[-empyre-] Why Noise?

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

Hi xname, very good post>

Ciao,
Murat

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 4:19 PM, xname <xname at xname.cc> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear all,
>
> before I shoot another thread off, I wanted to share some reflections
> following David's thought provoking post with related responses.
>
> Regarding the relation, or ratio, noise to signal, I think this is a
> matter for physicists and engineers, along with media theorists. The
> distinction dilutes to different ends, of course. As in regards to artists,
> I believe since Man Ray's photo of the DUST on Duchamp's Large Glass, the
> position of noise and dust in art has been established. The distinction
> between carrier and content brings ideas that come from communication
> theory and semiotics. When I was writing about the semiotics of
> audiovisuals and the animation of drawings, back in 2002, I had to notice
> that for a sign to communicate any meaning in time, there is always a
> sequence of signs producing nonsense. Every sign contains nonsense if we
> break it down to size. For signification to occur, there is always
> something emerging between interpretation and miscommunication, object and
> reference.
>
> So the idea of encrypting communication into that which is human but not
> machine understandable is very contemporary, as we wouldn't have thought,
> not so long ago, that we'd have to prove we are not robots on a everyday
> basis. The question of censorship on the one hand, and this idea of noise
> as potentially subversive. Why should we consider noise as subversive?
>
> Is noise ontologically anti establishment?
>
> How often are media making noise, without actually informing?
>
> Luigi Russolo, in his futurist manifesto dated 1913 (The Art of Noise),
> connects the encounter of noise and art to the machine:
>
> "Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the
> invention of the machine, noise was born. And so was born the concept of
> sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, and the
> result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an
> inviolable and sacred world."
>
> QUESTION
> Listen to this:
> https://soundcloud.com/xname/spectropticon-raw
> Is it SIGNAL or NOISE?
>
> Maybe we could think of something hidden, whose voice is unheard, or
> cancelled, the marginals, including those marginalised and those living at
> the borders, all that which is not accepted by society, that which is
> overlooked, a floating eye avoiding the gaze of the 'home' of the homeless,
> or the screams of those who haven't been accounted for?
>
> This metaphor of that which is there but is not considered important
> enough (to BE SIGNAL), becomes, then, NOISE, that noise we want to amplify,
> taking it to the foreground, we want its narrative to stand out, telling us
> the stories which are unfolding at the interstices of the MACHINE (social,
> mechanical, electronic, affective, semiotic, etc).
>
> We want to listen to the sound of the mechanism, we want to make it
> excessive because we have been told that we shouldn't pay attention, that
> it's annoyance, that it doesn't mean much because it's NOISE, nothing else
> than NOISE, and should be ignored.
>
> Instead, we want to see if it there's SOMETHING IN IT FOR US. And we want
> to hear it clear and LOUD.
>
>
> Yours truly,
> xname
>
>
> --
> phantasmata and illusions
>
> @oracle666
> http://xname.cc
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20180314/6aa3879f/attachment.html>