The
Hyper-Noise Aesthetics of an Exquisite Monster SacrŽ :
Annoyance
and its Allowances in the Age of the Digital Surveillance State
I
Art of
Noise Conundrums
In the
beginning was the noise.
-Michele
Serres, The Parasite[1]
Recently
in my book Immersion Into Noise (2011) I have mapped out a
broad-spectrum of aesthetic activity I call the art of noise by
tracing its past eruptions where figure/ground merge and flip the common
emphasis to some extent. Immersion Into Noise
concludes with a look at the figural aspect of this aesthetic lodged within the
ground of consciousness itself.[2]
In this paper, I will address noise aesthetics and the art context within our
broad-spectrum data-monitoring info-economy environment of background
machine-to-machine gigabyte[3]
communication murmur - and think
through and deploy noise art as an embedded subject within
the larger environment of ubiquitous computing cognitive capitalism.[4]
This text then will attempt then to think through an under the radar
speculative reality of noise aesthetics in the era of algorithmic
globalization. To do so, I will be examining some trends and vivid prospects
for what I have been speculatively calling noise art - that is
visual art as compared to noise music.[5]
In brief,
noise art aesthetics[6]
is a kind of unbound zone (where qualitative shifts of coordinates takes place)
in which it is possible to carry out art experiments that would be unachievable
in a different place. What noise art aesthetics has to offer is the possibility
to understand things in a different way, shifting boundaries, departing from
established functions.
This
paper is somewhat of a reaction to what some interesting contemporary
philosophers have been saying about contemporary art. Most notably, the
surprising talk "The Next Avant-Garde" that the philosopher Graham
Harman gave at the Aesthetics in the 21st Century
Conference at the University of Basel in September that engaged me with the
recent speculative realism[7] turn in
continental philosophy and aesthetics. In that talk Harman criticizes
Relational Art[8], calling it
convivial art, so as to circle back to the formalist, media specific aesthetics
of the art critic Clement Greenberg where art objects are free of the Òtyranny
of contextÓ (but letÕs not forget that they are already swallowed up in the
politics of abstraction). This supposed context freedom merges efficiently with
HarmanÕs theory of Object-oriented ontology[9]
(OOO) but seemed somewhat at odds with his proclaiming that Òthere must be a
new avant-garde in every fieldÓ that we cannot predict. Harman then touched on
the subject of figure/ground relations (the main focus of my noise art
aesthetic theory) in terms of anthropomorphic free, flat ontology without going
very far in addressing the human specialness[10]
(relationality) involved in viewing certain artworks. So soon after, I
mentioned to him the irony of the intense dislike that Clement Greenberg had
for the late work of Jackson Pollock, where Pollock played with figure/ground
indeterminate states of ambiguity.[11]
Indeed there are several vital planes of convergence between these two
figure/ground poles (particularly in their critique of political domination and
authority) that can be teased out with the art of noise. Thus this paper will
be somewhat of a friendly response to HarmanÕs talk.
Also, I
have been following closely the public proclamations of another philosopher on
art, Simon Critchley. Critchley described in 2010 contemporary artÕs dominant
trend as an in-authenticity of Òmannerist situationismÓ based in rituals of
reenactment.[12] Critchley goes on in 2012 to describe the
circumstances further, as the Òcold mannerist obsessionality of the
taste for appropriation and reenactment that has become hegemonic in the art
world.Ó[13]
So things have gotten no better. Clearly something deep-seated must be
reevaluated. And art aesthetics is more interesting when it does the work of
shifting meaning. So I am declining here CritchleyÕs urging for contemporary
art to focus in on the monstrous, as, in my opinion, that parody
of gloomy general dystopia only plays into the extreme spectacle aspect of
mannerism. To be fair, Critchley doesnÕt explain what or who he means by the
monstrous[14] but when I
think of the monstrous today I think of the high visibility of Lady Gaga (and
her little monsters), extreme Hollywood lowbrow movies and grotesque far right
political claims and postures. And in art (commodified and co-opted by the
socio-economic system that is its life blood) we have had the work of Eduardo
Kac, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Orlan and Paul McCarthy.
No, here
I am only interested in a new contemporary aesthetic labor based in a certain
exquisite untouchablity, and unseeablity Ð a monster sacrŽ affinity
of disconnectedness, that focuses on an impregnable diva-like commitment to a
nihilistic aesthetic of becoming imperceptible[15] (ala Ad
Reinhardt blackness, but one that takes you into embodied and embedded resonance
perspectives, into radical immanence, and away from extreme pure abstractions).
