Immersion Into Noise

Front matter

Immersion Into Noise

Immersion Into Noise

Critical Climate Change

Contents

List of Figures Preface

Notes Bibliography Additional Licenses

104 133 199

Preface

On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and productive ways within practices located in the world of art and thought? This is the question I have set out to explore in Immersion Into Noise.

For many people, if anything is representative of the art of noise, it is ambivalence. Ostensibly, everything is permitted in art today—and thus nothing is necessary. As a result, art and entertainment are said to have merged. For me, however, perhaps surprisingly, the denial of this merger and the answer to the question posed above is to be found within the challenge of style.

In writing this book I have come, counter-intuitively, to see the style of cultural noise as the necessary (and thus valid) art of today—precisely because it does not cave in to the supposed need for immediately legible, spectacle. Indeed it restores art’s responsibility of resistance.

Some claim that art, as entertainment-spectacle, participates in the dumbing-down values that have proved useful to big business, values that address all communications to the lowest common denominator. I tend to agree. Therefore my feeling is that today art must indict—or at the very least play the role of the noisy jester who unmasks the quietly persistent lies of the powerful. Corporate and government propaganda is often designed to deceive and victimize us—and if art cannot rebuff and contest this by fueling the political will and imagination of resistance, I wonder why we need it at all. So for me, an intricate art of noisy resistance is increasingly valuable to an analytical social movement based on skepticism as it strengthens unique personal powers of imagination and critical thinking through self-perception, while undermining market predictabilities. Such art noise counters the effects of our age of simplification—effects that have resulted from the glut of consumer-oriented entertainment messages and political propaganda, which the mass media feed us daily in the interests of corporate profit and governmental manipulations.

This look at self-perception is the impetus behind this book.

My initial question concerned contemporary art’s commitment to the idea that a central core of art is that which purports to transcend the banal economic world and portray a wider vision of awareness, including private spiritual, ecstatic or numinous themes that become accessible through the subjective realm of each individual: this is a self-perception that reveals in minute particulars the full spectrum of the extensive social-political dimensions of the mind. I wondered about art’s new role in recognition of the fact that the logo representational paradigm is being overlaid by newer cognitive processes based on dynamic systems, connectionism and situated emergence.

I began this writing with the assumption that developing visual and cognitive noise as a cultural strategy is an important element of this dynamic model, one that challenges a cultural analysis founded on unambiguous representations necessary for entertainment. This was based on my observation that a noisy cultural constructivism is in the process of confronting unconnected ideal models of entertainment with information processing and self-re-organization through the digitization of knowledge. So, in this somewhat eccentric piece of writing, I have tried to explore such questions through a range of references, touching on some of the cultural, political, art historical, and philosophical aspects of noise, including the connection between noise and violence and noise and the sacred.

But I was always lead, from beginning to end, by my involvement with art. In my own case, I came to practice the art of noise through the research into ideology and power that I conducted in the 1980s in the form of drawings and photo-mechanical blowups of the drawings. For example, see Figure 1.

For me, the validity of art noise rests on the assumption that while rhizomatic growth and inter-relations are unpredictable, this does not mean that they proceed randomly. Noise may break some connections, but connections will always continue to grow in other directions, creating new thoughts and new affects. The notion of noise as creation itself is thus an important one that needs to be reconsidered and reevaluated.

Preface 11

Figure 1 - Uplifting, 1983, 11 x 14”, graphite on paper, Joseph Nechvatal. In the collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota

This creative art of noise draws us closer to our inner world, to the life of our imagination with its intense drives, suspicions, fears, and loves— that which guides our intentions and actions in the political and economic world. Our inner world is the only real source of meaning and purpose we have and a participatory, political visionary art of noise is the way to discover this inner life for ourselves. So, my intent here in Immersion Into Noise is to contrast these ideas with our market-frenzied materialist culture by training us to develop the eyes of clear outer perception.

