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 in which 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.
His work has been presented in different festivals and exhibitions around the world, such as DOK Neuland, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Geneva International Film Festival, ARS Electronica, Recto VRso Festival, Mutek Forum, Simultan Festival, Uncloud Festival, New Media Fest, 3D Web Fest, Cinnamon Colomboscope, Lacuna Festival, Videofenster, and Graphical Web Conference among numerous others. He has released albums on Farpoint Recordings, Karl Records, Flaming Pines, Unknown Tone Records, Taalem, and Soft Recordings.
Website: http://www.arashakbari.com
Project: In the technological age, for something to 'be' means for it to be reduced to the status of raw material - part of the endless process of production and consumption. Everything is detached from its potentiality and grounded to a fixed actuality. Heidegger referred to this concept as “standing reserve” (Bestand). This art project (Bec0m1ng) tries to imagine another form of relationship between A.I. technology and the earth in which the aim is to reveal what lay in potential.
A digital environment with a constant amount of matter is occupied by A.I. agents. They have to compete for resources while giving back the possessed matter to keep the whole ecosystem in balance. A constant flux of becoming and formation in which all is one.
It was inspired by Peter Handke’s “we-tiredness”: “I have an image for the ‘all in one': that seventeenth-century, for the most part, Dutch floral, still lifes, in which a beetle, a snail, a bee, or a butterfly sits true to life, in the flowers, and although none of these may suspect the presence of the others, they are all there together at the moment, my moment.“
The project imagines a possible A.I. interaction with the world in which a nondominant coexistence within an assemblage of everything is established. The real-time audiovisual piece is an interpretation of the development of these non-human beings. It explores the emerging aesthetics behind the agents' causal and probabilistic activities by making them expressive using audiovisual forms.