with living musicians by the veteran jazz guitarist and producer Rick Beato, which is probably neither or both but his interview with Rick Rubin is priceless.  

Have I ever podcasted myself? Only once because I don’t much like the sound of my own voice. It happened this way: in 1990 my brother-in-law Pip Hills and I took a road trip to Prague in his 1937 Lagonda saloon to witness Václav Havel’s inauguration as president of the Czech Republic. Following this trip another friend, Mark Williams, commissioned us to write about it for his magazine The Classic Motoring Review and subsequently the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, which Pip had founded in 1983, asked to reprint our article in their magazine and accompany it with a podcast. I charily agreed, and since I don’t possess a professional-grade microphone let alone a studio, performed my part over my Chromebook’s mic, using an audio editor called Lexis (my Android replacement for the wonderful Audacity with which I had 20 years of experience). I managed a usable take after two attempts, even including a snatch of music by Smetana at a pivotal point. Judge for yourself from the link below whether a career in voice-overs beckons…

[Dick Pountain’s Prague trip podcast is at https://unfiltered.smws.com/unfiltered-01-2024/smws-adventures-prague]

TRUMP OF DOOM?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 365/ 09 Dec 2024 10:48

I’ve been writing this column for over 30 years, during most of which I’ve deliberately tried to keep my political opinions out of it, apart from the occasional nod and wink about my lack of faith in free-market dogmas. However there are, very occasionally, world-historic events of such importance that to avoid mentioning them would be a sign of ignorance and cowardice. The last such event was the destruction of the World Trade Centre on the 11th of September 2001, and I did permit myself a column on that. Well, to me the re-election of Donald Trump on 6th November 2024 is another such event. 

I have of course been commenting on the rising power of Silicon Valley moguls – corporations like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, HP, Twitter and more – who built the industry whose products we document in this magazine. And during those whole 30 years I was writing under an unspoken assumption that these moguls, having emerged from the post-1960s counterculture, were fundamentally inclined toward ‘liberal’ (in the American sense) values. The two Steves Jobs and Wozniac were once ‘blue box’ phone phreaks, Google was started by two Stanford students in a friend’s garage under the motto ‘Don’t Be Evil’. And in the interest of full disclosure, PC Pro itself was created by a company founded by Felix Dennis, once editor of Oz magazine on which I too worked. 

In order to remain neutral, over the last couple of years I’ve refrained from expressing alarm as it became clearer that my assumption was being overturned. It started to look really shaky when Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, bought Twitter and proceeded to corrupt it from a vital news conduit for journalists of all persuasions into X, a conduit for previously-banned hate speech and pro-Trump propaganda. Then a week or so before the November election Musk came out for Trump and appeared prancing on platforms with him. Meanwhile Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post as well as Amazon, forbade its editors to endorse any candidate, while Mark Zuckerberg announced he’d made a “20-year mistake” and “political miscalculation” (coded language for dumping the Dems). 

What has induced such a hand-brake turn in these billionaires’ opinions? A stock price rally following Trump’s victory increased their collective fortunes by $64 billion overnight but that’s merely chump change: Musk spent $250 million to finance Trump’s election campaign, a sum he earns every 15 minutes. Trump is promising to oppose internet regulation and prosecute journalists who investigate or criticise too much, but I think even those aren’t sufficient bait. These moguls already had everything except power to rule, which is now on offer.

The other promise Trump makes is to dump the Democrats’ (already feeble) policies toward climate change mitigation, turning the USA away from the Paris Agreement and Net Zero. This very well suits a second generation of moguls – the AI barons. My own attitude to AI has changed somewhat over the last few years. I’ve been sceptical of earlier claims that silicon tech will soon produce intelligence equivalent to or greater than humans, a goal now renamed a AGI, but I’m enormously impressed by the strides made in language and perceptual processing (I did after all let ChatGPT write a guest column for me). 

Three AI problems are rapidly becoming visible. The first is that those who really know (as opposed to simply hyping a stock-price bubble) are  as sceptical as I am about whether merely adding more GPU and training data will push GPTs across into AGI: there are already signs of plateauing or even degeneration through data pollution. A second problem is the absurd, even obscene, amount of electrical power consumed by the huge processing arrays that support the current generative AI models. Pronouncements from OpenAI about their future energy needs are beginning to sound frankly deranged – restart old nuclear power stations to marginally improve AI services which are, let’s face it, really only souped up search engines rather than solutions to any physical-world problems. Building a new clean energy infrastructure to mangle words and bitmaps rather than provide clean transport, heating and air-conditioning is actually psychotic. 

