How an artist made a concert from five 40-year-old Commodore computers
How an artist made a concert from five 40-year-old Commodore computers
Earlier this year, composer, artist and software developer Robert Henke, traveled to venues across Europe performing a new audio-visual piece, CBM 8032 AV. Soaked in the nostalgia and iconography of 1980s computing, the glitchy beats and green, text-based displays seem an unlikely concert piece for 2020, but amongst today’s hi-resolution graphics and sound, it’s surprisingly refreshing.
The entire show is produced using five 40-year-old Commodore CBM 8032 computers, built using the same processor as the iconic Apple One and Two. “They are incredibly powerless”, says Henke, when we caught up with him backstage at his London show. The computers run at a “sturdy” 1hz clock speed, which makes complex operations impossible. However, “it’s totally liberating”, he says. “You can bypass any notion of an operating system, and that means you can do things that are totally impossible with modern machines. It’s unchartered territory”.
Despite the aesthetic, the show feels familiar. “There is a strong cultural resonance bound to this green screen”, Henke explains. “If you think about the Matrix or every single article about cybercrime, it’s green letters. All this is connected with the aesthetics of these computers”.
But this is not a history lesson, what Henke has created transfers these old machines into 2020, where their unique visuals and sounds are more relevant than ever. “Everything presented within the project could have been done already in the 1980s”, he says, “but it needed the cultural backdrop of today to come up with the artistic ideas driving it”.
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