I am interested in an exquisite monster sacrŽ aesthetic (where personal
anthropomorphic eccentricities and indiscretions are tolerated) that is bent on
combining the neo-materialist[16]
vibrant world with a wider vision of political awareness including private
spiritual, ecstatic or numinous themes accessible through the generative
subjective realm of each individual (so not OOO); an aesthetics of perception
politics based on resonance - not
a politics of visibility - which reveals in minute particulars the full
spectrum of the extensive social-political dimensions.
This monster
sacrŽ affinity is a materialist nihilism of no that (if
it goes far enough) can transform a metamorphosis (subject to the flickering
formative forces of emergence)[17]
into an all-embracing yes of delicate abhorrence.[18]
So I am advocating here not the passive and thus incomplete nihilism of form,
but a generative and virulent and curative nihilism that unleashes forces of reverberation
to emerge and resonate like a web of inter-connected, molecular and viral
relational affects and intensities that traffics in dissonance, deviation, and
the incidental.
But what
specifically can we glean for art from this instability and resonance of covert
nihilism? In what kind of regimes of attraction/repulsion can the resonant
nihilistic art object participate, and what may it do differently from other
signs and objects? To these questions I offer a counter-theory to OOO formalism
Ð a theory of ˆ rebours[19]
exchanges of figure/ground relationships: a nimble art as monster sacrŽ that
emphasizes human and non-human entanglements. This is an art that depends on
playing out nihilistic negativity by intensifying its forces into an affirmative
nihilism. This nimble nihilist bracketing pushes the audience towards open
de-familiarizations, challenging them to think outside of the normal system of
human consciousness. In this way it is OOO aesthetically favorable. So this art
as nimble monster sacrŽ is implicated in the very type of problematic
instability that the ÔselfÕ undergoes in NietzscheÕs thought: the cohesiveness
of the culture/state distinction, like the cohesiveness of the Ôself/otherÕ
distinction disintegrates with the ontological instability produced by the
annihilation of the real as distinguishable from the illusory. With a nimble
art of noise - based in the distinction between active nihilism and passive
nihilism (or monstrous nihilism) - we can depict the underground vigor of form
as an active verve that can only be speculated at by thinking beyond the
discursive. And that enacts a shift away from the subject-object dualism that
is currently much lauded by Object-Oriented Ontologists.
The
embeddedness of our inner world - the life of our imagination with its intense
drives, suspicions, fears, and loves - guides our intentions and actions in the
political-economic world. Our inner world is the only true source of meaning
and purpose we have and nimble exquisite gazing[20]
(that involves self-investigation) is the way to discover for ourselves this
inner life. So we see now that in contrast to our frenzied data market
surveillance culture,[21]
that which trains us to fear the monstrous eyes of outer perception, an inner
gazing style of art could encourage the development of nimble private vistas
based on the embedded individual intuitive eye in conjunction with an abundant commons (not
cloud)[22]
that shares a sensibility for building a force. Of course this anti-purist
gazing-commons sphere (essentially a rejection of the tyranny of labels,
essential identities, abstractions and fixed ideas) is what allows art to make
distinctions between subjects and objects that become unstable, and that
embraces the entire embedded spectrum of imaginary spaces; from the infinitude
of actual forms to formless voids of virtuality. Subsequently my interest here
is in anti-pure nimble artists that challenge and sometimes reverse the
monstrous hierarchy of figure and ground (figure and abstraction) through
struggles with noise.[23]
The question is: how do artists and dealers and critics prevent the market from
eliminated that quality from art?
Certainly
globalization is all about world space, so noise art aesthetics here will
continue to be thought of in terms of spatialization: dimensions, areas, and
territories. What space does noise clear and what space does noise clog? How does
noise function as an attractor for a gazing-commons and as a repellent in the
monstrous era of global data mining and the digital surveillance state? How can
monster sacrŽ aesthetic thought help us to think and live differently within
our smooth and surveyed spaces through art? How can we live more intently and
intensely in our imaginary cosmos of pleasure rooted in the non-closure of a gazing-commons
aesthetic, with its yearning for otherness in the non-appropriative mode? By
not ignoring the differences between the personal and the political, but on the
contrary, by showing how these differences resonate together in unpredictable
and contingent ways to form, in the words of Gilles Deleuze:[24]
planes of consistency from which new political
concepts can be formed.