The third problem is that if Trump humours his new silicon buddies by employing their current, flawed, AI products to displace huge numbers of human jobs, he’ll likely trigger an economic crisis that leads to social unrest or even breakdown. This magazine is called PC Pro, the first P standing for Personal. We grew out of a 1980s technical revolution that put computing power into the hands of individuals and decentralised power away from the mainframes of state bureaucracies. The ambitions of the AI brigade concentrate processing back into gargantuan data centres that threaten data democracy itself.  

[Dick Pountain is busy gathering followers on BlueSky (@dick-pountain) as an act of Xtermination]

IN PRAISE OF PDF

Dick Pountain /Idealog 364/ 07 Nov 2024 12:58

Besides all that arty stuff I wrote about in last month’s column, I also review books. Not novels, self-help or pop science books but rather heavier subjects like political economy, evolutionary and social psychology. Some of these tomes get big (I mentioned a 1000-page job back in column 315) and note-taking for such a behemoth is hard work. That’s why I was delighted to discover the notation abilities in Kindle ebook editions, which I’ve also mentioned in previous columns. This ability to bookmark pages, search for keywords, add comments and cut-and-paste notes and quotes has become essential to my way of working. 

Regrettably or otherwise, Amazon’s dream that Kindle editions could take over the book business hasn’t materialised, with sales stagnating or declining and, more importantly for me, few of the academic publishers I deal with still producing Kindle editions. However they do all produce PDF versions, used internally for proofreading and so on. Hence when soliciting a review copy I now always ask for a PDF too.

The facilities provided in a PDF are sometimes sparser than those in Kindle Reader, depending on the settings used by the publishers and designers when outputting them, and so the capabilities of PDF readers have become a vital issue to me. I started out as everyone does with Adobe Reader, but found it less and less satisfactory over the years and not just because of Adobe’s grabby pricing structure – it’s become way too slow to navigate and search my biggest books. Also in column 315, I described discovering a far better PDF viewer, the Chrome extension PDF.js which is a free GitHub project built with HTML5. I’d been using this happily for several years until recently a Google change to ChromeOS stopped it working, and my Chromebook is too old to support the OS update now required. Before biting the bullet and buying a new computer I decided to try out all the PDF readers in the Playstore.

What a horror-show that turned out to be. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of them nearly all crap. It appears every wannabe Android developer from Lapland to New Zealand writes one as his apprentice piece, then bungs it online to reap 2-star reviews. All assume you’re using a phone rather than a Chromebook, all offer their own wretched file management, and few can see external USB drives at all, so I soon became Olympically fast at the ’install-swear-uninstall’ cycle. Scouring the forums yielded recommendations for phone users only, few understanding requirements as demanding as mine. Then one glorious day in October I found Readera, which does almost everything that Kindle does (and a few things more) at remarkable speed and with a very comfortable UI. Not only does Readera read every ebook format you’ve heard of, on Windows, Apple or Android, but it does it for free without ads. And not only does it see external USB drives but its own PDF manager with cover thumbnails is actually superior to Android’s. I used the free version for several weeks but they lured me into spending £14.49 (one-off) on the Premium upgrade which offers colour-coding for notes, which I’d started using under Kindle but then lost with the Chrome extension.

An unexpected side-effect is that I’ve started using PDFs for all sorts of purposes besides book reviewing. I’ve always known you can print documents to PDF rather than a physical printer via the system print dialogs in Windows, ChromeOS, Android (and I imagine iOS too) but I’d never found much use for this until recently. I started having problems saving web pages to Pocket for various reasons and so the penny dropped – just Save To PDF instead and store the file locally rather than in Pocket’s cloud, USB storage being so big and cheap.Some websites offer a download option, but for those that don’t, save-to-PDF often works and retains all formatting and colour pictures. 

I must stress that I’m not a pirate who re-sells or wishes to profit from such copies – they’re just aides-memoire for my writing of both book reviews and this column. For many years I used browser bookmarks but weblinks can break or just vanish and the bookmark hierarchies in successive browsers became more and more unwieldy. My local Idealog folder has subfolders like AI, Bio_Neuro and Quantum full of PDFs from journals like Nature, which I can find quickly to swot up or quote from. 

