Alexei Shulgin is a pioneer of net art and early computer art. His key work 386 DX was “the world’s first cyberpunk band, a singing computer based on the Intel 386 DX microprocessor, which became available in 1985 and by the time of the making of the work was considered outdated.
The members of the band are the components of a system unit: a 40 MHz chip, 8 Mb of RAM, a 40-Mb hard drive, a Creative Soundblaster 16 sound card, and the operating system Windows 3.1.
To create the vocals, Shulgin used existing MIDI files and manually programmed the musical notation using TextAssist text‑to‑speech software to create the effect of real singing, producing huge text files. Recording an album this way took about a year.
The band has played in Russia, Europe, and the USA, some¬times as a street performer in museums, metro stations or outside in the rain, hiding under an awkward umbrella, and took part in live audiovisual concerts with the artist.
In creating such performative situations, Shulgin is com‑menting on the nature of algorithmic (and artistic) labor, the autonomy of computing systems, the problem of obsolescence in technology, and the reproduction of images (and sounds) in popular culture. These questions remain relevant today, when neural‑network‑based generators imitate human creativity, making various communities‑from developers and politicians to creative industries and artists- revisit questions of authorship and labor ethics.
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