So what
does the brand contemporary art presently suggest for a
gazing-common aesthetic? Not much, yet. Julian Stallabrass argues[25]
that behind contemporary art's multiplicity and apparent capriciousness lies a monstrous
bleak uniformity and that this amounts to making culture uncurious, timid and
stupid in the service of a big business ethos of unquestioning consumer
conformity. Also, Stallabrass purports that the unregulated insular
contemporary art market seeks to dupe newbie art rubes into being enthusiastic
participants in the dumbing-down values useful to big business; values which
address all communications to the lowest common denominator of the monstrously
massive. So, the obvious question is: what about artÕs responsibility of
resistance? Perhaps surprisingly, for me the answer is to be found within the
challenge of a noise style based in resistance through the cultivation of
invisibility.[26] So I want
to argue for an agony of style of logo invisibility - and the importance that
should be given noise art aesthetic struggles for a gazing-commons.
The
principle of constructing patterns of infinite becomings is perhaps inherent in
avant-garde artistic tradition (avant-garde values). Graham Harman suggested as
much. But this avant-garde now, I think, should be considered in terms of noisy
invisibility not ontology, as deviating from the regularities of visible
normality provides the avant-garde new sources for artistic production.
Certainly, the values of the avant-garde have always been interfering with the
channels of artistic production and reception - and these values are
responsible for expanding the forms and definitions of art itself.[27]
But like in nature, noise in art plays a productive role in the invisible life
of a system when it stresses becoming-imperceptible.
But a
becoming-imperceptible-invisibile monster sacrŽ, today can no longer be a form
of enfant terrible with-drawl, akin to Marcel DuchampÕs strategic invisibility,[28]
but rather a phantasmagorical plunge into what FŽlix Guattari expresses as the chaosmosis.[29]
In that sense, becoming-imperceptibly noisy is an event for which there is no
immediate representation and therefore suited to the art of noise.
The art
of noise marks a qualitative transformation into a non-place where being and
non-being reverse into each other, unfolding out and enfolding in their
respective outsides. This short-circuit causes a creative conflagration typical
of the art of noise.
LetÕs
consider the difference between noise art (based on an individualÕs inner vision)
verses the monstrous mass machine data market,[30]
with its digital functionalism. For me the difference is in looking into and
projecting onto something - thereby discovering an emerging
manifestation based in invisibility - as opposed to looking at something.
In that sense it requires an active slow participation on the part of the
viewer - and noise style demands as much. For me this requires use of hidden
mental participation and, as such, is now essential in our climate of monstrous
mass media (mass-think) in that it plays against the grain of given objective
consensus visibility. In that sense painting becomes more like a service
product (or a server)[31]
than an autonomous (investment) object.
However,
my main interest in invisibility lay in a texture of emerging claims of
art-as-politics - with its emphasis on the production of individuality based in
a political physiology (a political function of living systems) with a strong
proposition of emergence as the key aspect. So, I will continue the work done
in Immersion Into Noise by looking at the art of noise
as an emergent property rooted in obscurity. This comparison relates to my
palimpsest work as an indeterminacy-based noise artist.
II
Hyper-Noise
Aesthetics
Noise
nourishes a new order.
-Michele
Serres, The Parasite[32]
Now I
would like to look more specifically at the possibility of further developments
in noise art aesthetics concerning where becoming-imperceptible and
becoming-perceptible nimbly interact. As sketched out in my book Immersion
Into Noise, the evolution of visual noise art develops from certain
pre-historic cave areas and baroque grottoes, to certain levels of mannerist
and counter-mannerist complexity, to noisy spatial renderings in various
exuberant architectural styles, then into cubism, futurism, dada, fluxus and
other 20th century avant-garde movements, into the screech of
technological noise art, and into the softness of software noise art
aesthetics.
As noted
above, what is important in the art of noise aesthetics is its intentional and
elongated invisibility[33]
and enigma. That is why this subject is so hard to write about. The very topic
is a very difficult one to pin down and make intelligible for good reason. The art of noise is an art of disbelief
in habitual codes of practice and understanding. You must take the art of noise
on its own terms or risk doing violence to the art.