What I’d like is a good grep-like utility that searches for text within multiple PDFs. Adobe Reader does this but its file management has irritating limitations, so occasionally I fantasise about writing one in Python (and bunging it in the Playstore to reap 2-star reviews) but the feeling soon passes…    

[Dick Pountain thinks PDFs are Pretty Damn Fine] 

ARTY FACTS

Dick Pountain /Idealog 363/ 05 Oct 2024 03:05

When I’m not writing this column, which let’s face it is most of the time, I perform a variety of activities to keep me amused. Apart from walking, cooking, reading, listening to music (live and recorded), playing and fettling guitars, I have a couple of computer-based ‘hobbies’, namely making computer-generated music and computer-generated pictures (non-moving). I recently restarted work on my Python-based computer composition system Algorhythmics – which I described here back in issue 306 – after a four-year rest. What prompted me was viewing a YouTube video about the Indian mathematician D. R. Kaprekar and some interesting numbers he discovered, so I set-up Algorythmics to compose a short piano sonata around two of his numbers, and it sounds like a fairly pleasing mashup of Ravel, Janáček and Satie.

I’ve been documenting my efforts at visual art in this column for over 20 years as I marched through successive generations of paint software from Paintshop Pro to Photoshop Elements to Sumo Paint to Artflow. I loved art at school and can use both paint and pencil reasonably well, but I’ve never been tempted to use either seriously since I discovered the computer (any more than I’m tempted to write articles with a quill pen since I discovered the word-processor). The crux is editability: once you discover the infinite flexibility of digital imagery it’s hard to give up this ability to experiment, redo and correct without wasting paper, canvas and paint. Images on a screen certainly lack the texture of proper paintings, but then I’m strictly an amateur with no realistic ambition to make a living selling my work.

I’ve also been into photography ever since the 1960s and my computer explorations began by processing snaps to make them look like paintings, which taught me how to use layers and blend-modes to take total control of both the colour and tonal content. Later I began using this knowledge to create purely abstract images.

It won’t have escaped anyone in the habit of watching Instagram, Facebook or YouTube reels that there’s a remarkable revival of abstract painting going on right now among the social-media savvy younger generations. Unlike me they’re not working in the digital domain but rather in the messy and expensive domain of wet paint. Under various labels like fluidart, spinart and poured art they’re making dynamic action paintings – Jackson Pollock style – by pouring multicoloured acrylic paints onto a canvas, manipulating it using palette knives and then spinning and tipping it to produce a finished image. Often they incorporate silicone-based additives that introduce cell-like patterns of bubbles, and the results have a very particular biological look. Some of them are very attractive indeed and nearly all are highly decorative. I doubt that many of these folk consider their products to be high art but they are highly saleable, and that’s on top of any revenues that derive from successful social media hits, which is just as well as the costs in canvas and acrylic paint must be considerable.       

I'm very keen myself on early 20th-century modernist abstract art, especially Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Sonia Delaunay. I don’t set out to imitate their works but merely play around using digital processing on a starting image, which could be a photograph, a clip from a website or a digital image that I draw by hand. Mostly I just use a mouse nowadays (I’ve had several Wacom tablets in the past) since my starters are so simple. Another way I sometimes start is by using Zen Brush 3 on my Samsung Galaxy Tab, a delightful finger-painting program with extraordinarily realistic watercolour bleeding effects, and then send the result to my Chromebook via Android’s Nearby Share. Then I spend some time layering, blending, smudging and slicing until I see something I like, which does indeed tend to mean something that reminds me of one of my modernist mentors. 

I’m not at all tempted to go in for fluidart myself to make money, even though those attractive canvases are more readily marketable than digital prints. That’s not only because I don’t have a garage in which I can splatter paint up the walls, but also because whenever I watch these artists at work on Facebook, more often than not I find the earliest part of a new work the most pleasing but then they keep adding too many colours and over-do it. So, while watching one particularly spectacular piece I hit ‘Watch Again’, then hit || to stop it at an early stage I liked better, took a screenshot and used that as a starter for my own piece! This potentially raises a novel legal issue about copyright and plagiarism: I froze a moment in time that didn’t make it into the final painting, so was I really stealing…. 

[You can see six of Dick Pountain’s abstracts at https://www.facebook.com/dick.pountain/posts/pfbid02UBtGRbAU7aTLSPYjeyTebxJUjMJ6EME6cKd5iqYBsYcdbaPCPrUNxZNqJhE48rSKl and hear his Kaprekar tune at https://soundcloud.com/dick-pountain/kaprekar-sonatina]