Arash Akbari is a musician, sound, and new-media 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 explores the relationship between human, technology, space, and the environment, and examines the ways interactive cybernetic systems, natural emergent behaviors, and phenomena can evoke meanings as well as social and emotional responses. 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 works have been exhibited in different festivals and exhibitions around the world, such as Athens Digital Arts Festival, Simultan Festival, New Media Fest, 3D Web Fest, Cinnamon Colomboscope, and Graphical Web Conference. He has released albums on Flaming Pines, Unknown Tone Records, Taalem, and Soft Recordings among numerous other labels.
Fragments Of Yearning, AKBARI’s latest solo work, is a finely crafted sonic journey into ambient soundscapes, centered around the topics of yearning, memory and humanity. In his own words: “Some moments linger in us, buried in time but molded the eternity. The dusty echoes from the past, yet are vividly unraveled. The irreplaceable momentary fragments of being human.”
The video was snspired by the ideas of “Emotional Memory” and “Cued Recall”, this music video seeks to utilize audiovisual cues to trigger emotions and memories in the viewers. It was created from a walk in the latent space of a stylegan2 AI model that was trained on top of a handpicked collection of vague images to evoke uncertain feelings and to create ephemeral and enigmatic visual compositions as metaphors of passing time, distant memories, and fragments of feelings. The result of the latent walk was processed using real-time generative image processing algorithms.