Arash Akbari from Tehran has released Amnestic Continuum (fp086) for Farpoint Recordings. Ten tracks, all of them created by utilising various datasets and databases, and reprocessing the numerical data as sound. Additionally, he’s created visual “data sculptures” in much the same way.
In the booklet that’s part of this release, there’s a list of all the sources he used – everything from an index of economic equality to a cumulative count of global deaths resulting from natural disasters since the year 1900, by way of statistics about alcohol-related disorders and death rates from suicide. In fact now that I look at it, his list tends towards rather gloomy information – figures about various ways in which the human race can die or get ill, and major disruptive changes in the climate, such as ‘Colourless’ which uses figures about CO2 emissions compiled since year 1751. The writer Christopher Doherty-Ingram, who operates the HearFeel site for experimental music in Birmingham, has written a short poem for each of Akbari’s works, and these too are printed in the booklet (not read aloud over the music, in case you were wondering).
Akbari has a real fear of dehumanisation; he’s very much aware of the technological revolution, and a lot of his art is about human-computer interaction, generative systems, and the ways computer technology is now shaping human life (or at least our perception of it). Yet the more we gather numerical data about ourselves, the more we ourselves become digits added to a vast accumulation of facts; to use his own expression, “we simply become quantitative values…what is being forgotten in the process is the world itself”. Indeed the very title of the work refers to the dangers of this “continuous amnesia”, as the cycles repeat themselves and we start to forget everything that’s important about being a human being. The whole album – which he regards as a “concept album” – could be taken as a very plausible warning about the direction in which we’re apparently sleep-walking. And it’s quite legitimate, I’d suggest, to use actual scientific datasets to make this point; perhaps in some way he hopes to detourn the information, repurpose it as art, showing us some underlying truths about what computers are doing on this global, international scale. But I wish he’d managed to sublimate the process. All the music here is incredibly dull, one churning morass of meaningless droney sound after another, no beauty, no shape, no aesthetic direction. The same applies to the visualisations created from the data, printed here in black and white, deficient in artistic value; it’s here we can see most clearly how Akbari’s work is mostly merely a by-product of computational actions.
I think it demonstrates how merely replaying a vast collection of data about the theme of “death” does not equate to an artistic statement on the topic, one which other human beings might relate to. There’s more humanity, and meaning, in Doherty-Ingram’s simple poems; the remainder I regard as an artistic failure on a grand scale. From 7th December 2022.