Finally, Immersion Into Noise is intended as a conceptual handbook for the development of a personal political visionary art of noise. This art of noise’s visionary realm embraces of course the entire spectrum of imaginary spaces, from the infinitude of actual forms to formless voids of virtuality.

I would like to deeply thank Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook, my editors at Open Humanities Press, Sigi Jottkandt from OHP, and the staff at University of Michigan for their insightful assistance in bringing this idiosyncratic text to fruition. I am very grateful to Tom Cohen, who first took interest in this work. Also, I wish to express my gratitude for the generous early support of Maja Hoffmann and to the French Ministère de la Culture for granting me access into the Grotte de Lascaux. Furthermore, I express my thanks to Laurent Fairon and Lauren Sedofsky for their early reading of the text. Lastly, I thank profoundly my wife, Marie-Claude Nechvatal, for her encouragement—and tolerance—of my noisy bursts.

Introduction

Where there is simple information processing, there is simple experience, and where there is complex information processing, there is complex experience.

— David Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness”

[...] the value of an old work of art should be assessed on the basis of the amount of radical theory that can be drawn from it, on the basis of the nucleus of creative spontaneity which the new creators will be able to release from it [... ] — Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Applied to culture, the concept of immersion into noise is an unfamiliar one. What do I mean when I say immersion? It is by no means uncomplicated. It is, like art, gradient. Even the word noise' on its own is fraught with philosophical implications and deserves to be closely scrutinized. And what is this diaphanous, dark designation called noise music and— even more problematically—art noise?

It would be preposterous to pass judgement on the aesthetics of noise without asking such questions at the start. And so to begin, I will endeavor to answer them in terms of what I will propose as an art of noise.” This art of noise will be embodied in the literary/scholastic technique used here, one that embraces a noisy heterogeneity that at times may simultaneously be fun, frustrating and funny. Thus what I offer the reader is a text that will engage them in a dynamic play of noisy forces and fluctuating perspectives that exemplifies the propositions put forth here: propositions concerning the recognition of—and immersion into— cultural noise.

First, we must consider that noise takes place in a general media culture of massive electronic deluge, where the mercurial reproduction of free-floating (ineffable) signifiers of language, sound and images has blurred into a problematized complex/compound/prodigality sometimes referred to as information overload. In one respect, all sounds and images are already a kind of noise: data without meaning.’ But I want to argue that an art noise takes a slight step outside overload/intoxication by means of its fuzzy identity as art (something vaguely abstract that is linked to pleasure and critique). Of course, any simplistic explication of the function of art (a concept that has no single function, but several) within Western society alone today would be inept. However, by examining the various definitions offered over the centuries, we can see that the idea of art developed primarily out of notions of anthropomorphic aesthetic agency displayed first through manual dexterity and then through intellectual stratagems concerning collective or intimate demonstration. As this embraces many types of production that are not conventionally deemed to be art, perhaps a better term for art would be culture.*

If so, perhaps an art of noise can also be postulated as a realm of anti-social cultural purpose directed toward the revolutionary transformation of an irrational social reality that insists on calling itself rational. I would like to think so and will argue this with the support of Gilles Deleuze’s (1925-1995) notion of the vacuole. This concept of noncommunication comes from Deleuze’s Postscript on Control Societies. Deleuze’s notion of control is connected to information-communication technology—a concept he pulled out of the work of William S. Burroughs (1914-1997). A vacuole is like a sac in a cell’s membrane, completely bound up inside the cell but also separate from it. Vacuoles play a significant role in autophagy, maintaining an imbalance between biogenesis (production) and degradation (or turnover) of many substances and cell structures. They also aid in the destruction of invading bacteria or of misfolded proteins that have begun to build up within the cell. The vacuole is a major part of the plant and animal cell.

If we agree to combine this thought of noise art as a vacuole of noncommunication with an insistence on signal-to-noise® psychological circuit breaking, we gain a more complicated image of noise—as vacuoles that re-route and break-up the pathways of control. Let us therefore entertain a noncommunicating art of noise as an aesthetic act that nevertheless communicates intricately.

