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). 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…