Ableton — Performing Music with Visuals

Short fragment from the Ableton blog post Performing Music with Visuals, published 5 September 2017 at ableton.com/es/blog/performing-music-with-visuals. Only the Lexachast paragraph is ingested here; the rest of the article concerns other artists.

The Lexachast collaboration with Bill Kouligas and Amnesia Scanner exists in three primary formats: live performance (premiered Unsound Kraków 2016; subsequent CTM / transmediale 2017 and Unsound Adelaide 2017), the persistent web work at lexachast.com, and the vinyl record on PAN (amnesiascanner.bandcamp.com/album/lexachast).

The fragment

Visual artist Harm van den Dorpel's algorithmically produced visuals for Lexachast (music provided by Bill Kouligas and Amnesia Scanner) changes each time you refresh the page. The collaboration has also appeared at various festivals, with van den Dorpel helming live visuals: "My algorithms filter random NSFW imagery from across the internet, generating graphic live-streaming visuals that fade into each other, sort of a Ken Burns effect on steroids," he reveals. "The filtering process was done with the open_NSFW classification model and word2vec tag cloud analysis. From this massive pile of image data, I live 'curate' the output and mix it with self-programmed, MIDI controlled Open GL software. This has somehow a quite dystopian effect. If you, for example, mix all colors together as paint, the result is this particular dark brown/grey color. Also, I used to cycle daily past a dump as a child, and it struck me that if you put all trash together, all of their smells combined create one quite specific and particular smell. This also happens with Lexachast. When 'all' images are put together, from this multitude and randomness, somehow a 'one-ness' emerges, or unity. A particular feeling."

What the fragment carries

Four distinct claims, each load-bearing in its own register:

Algorithm as filter, not generator. The pipeline is two ML models — open_NSFW (a classifier) and word2vec (a tag-cloud / semantic neighbourhood) — operating on the existing image-pool of the internet. Nothing is synthesised. The system selects, weights, and arranges what already exists. This is the inverse mode of the generative practice that dominates the wiki's account of van den Dorpel's algorithms: there, conditions produce outputs; here, conditions filter outputs. See Subconscious Computation.
Live curation as performance role. "I live 'curate' the output" — the artist is positioned at a real-time selection console (MIDI-controlled OpenGL), mixing the algorithmic stream. This is the bystander role from the ZORA ZINE account ("you cannot fully prepare yourself for what is coming out of this algorithm…you're also a bystander") rendered as a performance practice with controllers and a mixer, rather than as a posture toward the offline generative system.
The Ken Burns effect on steroids. Fades between images at high cadence; no still frame; perpetual transit. The visual unit is not the image but the cross-fade — the interval in which one image is becoming the next.
Multitude → unity — the paint and the dump. Two analogies, both insisting on the same counterintuitive fact: when you sum enough heterogeneous inputs, what emerges is not cacophony but a single particular thing. Mix all paints: dark brown-grey. Sum all the smells of a childhood dump: one particular dump-smell. Sum all NSFW imagery: one particular feeling (described as "dystopian"). The unity is not aggregated diversity preserved — it is the specific quality that the summation collapses to.

Where this lands in the wiki

The unity claim is the genuinely surprising part for the wiki, because it sits in tension with the finite-combination logic that organises Colour: there, meaning lives in small sets of values held in proportion (the chord). The Lexachast claim is not a counter-example but a boundary condition — what happens at the opposite end of the chord, when the combination tends to all rather than some. Both are true: a four-element chord names a feeling by selection; the dump-sum names a feeling by exhaustion. The two propositions about combination bracket the practice's working range.

The multitude → unity claim also reframes the randomness/pattern dialectic of Randomness and Pattern: pure randomness was claimed to produce variation without accumulation — "it's always different. But it's also always the same, in a way, and after a while you get bored" (Spike #70). The Lexachast claim sharpens this: pushed past a threshold of multitude, randomness does produce something that holds — not variation, not pattern, but a particular collapsed quality of the sum. The boredom of pure randomness and the dystopian unity of summed randomness are distinct affects produced by the same operation at different scales.