Alexei Shulgin — 386DX

1998

Artists: Alexei Shulgin · Year: 1998 · Medium: Performance — obsolete PC playing lo-fi synthesized cover songs · Substrate: Intel 386DX-based PC (circa 1993) with built-in sound synthesis and speech-synthesis chips · Place: Moscow, Russia / touring · Institution: Self-produced touring performance project 386DX is a performance-art project by the Russian-born artist Alexei Shulgin, consisting of a single aging PC — an Intel 386DX-based machine from around 1993 — configured to play lo-fi cover versions of punk, rock, and pop songs using its built-in sound synthesis and speech-synthesis chips. Shulgin toured the project as a cyber-punk band across Europe and occasionally the US from 1998 onward. The PC was the frontman; Shulgin sat beside it operating it. The audience danced to the covers. What 386DX proposed was that the relationship between humans and their computers could be read as a genre of popular music — that the heroic-rock-star framing of the lead singer as exceptional individual was obviously transferable to an obsolete piece of consumer hardware, and that the transfer would be legible precisely because it was absurd. 386DX performed covers of Smells Like Teen Spirit, Anarchy in the UK, Smoke on the Water, and dozens of other canonical rock songs. Shulgin had emerged in the mid-1990s as one of the central figures of the Russian and Eastern European net-art scene alongside Vuk Ćosić and Olia Lialina. The 386DX project is his best-known work from that period and is widely cited as a prescient comment on the aesthetics of obsolete hardware — the specific melancholy of a computer that was once new and is no longer, and the cultural weight that accrues to the specific sounds of a specific superseded generation of machines. Shulgin is still active. He lives in Moscow. Lore Alexei Shulgin's 386DX project — a "performance-art band" consisting solely of Shulgin and a vintage 386 PC running custom-assembled MIDI music software — toured European net.art festivals continuously from 1998 to 2003. The 386 PC played covers of pop hits (Smells Like Teen Spirit, Anarchy in the UK, Sweet Dreams) using its built-in MIDI synthesis as the lead voice. The piece worked partly as a music performance and partly as a deliberate-obsolescence joke about the rapid hardware-cycle treadmill of 1990s computing. Shulgin performed solo and accepted modest fees that covered travel costs across the European festival circuit. The 386 PC itself eventually broke and Shulgin retired the project; he has continued to live and teach in Moscow. Sources • Rhizome — 386DX documentation • Shulgin, Alexei — artist site at easylife.org • Net Art Anthology — Rhizome (2016–2019)