Noise art
is not a set of homogeneous practices, but a complex field converging around
perceived weaknesses in the art system. Such a noisy hyper-cognitive stance[34]
happens when the particular of electronic connectivity is seen as part of an
accrual total system by virtue of its being connected to everything else -
while remaining dissonant. Noise aesthetics is a complex and ambiguous
political gazing, and its theory of an art of resistance and investigation
would be increasingly valuable to an analytical social movement based on
skepticism while undermining monstrous market predictabilities, as it
strengthens unique personal powers of imagination and critical thinking. This
is so as it counters the effects of our age of simplification: effects which
have resulted from the glut of consumer oriented entertainment messages and
political propaganda which the monstrous mass media feeds us daily in the
interests of corporate profit and governmental psychological manipulations.
The noise
art aesthetic of the monster sacrŽ is that of dissonant immersion into a
maelstrom of glossolaliaic unintelligibility, chaos and exaltation. The art of
noise style is a way of seeing that reverses the order of figure/ground[35]
to ground/figure. It collapses being into non-being (ontological implosion). It
creates ambivalent aleatory[36]
processes that are true to our inner essential world: dynamic pools of
expansion and disintegration.
The art
of noise is that screech amid the collapse and extension of aesthetics
connected to immanence and transcendence (where art is in the process of
becoming-imperceptible-perceptible) facing the merging of figure into
environment and environment into figure. We can find moments of this screech of
collapse-extension in contemporary complexity theory and in some areas of
information technology, nano-technology, cognitive science, and biotechnology.
These
moments of collapse-extension accompany the contemporary development where the
static image has become dynamically engaged with the human imagination and
personal choices of the viewer. In some cases literally, engaging the
participation of the viewer (who becomes what I have elsewhere renamed as the viewpant)[37]
to the point of physical interactivity. In other cases they are engaged
conceptually (or post-conceptually) by looking long and hard at the art.
Noise art
aesthetics prefers the becoming-imperceptible invisibility of the later, as the
participants in this eye-catching trend absorb into the work without engaging
in the process of exposing their actions of external choices and events to
measure and objectification (to some extent), and thus to the participation of
the public in more or less advanced forms of control and reification. I believe
that the forms of this aesthetic post-conceptual participation can be a
decisive element in offering generative possibilities of development that will
continue to be interesting and supportive of the gazing-commons.
But the
noise aesthetic character of contemporary artistic production is reflected not
only in the shift in some artistsÕ interest towards hard technologies and
non-interactive art, but also in the pervasive presence of glitchy generative
a-life digital technologies.
The
initial phase of generative a-life digital practice that was experimental,
pioneering, and research-based, is now being followed by a period of
dissemination. This becomes particularly apparent if we gaze at performative
processing software used to manipulate audio and video data, now being employed
by a great number of video and sound artists. Some of these instruments make it
possible to program noise interferences using graphic objects. This helps
multiply the number of both artistic and commercial applications: the
generation of audiovisual output, live media, VJing, and art installations
which enable the monitoring of electro-mechanical devices (or the use of
sensors) to receive input from audience stimuli. With spectator-sensoring,
again noise art aesthetics prefers the becoming-imperceptible invisibility of
hard looking to the becoming-perceptible as fodder for calculation.
However,
while the use of compiled programming languages presupposes that the artists
using them have some interest in becoming-perceptible technologies, systems
based on graphic interfaces are often also used today by artists for whom
digital technologies are no longer a distinctive element but rather a mere
conceptual preference, as we see with the paintings of Wade Guyton.[38]
The
unwanted becoming-perceptible trend is likewise evident if we consider another
aspect: the spread through social media technologies of content that uses
visualization and data monitoring, for example systems that survey and process
in real-time preferences and movements of viewpants via mobile networks. The
same becoming-perceptible tendency holds for many net-art projects. So
process-based data monitoring design and algorithmic architecture have now
passed through the experimental phase and begun to have anti-commons practical
uses. What we have witnessed for art through this development, coupled with
relational art aesthetics, is on the one hand a spilling over towards
entertainment, and on the other a growing integration with fast data monitoring
surveillance.
In
defense of the individual-based commons, my theory of the aesthetics of an art
of noise encourages data monitoring deferral. Seen as
too ÔdifficultÕ by some, for me the paucity of clean art at a fast glance
conceals the riches of associational gazing with respects to combinatory
dynamics of leisurely layered creations.
