Lexachast

Visuals by Harm van den Dorpel; music by Amnesia Scanner and Bill Kouligas, founder of the label PAN. Website: lexachast.com (2016). LP: Lexachast (PAN, 2019). harm.work: Lexachast.

Superimposed photographs, a corridor, foliage and streaks of light, dissolve into one another in a single frame.

History

The music began as an improvised performance by Amnesia Scanner and Kouligas at the ICA in London in 2015 (FACT, 5 April 2019). In January 2016 the website lexachast.com went online with van den Dorpel's algorithmic visuals: images fading into one another over the soundtrack, a different set on each visit (Mixmag and The FADER, 6 January 2016; the 2017 Ableton text: it "changes each time you refresh the page"). harm.work lists the work as software, 2016: "Live visuals for performance with Bill Kouligas and Amnesia Scanner."

The website came first; the live show followed. Amnesia Scanner and Kouligas performed Lexachast at Unsound Kraków in October 2016 and at CTM in Berlin in February 2017, during transmediale, and later at Unsound Adelaide, with van den Dorpel "helming live visuals" (Ableton). In April 2019 PAN released an expanded recording on LP, nine tracks titled Lexachast I to IX and credited to Amnesia Scanner and Kouligas; FACT credits van den Dorpel with the generative visuals and names Flickr and DeviantArt as the image sources.

A projection of a mouth and teeth fills the screen above the performers at their table; the audience is in silhouette.

The system, in his words

The only first-person account of the visuals is a paragraph in Ableton's feature Performing Music with Visuals (5 September 2017), ingested as Ableton — Performing Music with 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."

open_NSFW is a classifier Yahoo released in 2016 that scores how likely an image is to be "not safe for work"; word2vec places words in a vector space so that related tags sit close together. The text does not say whether the filter kept images for their NSFW score or screened them out. It does say that the selection was not left to the software: he curated the stream live at the controls.

Readings in the wiki

Three pages take up the paragraph; the arguments live there.

• Colour. The paint and the dump are cases of combination pushed to "all": the sum collapses to one particular colour or smell. Colour reads this as the far end of the finite chord, where a few colours in proportion name a feeling.
• Randomness. In the Spike #70 interview he says pure randomness is "always different" but "also always the same". Randomness and Pattern reads the Lexachast paragraph as the other side of that: at a large enough sum, randomness yields a specific quality.
• Selection. Lexachast selects from existing images rather than generating new ones, and the artist chooses on stage. Subconscious Computation treats it as the filter mode of that principle.

The LP

A clear vinyl record half out of its printed sleeve.

The sleeve and the insert carry dark, blended images like the stills from the visuals.

See also

• Colour — the summed-multitude limit of the chord
• Randomness and Pattern — summation and the boredom of pure randomness
• Subconscious Computation — filter mode
• Verse Twitter Spaces (2024) — "I would also do that live with an electronic music ensemble"
• Ableton — Performing Music with Visuals — the 2017 paragraph