Consequently, I will focus here on the beatific aspects of noise (as I see it, the negation of negation) connected to an abstract non-communication as located in art that uses noise to re-route and break up our mental habits.’ Thus the focus will be on signal-to-noise art relations, those relations that signal anti-social interruption, resistance, damage and frustration as sources of psychic pleasure. This concentration directs us towards an understanding of art noise as an art that distorts and disturbs crisp signals of cultural communications.

Our focus will conclude with a broader theory of pleasurable resistance as applied to noise culture in viral infected networked systems.

So to begin, I hypothesize that an art (or culture) of noise? produced in our milieu of image superabundance and information proliferation can problematize culture and hence enliven us to the privacy of the human condition in lieu of the fabulously constructed social spectacle’ that engulfs and (supposedly)"° controls us.

As a consequence, this book’s aim is to open a dissonant space for a beatific noise theory that constitutes an alternative, although not necessarily a competitor, to the quiet manner in which most art and music theory is generally practised. As such, its strategic goal is focused less on delivering to the reader a sealed cultural product of recognition, and more on calling the reader into an immersive state of procedure that is based on the attributes of continuous spanning (distentio). This emphasis on the continuous spanning of listening—which itself is indicative of the immersive modus operandi of sound—lends a focus to thought that delivers a sense of continuity over time (extentio animi), as opposed to readily available—and thus fixed—intellectual strategies. This is particularly so in that the starting point of this intellectual investigation is the immersive position from within: intus. A position that necessitates a broad span of hearing, sight and thought—as well as a tight focus on disturbance.

Towards an Immersive Noise Consciousness

The highest art will be the one that presents in its contents of consciousness the thousand-fold problems of the time; to which one may note that this art allows itself to be tossed by the explosions of the last week, that it pieces together its parts again and again while being shoved by the day before.

— Tristan Tzara, Franz Jung, George Grosz, Marcel Janco, Richard Hulsenbeck, Gerhard Preiss, Raoul Hausmann, Dada Manifesto

..our previous history is not the petrified block of single visual space since, looked at obliquely, it can always be seen to contain its moment of unease.

— Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision

In everyday use, the word noise means unwanted sound or noise pollution. I look at it (and listen to it) differently: from an immersive perspective. In music, dissonance is the quality of sounds that seem unstable, with an aural “need” to “resolve” to a “stable” consonance. Despite the fact that words like “unpleasant” and “grating” are often used to describe the sound of harsh dissonance, in fact all music with a harmonic or tonal basis—even music that is perceived as generally harmonious—incorporates some degree of dissonance.

For music, I am using the term immersion in a strong sense: sound surrounds us, and in a weak sense: as a spontaneous substitution involved in suspending disbelief and outside stimulus for an interval of time—as when one’s attention gets wrapped up in something compelling. For visual art, the term will be applied to suspending disbelief when using one’s own interpretative imagination—plus a more physically based, and more scopic, application. For consciousness, the term is here almost mashed up with immersion.

As with art, reductive explanations of consciousness have proved impossible.'' And as Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) said, the fact that ready-mades are regarded with the same reverence as objects of art probably means he failed to solve the problem of trying to do away entirely with art. Thus, Immersion Into Noise will take on a very wide aesthetic interpretation of noise (in art) and push it to the limit: defining immersive noise art as a saturating border experience.” So the raucous understandings proposed here are going to fashion a synchronous theory of art, particularly informed by encounters with—and concepts of—the inside (and outside) of sensual noise. By attacking the important abstract aspects of aesthetic noise, Immersion Into Noise will propose a supplementary understanding of contemporary culture. But it will also touch on aspects of ancient Western culture as detected in the histories of art and architecture and so develop a general theory of immersive noise consciousness: one that is a disturbing, sensorially reverberating, compound unified field.

