[-empyre-] noiseless noise

["sergio basbaum" <sbasbaum@gmail.com>]

Message from Tim Murray:

This month's reflections on "noiseless noise" call to mind work that I
did with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker when we put together the
"NetNoise" issue of CTHEORY Multimedia in 2003:
http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/ . This issues includes 11 very
different net.art approaches to the subject, which we organized along
three NetNoise tracks: sound motion, culture pitch,  and noise
velocity. Designed by Ritsu Katsumata, this issue was particularly
successful in integrating the structures of digital art, culture,
production and design.

I copy below the Introductory Curatorial Note by me,  Arthur, and
Marilouise in hopes that it might contribute to our discussion of
noiseless noise.

Best,

Tim


Imagine the manifold soundings of art on the Net.  Listen to what's
happening when CTHEORY morphs into CSOUND.  Then enter the zone of
CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA coming of age on the horizon of NET NOISE.
>
A sound of wireless motion and dark noise. The surging sound of
coding, network streaming and file-surfing. The almost undetectable
whispers of splicing, mixing and mutating noise into a brilliant
tattoo on the skin of the digital.  The viral backbone of digital
culture, Net Noise sounds the electronic pulse of connectivity, the
babble of chat, the pings of hits, and the silent tracking of
back-orifice hacking.
>
What happens when sound resonates images with such intensity that art
shudders, finds itself wandering in a spectral space not of its own
making?  What happens when the net hears murmurs of strange new
codes--digital looping, sound displacement, time compression, phasal
syncopation--and suddenly opens up into a new electronic universe,
speaking the vernacular of sounds recombinant fit for speed travel
across the crystal palaces of the image matrix?  What happens when the
pitch and sigh of digital noise envelopes and expresses the complexity
of decaying material culture and corporeal politics?
>
When the Net finally begins to speak, when the codes of the wired
world finally find uttterance, global surfers are suddenly projected
into an art of the cyber-ear, listening intently to what artists of
Net Noise have to tell us about the distended ear of digital sounds
and virtual images.

Tracking and coding the currents of sound in digital culture, this
issue of CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA presents three noisy jam sessions of
interactive performances mapped onto the epidermal screen of the
digital ear: Sound Motion, Culture Pitch, Noise Velocity.

--

Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
Co-Curator, CTHEORY Multimedia: http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu
285 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York  14853
office: 607-255-4012
e-mail: tcm1@cornell.edu