Amnestic Continuum is a concept album and a multidisciplinary project that utilizes data sonification, data visualisation, and literature to critique the hidden external effects of the increasing hegemony of computation and automation on life on earth.

In order for intelligent machines to function, we need to reduce the world into sets of numerical data that sustain the databases and algorithmic operations: what is being forgotten in the process is the world itself. We simply become quantitative values in a specific time and place, the forgotten stories and lives that are being added to the datasets as inert numbers. This process repeats itself again and again until no sense, no meaning, and no life is left behind, like continuous amnesia…

Amnestic Continuum aims at creating sensitivity to the context and subjects behind these sequences of numbers. Using data-sonification to create musical compositions and soundscapes; data-visualisation techniques to generate data sculpture; and poetic interpretations in written word by Chris Doherty-Ingram, a multi-sensory experience is created to explore how we relate and respond to the context and subjects behind datasets when filtered through the human experience.

(Arash Akbari)

---

The Lower Tail

The Afar Triangle,
the nook of Africa
and cradle of humankind.

Here, ancestral bones
freed from their substrate
bake in the daylight
under Saharan Sun.

Four million years prior
our predecessors took nothing with them
crossing into the next life
and neither will you.

Their progeny,
the haves and have-nots,
share a world divided
by inequitable fortunes.

Computers fill with currency,
as coffins fill with corpses.

Skeletons spell our future:
relics from a simpler past
they call across ages
to the ivory towers:

All the good you’ll ever do
is now

(Christopher Doherty-Ingram)

. . .

Track Listing:

1 The Lower Tail 02'37”
2 No One Who Remembered 3 Colourless 03'59”
4 Departure 05'20”
5 To Forget 01'45”
6 Fire Over Our Heads 03'50”
7 Drowned 03'12”
8 Call Of The Void 03'45”
9 No Life Worse Lived 02'56”
10 That Was Our Shelter 03'49”

Total duration 31’21”

---

Credits
Coded, Produced, and Mixed by Arash Akbari
Poems by Christopher Doherty-Ingram
Artwork and Data Sculptures by Arash Akbari
Mastered by David Stalling
Graphic Design by Anthony Kelly for Illuminate Studio
CD Project co-ordinated by Anthony Kelly & David Stalling

 ---

This album is available as a digital download including audio & a pdf booklet featuring poems by Christopher Doherty-Ingram and images by Arash Akbari.

About the artists:

Arash Akbari is a transdisciplinary artist, based in Tehran, Iran. His interest in dynamic art systems, human perception, nonlinear narrative, and the co-existence between physical and digital worlds compelled him to explore the fields of generative systems, interaction design, and real-time processing. He examines the ways that computational processes, interactive cybernetic systems, and their emergent behaviors can evoke concepts, ideas, and questions as well as social and emotional responses and impacts. Akbari directs his experimental practices into audio-visual performances and installations, interactive applications, and multisensory experiences.

His compositions investigate experimental approaches to sound generation, field recordings, acoustic instrumentation, digital synthesis, DSP, and noise to create immersive sonic environments that explore the agency of autonomous systems, indeterminacy, memory, and the perception of time and space.

www.arashakbari.com

Christopher Doherty-Ingram is a writer and photographer from Birmingham, England. His love for Ambient and Drone music led him to establish HearFeel, a site dedicated to covering these and other Experimental music which he has run for over ten years. Through it he tackles abstracted stories and feelings in an ongoing attempt at honest and vulnerable discussion, focusing on sharing the intimate connections experienced through sound.

He has also been a film photographer for 15 years with two self-released photobooks incorporating personal poetry which, combined, revolve around the exploration of time, the relationship between humans and nature and the spirituality therein, and the navigation of interpersonal relationships. He continues to search for means of expanding his sensitivity to the world, and answers to the questions it raises.