In electronics, noise can refer to the electronic signal corresponding to acoustic noise (in an audio system) or the electronic signal corresponding to the (visual) noise commonly seen as “snow” on a degraded television or video image. In signal processing (or computing) it can be considered data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. Noise can block, distort, or change the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication. What the art of noise does is to take the meaninglessness of noise and convert it into the meaningful.

White noise is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise is considered analogous to white light, which contains all frequencies.

The French philosopher Michel Serres has interrogated the idea of noise in two of his books, Genése and The Parasite, where he established that inherent to the concept of noise is the incident of interference. For him, noise is a chaotic parasite that is an excluded middle (or third) —without which the entire logical structure of western thought is unthinkable."

In noise art, modes of representation (categories) tend to be interfered with and thus bend towards collapse. I intend to show how the cavernous conversion in aesthetic perception engendered by noise (as it wraps around us) can also be stretched to identify certain shifts in ontology that are relevant to our understanding of being by attending to sound-wave vibration frequency. To do so, an automatismic artisticphilosophical consideration of noise must assume the two-fold task of establishing an axiomatic aesthetic epistemology based on theoretical texts (of artists whenever possible), while testing them against my own artistic experiences and by placing myself within the operations of noise, thus raising questions of the reciprocity between theory and practice. I have approached this reciprocity through the creation of a 99.28 minute laptop noise opus entitled viral symphOny in four movements with pOstmOrtem (2008).'*

Unsurprisingly, the fairly recent surge in the popularity of glitch electronica’ and its clicks-and-cuts aesthetic of error (and to a lesser extent musique concrète) directly relates to my interest in noise as a form of negative dialectics, as it mines what was once the erroneous use of musical technology in the production of sound. In glitch, the effects of malfunction, such as bugs, crashes, system errors, hardware noise, skipping and audio distortion, can be captured on computers and this material provides the fundamentals of glitch music. In the glitch sense, deciphering noise in art will be tied to the potent erroneous in a general way. But noise art is not pop, and the broad spectrum of people do not appreciate it. In each case, from the mainstream point of view, something is wrong with the art. Subsequently, I will examine what noise signifies to those who love it.

To do so, I will be looking at the cultural and aesthetic benefits of noise” from my point of view both as a practising artist and as an art theoretician. Hence, in addition to preparing the reader for the previously indicated stylistic bounces back and forth between the first and the third person voice in the text, I shall establish my fundamental contention that all art is fundamentally conceptual and imaginative because art only exists conceptually and its goal is to change our consciousness. That is what Joseph Kosuth teaches us. This is not an uncomplicated matter however, for as the philosopher and specialist in consciousness studies, Dr. David Chalmers, says in his seminal essay “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness’, “there is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing harder to define”!

According to Gilles Deleuze, consciousness is “the passage, or rather the awareness of the passage, from less potent totalities to more potent ones, and vice versa? This hypothesis receives support from Thomas Metzinger who writes in Conscious Experience that “holism is a higher-order property of consciousness” and that “this global unity of consciousness seems to be the most general phenomenological characteristic of conscious experience”.””

Noise is often loud, elaborate, interlaced and filigreed—but almost always gradient and highly phenomenological.” Noise is often a potent and transcendent negating intensity—but it is never unassimilable. The prime example of this will be the short history of noise music to follow.” What was once noise (unacceptable) has now become noise music (acceptable and even desirable). What was once negating and exterior now fuels the inner artistic imagination. But for noise to be first noise, it must destabilize us. It must initially jar. It must challenge. It must initiate a glitch of psychic crumbling.

Through the relationship between noise and noise music we can see how both notions of in and out (of the psychic edge/frame) are contained in an expanded idea of noise” that becomes potentially unhindered.” This understanding offers the critic a complex amplitude that deepens both the inside and the outside because they both extend as part of a potentially vast scope. In noise, potentially opposing directions can lose their positions and meet in a crushed connectivity. This recalls Gilles Deleuze's wonderful statement that “the interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior”? If we amend these divisions within a conceptual noise homogeneity I believe we are much closer to the truth of the matter as concerns the experiential levels of aesthetic immersion into noise.

