The following pages are extracted from a book by Abraham Moles, Art et ordinateur, which will be published before the end of the year [1970]. We have already spoken in previous issues about computational artistic creation. But this chapter adopts a more general perspective. Without entering the field of any one art in particular, it envisages the general conditions of artistic creation by means of cybernetics, whatever the field of application. It thus renews the very notion of aesthetics, envisaging the new role that it could be called upon to play.

Just a short update to say that earlier this month, I visited Luxembourg to attend the 2025 annual conference of the Society for History of Technology (SHOT), which was held at the University of Luxembourg in Belval.

I was grateful to present work alongside colleagues old and new in the panel, entitled ‘The analog in migration: when the world embraced “Multimedia”’.

I followed up the conference presentation with a visit to the CD-Hist project at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), graciously hosted by Prof Valerie Schaefer, Dr Fred Pailler, and Dr Alina Volynskaya. The first day was spent comparing notes on our shared interest area - CDs - and meeting other researchers at C2DH.

The MP3 moment is well understood as a decisive episode in the history of music industry (Sterne 2012), as it engendered radical changes in how music was distributed and consumed, and ultimately precipitated music streaming, which consigns listeners to the status of renters. However, with limited exceptions, scant attention has been paid to the mechanisms and practices by which users reformatted physical - albeit digital - releases in the compact disc (CD) medium into audio files, so that they were amenable to later distribution via the various infamous file-sharing platforms. In this paper, I discuss the first codes for that enabled bit-for-bit capture of audio data from CDs (digital audio extraction, or DAE), which circulated on the Internet during the early 1990s.

Elsewhere, I have described how interleaving in the CD system makes those marks corresponding to events which are contiguous in the real (i.e. the sound originating in the studio) discontiguous in the symbolic (i.e. the alternating pits and lands as they are demodulated by the CD player’s laser).¹ The inverse process, de-interleaving, is applied during decoding and has the effect of making defects which are contiguous in the real (i.e. on the surface of the disc) discontiguous in the symbolic (i.e. the de-interleaved data before the crucial error-correcting step is applied). The closely related media-historical question, of course, follows: are there precedents for these processes?

These notes were developed in April 2022, in dialogue with Nikita Braguinski

“Artificial intelligence” (AI) is the catchphrase for a variety of automatic techniques for the manipulation of computational representations. It encompasses algorithms that process, create, organise, and otherwise recompose recorded culture: texts, images, sounds.

Whether AI refers to a coherent set of techniques is immaterial, since that term has passed into popular culture (and policymaking) as a sign with many referents. It is as such—an amorphous assemblage of specific techniques, not necessarily sharing any single feature—that it should be analysed.

The US-based Voyager Company realised the creative and commercial potential of optical media formats—Laserdiscs and mixed-mode CD-ROMs—for early-1990s interactive multimedia. In this paper, I briefly chart the technological history of Voyager’s CDLink platform, provide a flyover view of this archive, and describe the value of recovering these early-Web digital music experiences. These pages pose technical challenges to preservation, access, and analysis. CDLink, like all obsolete and oft-forgotten platforms, provides an object lesson that the apparent abundance of the digital record today is always mediated by the retrieval techniques of tomorrow.

Notes on a section of Adorno’s long essay on “Radio Physiognomics” from his time at Princeton.

When the digital audio CD format was launched in 1982, it introduced a new paradigm for sound reproduction to the consumer market. Instead of tracing recorded sound with a quasi-indexical groove like its phonographic forebear, the microscopic pits and lands on the CD’s plastic surface represent sound as symbols. As the interpretation of symbols is largely conventional, precisely how these pits and lands corresponded to audio was determined by a small group of engineers who had worked to define the CD standard in the years leading up to its release. In this short talk, I discussed test CDs: discs that were used to put the audio CD format on trial both before and after its standardization by its creators, Philips and Sony.

Around 1960, Walter Reitman of the Complex Information Processing group at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) made tape recordings with his co-investigator Marta Sánchez ‘thinking aloud’, as an unnamed experimetnal subject composed a fugue at the piano keyboard. Reitman used protocol analysis to mine the 150-page transcript of this recording, seeking design inspiration for a new computer model of ‘human information-processing’—Argus—which was intended to complement the then-recent work of his colleagues Herbert Simon and Allen Newell on the General Problem Solver. I relate and contextualise this unusual historical case, which shows how Western art music composition was used in the experimental systems of early 1960s AI research as a proxy for so-called ‘ill-defined problems’ and as an apodeictic demonstration of supposed algorithmic creativity. With the release of the Google ‘Bach doodle’ in March 2019, little appears to have changed in how high culture is mobilised in the rhetoric that surrounds AI systems.

In this talk, I focus on the second movement of Nicolas Collins Broken Light, a piece for modified Discman and string quartet composed in 1991 and revised in 1992. Sound art historian Caleb Kelly has already overviewed Collins’s musical experiments with CD media in his 2009 survey of sound art and composition that featured “cracked” technical media: both destroyed vinyl records and damaged compact discs…