In that
respect, consider the large quantities of subtle kinds of noise that have
proliferated since electricity, especially so since the onset of information
revolution at the end of the 1970s. With it came a low impact noise emitted by
every kind of electrical appliance, contributing to the white-noise dense
texture of our acoustic environment.[39]
Such a post-industrial white noise environment is ambiguously omnipresent and
mostly subliminal.
My
suggestion for visual art noise aesthetics is, I believe, fully able to render
sensible the white noise sequencing when it uses subliminal latent excess in
its presentational mode, and when avoiding over-determination like the plague.
Because such an excess overload of representation offers us a measure of
freedom of choice in how we unpack it (or not). The greater amount of
stimulation-information needed, the greater the uncertainty that the ÒmessageÓ
(proposition) offers. That is why my preference has been for semi-abstract,
palimpsest-like work that contains subliminal latent excess. It has greater
freedom of choice, and greater uncertainty, due to an excess of information via
the ground/figure catastrophic collapse. This is what it takes to make nimble
art today, if we consider that clean pop is that which the art of noise defines
itself against. Pop spectacle is the outside of noise cultural aesthetics at
large.
My
concern here is with the ethical and liberating use of representation (and
anti-representation) within the broader image environment. By attempting to
represent the monster sacrŽs aesthetic as non-representable (as the hugeness of
post-industrial white noise is ubiquitously if subtlety present) one can
obliterate the proper object of re-representation through the
awareness/consciousness of gazing aesthetic bursts. This stress on the alterity
and ineffability of noise that eludes our fuzzy grasp of its grandeur is what hyper-noise art is
about.
The term hyper-noise is my
theory of noise art as constructed via connected-competing vectors and
figure/grounds.[40] This
concept owes something to Quentin MeillassouxÕs idea of hyper-Chaos that was
sketched out in his book After Finitude: a form
of absolutization where nothing is impossible or unthinkable.[41]
Hyper-noise
art refuses easy consumption and encourages love, because a love for visual
noise art will make perturbing events in your life more tolerable. It will make
you able to see more and make you more adaptable to disturbance, rather than
being torn up about them. It will help you to avoid psychic ossification by
your loving latent expanse. This is what suggests referring hyper-noise art to
the aesthetics of the sublime, which, in the 18th century, was
linked to the grandness of natural phenomena. Now hyper-noise art is an
innovative version of the sublime in which, for the first time, the
embeddedness that we recognize ourselves in concerning white noise matches up
with our subliminal inner noise world. This embed awareness can be produced by
noisy artistic becomings.
Generative
hyper-noise art is perhaps the most evident example of this hyper-noise
sublime opportunity, as generative art serves to produce unpredictable
results, both when it is based on arithmetic instructions contained in code, or
in other ritual rules. So hyper-noise software art means primarily some form of
generative or semi-generative art, in which the artist establishes the
operational tenets/choices that are calculated to act autonomously or (in my
case) semi- autonomously.
I have
chosen semi- autonomous means because fully autonomous generative practices,
which privilege end results that are sometimes decorative visualizations, often
make for eye candy that can be just fine for club VJing, but can only be
considered a form of measly folk art within our cybernetic-algorithmic
era.
The above
mentioned white-hyper-noise dense texture of our acoustic environment, with its
uniformity and lack of variance, suggests to me a possibility of connecting ourselves
psychically to the great chain of being (that which proceeds us and of which we
are apart) through contemporary art. However, this requires an active
imagination that is aided by the visualization properties offered up in the art
of noise.
This potential
of noise art aesthetics is embedded in the recognition of our sheer
potentiality: all the selves we have within to develop or burn out. All the
worlds we might create or destroy. Hyper-noise art shows us that we are more
diverse than we had imagined; and more tolerant. It points out that what we
have in common is a dangerous propensity for overrating our powers of
comprehension.
But noise
art aesthetics is hostile to generalizations. It is recalcitrant by design. It
affirms with jubilation our state of varied mutability. That is my general
standard of excellence for it.
Noise art
aesthetics tears our phallogocentricism apart to confront the diversity in us,
and in each other. This lesson is a necessity and the recognition of this
necessity is part of the peculiar pleasure that noise art affords us. A
pleasure clearly of rapturous abandonment where the intended effect is an inner
liberation by means of de-simulation. Noise art aesthetics opens up in us a
sense of possibility that we understand and feel at one and the same time to be
both dangerous and indispensable. It points us towards the perilous turbulences
and chancy exhilarations that pass through us: overcast, heartbroken, eloquent
passages that pull us apart even as they discharge pent-up repressed ways of
accepted common wisdom. So, my initiative for a hyper-noise art aesthetics is
not a swoon to an intricate inner violence. Rather it is more like the look and
sound of the delicately puckered anus that we each own but do not face, that
opening that keeps reminding us that we were left behind.