Noise art theory, then, involves the exaltation of the void and the melting of unstable frontiers as it expands definitions both inwardly and outwardly to envelope from both sides a felt understanding of the unfettered immensity and myrrh of our universe (where noise of one sort or another is everywhere).”*

Given this thinking about noise’s special conundrum (particularly when depending upon the supposed filter of analogic thought, the stepby-step comparison of partial similarities between things) art as noise— or noise in art—is well suited for reflecting on noise’s overwhelming sensations and qualities of excess: an incoherent and multivalent excess that defeats attempts at reducing reality” to the indexical level of representation. I am theorizing here, then, a potentially shifting total excess where many once discrete elements are conceived as occupying the same space in a preliminary step towards producing an innovative unity (or ontological identity) as mash chaosphere.*°

Undoubtedly, at times in the past totalizing analogies have been fatuously and unequivocally self-sententious in their urge towards perfectification, embellished (as they must seem to be) with a sort of selfsignificance and often fallacious, sweeping universalism. However, this awkward question of totalizing in terms of immersive noise art and immersive noise consciousness is at the hub of this investigation’ and so it immediately beckons the questions: what models we make for ourselves, which do we prefer aesthetically, and why?

In terms of creativity and self-programming, the resultant new sense of synthesized unity noise provides is valuable in that it allows the creator to move from what exists and is known to the limits of knowledge and experience, and therefore to move into the realm of the unknown—a move from the familiar to the unconceived.

To address this gradient subject of audio noise—and then take it outside the organ of the ear—I have accumulated aesthetic examples of noise tendencies as experienced by myself and as found in the histories of art and philosophy. These examples subsequently contribute towards the articulation of what I have come to call noise culture—or better—noise consciousness,” as even the proclamation, culture, presents a set of highly ambiguous notions in that the word culture has immediately conflicting insinuations, and it is invariably best to observe scrupulously the context of its use. For some it means High Art, but for others (myself included) the word has more anthropological applications where culture represents less hypothetical measures of excellence than a widespread way of hearing, seeing and being.

What I will show here is that while formulating such an art of noise consciousness, a good deal of the basis for the questioning of the western ontological tradition has been found in the western tradition itself when we hear with new ears and look with new eyes and ask indeterminate questions.

Noisy Aesthetics

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

— Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

The term aesthetics is traditionally used to distinguish the appreciative from the expedient. The notion originated with a 1739 text by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) who introduced the term aesthetic in his text Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus, defining it as the study of attraction as concerned solely with discriminating perception. For Baumgarten, in other words, aesthetics should be a separate, independent concern dealing only with perception. In Baumgarten's theory, much attention was concentrated on the creative act and the importance of feeling. For him, it was necessary to modify the traditional claim that “art imitates nature” by asserting that artists must deliberately alter nature by adding elements of feeling to perceived reality. In this way, the creative process of the world is mirrored in art activity. Baumgarten's thought in this regard was influenced by the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and that of Leibniz's pupil Baron Christian von Wolff (1679-1754).

The problems of aesthetics had been treated by others before Baumgarten, but he both advanced the discussion of art and beauty and set the discipline off from the rest of philosophy. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who used Baumgarten's Metaphysica as a text for lecturing, retained Baumgarten’s use of the term aesthetics as applying to the entire field of sensory knowledge. When combined with logic, aesthetics formed a larger discipline which Kant called gnoseology, a theory of knowledge that other philosophers called epistemology. Only later was the term aesthetics restricted to questions of beauty and of the nature of the fine arts.

