Afterimage

An afterimage is an image that continues to appear in the eyes after a period of exposure to the original image: "afterimages occur because photochemical activity in the retina continues even when the eyes are no longer experiencing the original stimulus." In a positive afterimage the original colours persist; in the more common negative afterimage the complementary colours appear. The ear has a counterpart in tinnitus, the ringing that follows loud sound. In both, the trace outlasts its cause.

Duchamp's Rotoreliefs

Marcel Duchamp turned away from what he called "retinal" painting but kept working on optical effects. His Rotoreliefs (1935) are printed cardboard discs of spirals and eccentric circles, made to be spun on a gramophone turntable, where the flat designs seem to move in depth. He had 500 sets of six printed for a Paris inventors' show in 1935, a commercial failure. Early versions of the discs had already been filmed in Anémic Cinéma (1926), with Man Ray and Marc Allégret.

Rotorelief (Markov's Dream #10)

Token #10 of Markov's Dream carries the description "Inspired by the Rotorelief series by Marcel Duchamp. Using identical colours." Its traits: behaviour "constant rotation", colours "hand picked", solid fills, nesting depth up to 4, outlines "sometimes". The still shows a black field of dark grey squircles and one terracotta squircle containing white and pink forms. Duchamp's discs needed a turntable; Rotorelief turns in the browser.

Hedphelym (Markov's Dream #9)

Token #9 is "Named after the Aphex Twin track", from Selected Ambient Works 85–92 (1992), the debut album of Aphex Twin. Its behaviour is "mayhem rotation & sliding": where Rotorelief turns steadily, these violet and blue squircles spin and drift. The wiki's reading: past a certain speed the eye stops following single forms and sees a blur of their positions, the visual counterpart of sound that stops being separate events.

Maschine (2023)

Maschine (2023) is a collection of 1,000 tokens on Ethereum, which harm.work describes as "a collection about velocity and perception, created by Harm van den Dorpel in collaboration with Fingerprints DAO & Mercedes-Benz NXT". The work, its trait "afterimage trails" and the artist's text Maschine (2023) are read on Maschine (2023). Its are.na channel, Maschine, opened on 13 January 2023 with three blocks: Hedphelym (block), the market page of Markov's Dream: Orb (lite) (block; → Orb (lite)) and Duchamp's Rotoreliefs (block). Over the next five months the channel adds František Kupka's Around a Point (block), a 1968 lacquer-on-board work by the Gutai artist Yuko Nasaka (block), the wormhole sequence from Contact (1997) (block), the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (block) and an essay on car paint (block). On 7 May 2023 the artist also filed a 2018 drawing of arcs turning around an empty centre, noted "Location: Amsterdam / Upstream" (block); its file name, "lazy-eager-last-final", is the title of a 2018 drawing listed among his works in Context Switch (Galerie Noah Klink, 2022), so it is probably that drawing.

The artist's screenshots in the channel record the steps. On 29 January the disc is flat: coloured wedges converging on a black centre (block). On 17 April it is tilted and seen from a low angle, a ring of coloured rods. By 26 June the view runs down a tunnel of fibrous streaks into a black centre. Rotorelief and Hedphelym turn on the picture plane. Maschine tilts the disc and then moves the viewpoint into it, so the rotation reads as travel.

Framed drawing in blue line: arcs turning around an empty centre — Drawing, file "lazy-eager-last-final" (2018); filed 7 May 2023

Disc of magenta, red, yellow and white rods seen from a low angle on black — *Maschine*, work in progress; 17 April 2023

Tunnel of gold and brown streaks around a black centre — *Maschine*, work in progress; 26 June 2023

Afterimage and Loveless in Struggle for Pleasure

Relieved Afterimage, Struggle for Pleasure #3 — *Relieved Afterimage* — *Struggle for Pleasure* #3 (2024), NFT

Each of the 128 tokens of Struggle for Pleasure has a title among its traits. Token #3 is titled Relieved Afterimage; its colour trait is "fluorescent" and its structure "blast". The still is a field of green, cyan and pink blocks of many sizes. Two other tokens in the collection are titled simply Afterimage. The page reads the fluorescent colour as apt for the title, since bright, saturated colours leave strong afterimages; the metadata does not explain the choice.

Loveless, Struggle for Pleasure #51 — *Loveless* — *Struggle for Pleasure* #51 (2024), NFT

Token #51 is titled Loveless, with the traits "duotone" and "cloud": a soft field of magenta and red blocks. Loveless is My Bloody Valentine's second album (Creation Records, November 1991), recorded over more than two years at a cost reported to have strained the label; its guitars are layered and detuned until the notes smear. The companion series Swallow, Only Shallow, shown in the same exhibition, takes its title from two My Bloody Valentine songs, "Swallow" (Tremolo EP) and "Only Shallow" (the opening track of Loveless), both 1991.

Shoegaze and tinnitus

Shoegaze is the guitar music of late-1980s and early-1990s Britain and Ireland, associated with My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride: heavily processed guitars, buried vocals, high volume. Loud playing is what causes tinnitus, the aural afterimage.

In the Verse Twitter Spaces talk (January 2024) he brings in shoegaze for Swallow, Only Shallow, made from found video stills: "with shoegaze it's almost as if the band is there only to supply signals for this half heavy signal processing chain, where the texture and the complexity of the harmonics is created by using lots of delays and echoes and all these other effects to create new textures." And: "the texture of sound is something I can really relate to" (→ Verse Twitter Spaces (2024)).

The listening is older than the analogy. The artist's are.na channel What I'm listening to opens on 12 June 2018 with Lilys' In the Presence of Nothing (1992) (block), an album AllMusic's Jason Ankeny called "the quick follow-up to Loveless that My Bloody Valentine never made". Bowery Electric's 1995 debut follows on 1 July 2018 (block) and Lush's "Breeze" on 30 September 2019 (block). My Bloody Valentine appear on 17 December 2023 with "(Please) Lose Yourself In Me" from Ecstasy (1987) (block), a month before the Verse interview.

The pre-image (857)

Note 857 remembers the state before meaning:

"I remember what it looked like before it meant anything / what it sounded like as a child / before I understood the language of the lyrics"

It ends on a second thought: "some things that work in one decade / just don't work in the next". Note 920 has the first sentence alone.

The note does not mention afterimages. This page reads it as their mirror and calls it the pre-image: the afterimage is what the senses keep producing after a stimulus ends; the pre-image is the sound or sight as it was before categories arrived, which an adult can remember but not re-enter. Shoegaze, with its lyrics buried under texture, lets an adult hear words as sound again, which brings it close to the state the note describes. The link is the wiki's; the artist describes his interest in shoegaze as an interest in "the texture of sound".