So noise
aesthetics is a return to the shifting ground on which music and art rests. The
art of noise gives us a sense of discovery that marked music and artÕs
beginning. It is an alternative, phantasmagorical, way to express the agitation
between form and the ground. It dislodges art and music from their customary
formal frameworks and makes them thrillingly intense again. The art of noise is
beautiful negativity.
But
understanding noise aesthetics may be the wrong goal here, as the art of noise
attempts to expresses the unsayable. Or perhaps all it says is: WAKE THE
FUCK UP (sounding a wake up call). But that is far from nothing. So
perhaps this idea of a visual art of noise is a psychotic outburst that disrupts
smooth image operations with an explosion of buried visual hysteria that
promises a highly diverse world.
Its
incomprehensibility by design connects the commons to our unconscious mind and
inner feelings through what I think to be a type of chaos magic.[42]
Through a variety of techniques often reminiscent of Western ceremonial magic
or indigenous shamanism, many practitioners of chaos magic believe they can
change both their subjective experience and objective reality. Although there
are a few techniques unique to chaos magic (such as some forms of sigil magic),
chaos magic is often highly individualistic and borrows liberally from other
belief systems. In this way, some chaos magicians consider their practice to be
a meta-belief. But I consider it to be a phantasmagoric art of noise.
Chaoist
noise art creates the visualization bridge between form and intuition, as its
uncertain images have more information in them than a clear certain image (or
sound) where the information quickly becomes redundant. Thus noise art
aesthetics gives rise to new thought. It promotes the emergence of new forms of
an old story: art.
As
mentioned above, what is important in the art of noise is its intentional
enigma. It needs to be obscure to the degree that its codes cannot be
discerned. This phantasmagorical obscurity and mystery is increasingly
desirable in a world that has become increasingly data-mined, mapped,
quantified, specialized and identified in a straight-forward matter of fact
way. This will for enigma is the basis for discovering and entering into an
immersion into the art of noise, even.[43]
Such
aesthetic enigma is alluring when intelligible mining type data processing is
perceived as hollow, trite, and insensitive. Its goal is to disrupt
instrumental logic and contradict, counteract, and cancel out false reason and
hollow feeling.
What also
interests me profoundly with the art of noise aesthetic is the extent to which
it urges the mind towards transformations. Here art is the infinite space of
hyper-chaos[44] imagination.
The hyper-chaos art noise dynamic exceeds the art world to the point where this
dynamic empowers art to oppose that which threatens it (money) - as the
strategy of a dissonant hyper-anything[45]
includes principles of networked connections and electronic links that give
multiple choices of passages to follow and continually new branching
possibilities. Instead of stressing the reflective limits imposed by the
category of art - the art of noise aesthetic can attempt to specify the
resistance embodied within it. So noise artÕs counter to the spectacleÕs misery
consists in not forgetting or denying spectacle, but in an interruption of it
with a phantasmagorical semi-remembering of pre-spectacular suffering through
which human grief is at one and the same time relived and relieved. Suffering
and joy, like figure and ground, are here tied together, neither one without
the other. Constantly flickering. Thus noise art aesthetics suggests and
produces stress in us; one might even say an urgent anxiety of disintegration.
So dedication to its merits, if there are any, might well be described as
vaguely heroic, because noise art aesthetics suggests the revelation of a
plentiful nihilistic life force. Thus noise art aesthetics can be as creative
as it is destructive. Or implies an endless struggle between the two. In that
sense it is a cul-de-sac of ill communication (vacuole)[46]
Ð the communication of enigma itself.
Indeed,
phantasmagorical falsifications of the self are high-lighted by noise arts
non-representation ability; its refusal to participate in the world of the
clear and precise, with its massive data banks, clone-like life style models
and ideological conceptual camps. When we have become too complicated to
clarify and order, but too accepting of administrations of our existence Ð
noise art aesthetics offers a certain path of socially acceptable withdrawal. I
mean here a boomeranging figure/ground withdrawal that provides the means for
secretly re-identifying ourselves, and then coming back into the world commons:
scrubbed.