Kant used the term aesthetics to argue that aesthetic appreciation reconciles the dualism of theory and practice in human nature, thereby leaving the way open to identify beauty (a relative, shifting and elusive concept) as a profoundly psychological quality (and not inherent in the artwork) by formulating a distinction between determinate, determinable, and indeterminate concepts. For him, beauty is non-determinate because we cannot know in advance whether something is beautiful or not by applying a set standard. He also deemed the concept of beauty non-determinable because, due to creativity, we will never find such a standard. Beauty, therefore, must reside in the indeterminate supersensible. And so must noise. This approach supports Walter Benjamin’s (1892- 1940) conception of aesthetics not as a part of a theory of the fine arts, but as a theory of perception.

For me, such an approach to noise aesthetics was anticipated by Georges Bataille (1897-1962)** when he considered excess the non-hypocritical human condition, which he took to be roused non-productive expenditure (excess) entangled with exhilaration. Excess, for Bataille, is not so much a surplus as an effective passage beyond established limits, an impulse which exceeds even its own threshold.** When one takes an interpretative metaphorical view of noise—broader than the typical, somewhat fatuous, reductive explanations—one soon detects that the concept of noise itself is an open concept.” The concept of noise itself is pantheoristic. But in my use of the term (based on my activities as an artist) I understand art noise to be fundamentally an extravagant activity of creativity.*°

However, a new meaning for noise in art (and in life) is not developed by thinking about the aesthetics of noise as an invasive and unpleasant return to a dark primal unconscious.’ It works when noise is also understood as an expanded” psychic thermidor: when it takes us back from the edge and rounds out our sensibilities as it forces us to get with the underlying assumptions of excess inherent in noise.” As Allen S. Weiss says in his incisive book Phantasmic Radio, “Noise creates new meaning both by interpreting the old meanings and by consequently unchanneling auditory perception and thus freeing the imagination”* This book is an attempt at facing up to the radical implications of those assumptions, and at purging us from conventional ways of thinking about noise (which is often disapprovingly).

This purging strategy provides a means of exemplifying various methods of thinking about noise. But it will not position noise in an easy opposition to Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s (1717-1768) codification of classical ideals as those being primarily uncomplicated and Apollonian in their logic, for when the idea of simplicity takes on the intensity of a righteous injunction, the implied equation between simplicity and goodness obscures a less evident function, that of cognitive constraint.

Plus noise today has become too subjective’ and ambient for that kind of dialectic between Apollonian calmness in relation to Dionysian non-restraint. And too sublime,” with its mix of alarm, approval, apprehension, and ascendancy. As Edmund Burke says in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: “The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight I call sublime”. So this time, sublime immersion into noise promotes a conflicted but promiscuous ontological feeling (awareness/consciousness) where aesthetic cognition of the limits of the aesthetic attain the actual state of the generally subjective world of consciousness itself.

Pertinent to these noise concerns is, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and his acute criticism of the static culture of the bourgeoisie, particularly as it relates to the gesamtkunstwerkkonzept in Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy), Nietzsche's account of classical Greek drama and its merits. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche procures the concepts of the Apollonian and the Dionysian principles from Greek tragedy. According to Nietzsche, the Apollonian principle: reasoned, restrained, self-controlled and organizing is subsumed within the Dionysian principle: that which is primordial, passionate, chaotic, frenzied, chthonic and creative. This dialectical aesthetic tension allows the imaginative power of Dionysius to operate, in that the products of this operation are kept intelligible by Apollonian constraint.

Hence Nietzsche examined the dialectic between an Apollonian calmness in relation to an antecedent Dionysian non-restraining tragedy which has its origins in the chants of the Greek chorus. By invoking the power of the Greek drama, Nietzsche implied a pejorative judgement on subsequent dramatic forms of realism and inert spectatorship. Generally speaking, this aspect of Nietzsche's thought thus participated in the widespread ideal embedded in Romanticism* of a popular recovery of the mythic precondition necessary for cultural consciousness based on, in most cases, the sublime excess of the infinite.“