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Arash Akbari & Spekki Webu – Veiled Fluxes

Arash Akbari

Arash Akbari

Arash Akbari is a transdisciplinary artist. His interest in dynamic art systems, human perception, nonlinear narrative, and the co-existence between physical and digital worlds compelled him to explore the fields of generative systems, interaction design, immersive technologies, and real-time processing. With a critical mindset toward the dominant paradigm of technology, he examines the counternarratives in which computational processes, interactive cybernetic systems, and their emergent behaviors can evoke concepts, ideas, and questions as well as social and emotional responses and impacts. Akbari directs his experimental practices into audio-visual performances and installations, interactive software, and multisensory experiences.

His music compositions investigate experimental approaches to sound generation, field recordings, acoustic instrumentation, digital synthesis, DSP, and noise to create immersive sonic environments that explore the agency of autonomous systems, audification, indeterminacy, memory, and the perception of time and space.


More with Arash Akbari

Embedded/Embodied

Farzané    Arash Akbari   

Embedded/Embodied is Farzané & Arash' interactive digital art commission for The Couch in collaboration with Sonic Acts.

view the work here

interview

Farzané & Arash: Artificial Acoustemology

Loes de Boer    Farzané    Arash Akbari   

"The question that piques my curiosity is not whether machines can exhibit human creativity, but rather to explore how human-machine interactions can lead to the development of aesthetics or epistemologies that are based on the combined agency of both entities."

read more
Spekki Webu

Spekki Webu

Spekki Webu is a multidisciplinary artist, producer, sound designer and DJ based in Delft. Guided by an ethos gained through his involvement in the gabber and tekno movement, Spekki Webu cultivates a sound that can be described as persistent and ritualistic. Whether it is his DJ sets, live performances, or music productions, the mysterious chief mind expander deconstructs time and space with fierce precision and tactility. On a constant quest to explore the unknown, his studio-binging sessions resulted in releases on widely respected labels such as Amniote, Blue Hour, and Positive Source.

Published 22 Jul 2024

For the first video in our two-part music video series, we asked seeming polar opposites Spekki Webu and Arash Akbari to make something together.

Spekki is a multidisciplinary artist based in Delft who performs live, produces music and works as a sound designer and DJ. Next to that he runs two music labels called Mirror Zone and Optic Portal. Arash is a music producer and new media artist based in Tehran. He’s interested in exploring computational processes to identify potential loopholes that address questions about our existence, culture, society, and nature, which are being dissolved within these computing networks. He uses real-time technologies along with experimental and custom algorithms that enable us to interact with a dynamic, almost living system capable of communicating with external signals.

While Spekki’s sound for the track came from field recordings he made in and around nature and urban areas during his tour in Australia. He processed these audio segments into complex rhythmic structures and scapes, drones and generative audio. If you listen very carefully you might recognize some sounds, but because of heavy processing and lots of resampling that will be very difficult.

Arash de- and reconstructed the sound in visual form through custom computational processes. Together, they tried to connect the dots, to find an aesthetic of structured noise and chaos that still harken to the peaceful, natural environment from which the sound originates.

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Still form Veiled Fluxes

Arash developed a custom graphics shader that responds to extracted data from the music piece in real-time. This was challenging because Spekki's track was both rhythmic and abstract, and because the visuals needed to maintain synchronicity while presenting the data flow, which can be arrhythmic and chaotic. 

At its core, the visual piece is an exploration of binary data as the substratum of the digital space, offering viewers a journey through what is behind digital representations. The visual components of the piece emerge from the very essence of the audio file itself. By extracting binary data from the WAV file, combined with real-time machine listening algorithms, it unveils hidden patterns and structures within the audio wave file. These data were mapped to the parameters of the visual representations, giving rise to pulsating colors, abstract shapes, textures, and motions.

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Still form Veiled Fluxes

In his work, Arash often translates physical spaces into abstract visualizations that still maintain some recognizable spatiality. In this video, the whole system comprises a three-dimensional array of 3D points, forming a cubic morphing block. The data mentioned controls all aspects of this block, including color, position, movement, and FOV parameters. Consequently, this simple 3D block is capable of generating an infinite number of forms and motions. This plasticity can capture the subtle temporal nuances in both data and sonic fluxes.

The video aims to reveal the potential narrative underlying the data flow and sequences, independent of our contextual framework. Additionally, the temporal data series extracted from the audio analysis algorithms are utilized to explore Spekki's compositional choices in visual format. The end result is a trippy, tessellated and mesmerizing video that seems totally abstract, almost aseptic at first - until you are sucked in to a story of your own making. 

We collected all sources in one place, so you can browse through them all.