So noise
art experience has something that words risk diminishing. Nevertheless, I
obviously have felt that I must take that risk because if we are to continue to
live among electronic vibrations that mine us, it may be helpful to talk back
against them. But yes, noise art aesthetics is the transmitter of unspeakable
secrets. That is why art noise matters. It wants more from us.
Moreover, it teaches us to want more from art. It
teaches us to look deeper, to hear more, and to
trust the inner noise.
There are
now many artists who see the symbolic and metaphorical dimension of a work as
of little importance. I am not one
of them. For me, the real worth of vigorous contemporary art is in its ability
to deliver to the commons excessive sensually-embodied implications (and not a
bank vault to stash virtual cash in). As noise art aesthetics are
indistinguishable from that which it produces as the art of noise, in might be
considered as a panpsychic[47]
sphere that contains systems of chance operations within it. What more can we
ask of this spherical art of noise aesthetics than making art again
unpredictably alive enough to produce palimpsest visions?
Joseph
Nechvatal
[1] Michele Serres, The
Parasite, University
of Minnesota Press (2007) p. 13
[2] This involves a question of
the qualities (and levels) of awareness of our own consciousness within aesthetic realms which
we are capable of attaining through noise art. Nechvatal, Joseph. Immersion
Into Noise.
Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press (2011)
p. 210
[3] Data storage is measured in
bytes. A gigabyte is a billion bytes of information. The New York Stock
Exchange, produces up to 2,000 gigabytes of data per day that must be stored
for years.
[4] Stupendous amounts of data generated
by nearly one billion people are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous
click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances
through VisaÕs Web site, send e-mail with files attached, buy products, post on
Twitter or read newspapers and art theory papers online.
[5] Noise Music in general
traffics in dissonance, atonality, distortion, incidental composing, etc. This
music begins with Russolo, Luigi: ÓThe Art of Noises: Futurist ManifestoÓ in
Cox, Cristoph & Warner, Daniel (ed.): Audio Culture: Readings in Modern
Music,
Continuum (2004) For more see Hegarty, Paul: Noise/Music: A History. New York: Continuum (2007)
[6] For a full investigation
into this topic see Nechvatal, Joseph. Immersion Into Noise, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press
(2011) http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ohp;idno=9618970.0001.001
[7] Speculative realism is a
movement in contemporary philosophy which defines itself loosely in its stance
of metaphysical realism against the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy
or what it terms correlationism. While often in disagreement over basic
philosophical issues, the speculative realist thinkers have a shared resistance
to philosophies of human finitude inspired by the tradition
of Immanuel Kant.
[8] Relational art or relational
aesthetics is a mode or tendency in fine art practice originally observed and
highlighted by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. Bourriaud defined the
approach simply as a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical
and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social
context, rather than an independent and private space. The artist can be more
accurately viewed as the "catalyst" in relational art, rather than
being at the center.
[9] Object-oriented ontology
(OOO) is a metaphysical movement that rejects the privileging of human
existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. Specifically, object-oriented
ontology opposes the anthropocentrism of Immanuel Kant's Copernican Revolution,
whereby objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn,
become products of human cognition. In contrast to Kant's view, object-oriented
philosophers maintain that objects exist independently of human perception and
are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other
objects.
[10] ArtÕs coherence stems from
human values and symbolic systems and the role of the beholder, thus is, and
must be, correlational and anthropocentric.
[11] For example, Jackson
PollockÕs portrait of Jane Smith, No. 7 (1952) that I saw numerous times at her home
and that is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
[12] At his talk ÒThe Faith of
the Faithless, Experiments in Political Theology at the Dance Politics &
Co-Immunity WorkshopÓ in Giessen, Germany, November 12th, 2010
[13] Simon Critchley, ÒAbsolutely-Too-MuchÓ, Brooklyn Rail, Summer issue 2012 http://www.brooklynrail.org/2012/08/art/absolutely-too-much
[14] Given his age and
Englishness I would guess Throbbing Gristle.
[15] ÒAlthough all becomings are
already molecular, including becoming woman, it must be said that all becomings
begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other
becomings. [É] If becoming- woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment,
with the becomings-animal that link up with it coming next, what are they all
rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-imperceptible. The imperceptible is the
immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula. [É]Ó Gilles Deleuze, FŽlix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translation by Brian
Massumi, University of Minnesota Press (1987) p. 279
[16] Manuel DeLanda coined the
term neo-materialist in a short 1996 text ÒThe Geology of Morals, A Neo-Materialist
InterpretationÓ where he treats a portion of Deleuze and GuattariÕs A
Thousand Plateaus in order to conceptualize geological movements. For more on
neo-materialist see Manuel DeLandaÕs interview in New Materialism:
Interviews & Cartographies by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities
Press (2012) p. 38
[17] In philosophy, systems
theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns
arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is
central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.
[18] For a musical comparison,
see ÒThe Beauty of Noise: An Interview with Masami Akita of MerzbowÓ in Cox,
Cristoph & Warner, Daniel (ed.): Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum (2004)
[19] The meaning of ˆ rebours is against the grain. Also, Ë
rebours (1884)
(translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain) is a decadent novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans.
Its narrative concentrates on the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes,
an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero who loathes bourgeois society and
tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation.
[20] to look long and intently. Gaze is often indicative of
wonder, fascination and revelation.
[21] For example take the fact
that now under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, is the
blandly named Utah Data Center, being built for the National Security Agency. A
project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled
over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store
vast swaths of the worldÕs communications as they zap down from satellites and
zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and
domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and
running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored
in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the
complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as
well as all sorts of personal data trailsÑparking receipts, travel itineraries,
bookstore purchases, and other digital transactions. It is, in some measure,
the realization of the Òtotal information awarenessÓ program created during the
first term of the Bush administrationÑan effort that was killed by Congress in
2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading AmericansÕ
privacy. For more on this trend see James BamfordÕs book The Shadow Factory:
the Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Anchor (2009)
[22] The term ÒcloudÓ is often
generally used to describe a data centerÕs functions. More specifically, it
refers to a service for leasing computing capacity.
[23] As I have done with my own
work while also collecting examples of many other artistÕs work that can be
placed in this continuum.
[24] Gilles Deleuze (January 18,
1925 - November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French
philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Deleuze conceived of
philosophy as the production of concepts, and he characterized himself as a
Òpure metaphysician.Ó In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, he tries to develop a
metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and scienceÑa metaphysics in
which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces
essence and virtuality replaces possibility. Deleuze also produced studies in
the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza,
Foucault, and Leibniz), and on the arts (a two- volume study of the cinema,
books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, a work on the painter Francis Bacon, and a
collection of essays on literature.) Deleuze considered these latter works as
pure philosophy, and not criticism, since he sought to create the concepts that
correspond to the artistic practices of painters, filmmakers, and writers. In
1968, he met FŽlix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst,
with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and
Schizophrenia,
comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Their final
collaboration was What is Philosophy? (1991).
[25] See Julian Stallabrass, Contemporary
Art: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press (2006)
[26] Perhaps this should not be
surprising given the hidden complexity of a basic internet transaction is a
mystery to most users: Sending a message with photographs to a neighbor could
involve a trip through hundreds or thousands of miles of Internet conduits and
multiple data centers before the e-mail arrives across the street.
[27] For more on this read my essay Viractuality
in the Webbed Digital Age
that was published in M/E/A/N/I/N/G
Online #5 25th Anniversary Edition (2011) http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/05/meaning-online-5.html#nechvatal
[28] Duchamp's entire artistic
activity since the "definitive incompletion" of the Large Glass in 1923 was an exercise in
strategic invisibility, giving rise to objects and events which--because they
were apparently too impermanent or unimportant or insubstantial, or because
they eluded established genre conventions, or because they confused or diluted
authorial identity--evaded recognition as "works of art."
[29] FŽlix Guattari said in his
noteworthy book, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, the work of art, for those
who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque
proliferation or extreme impoverishment that leads to a recreation and a
reinvention of the subject itself.
[30] To support all that digital
activity, there are now more than three million data centers of widely varying
sizes worldwide, according to figures from the International Data Corporation.
[31] A server is a sort of
bulked-up desktop computer, minus a screen and keyboard, that contains chips to
process data. For security reasons, companies typically do not even reveal the
locations of their data centers, which are housed in anonymous buildings and
vigilantly protected. Each year, chips in servers get faster, and storage media
get denser and cheaper, but the furious rate of data production goes a notch
higher.
[32] Michele Serres, The
Parasite, University
of Minnesota Press (2007) p. 27
[33] This parallels the fact that
in many data facilities, servers are loaded with applications and left to run
indefinitely, even after nearly all users have vanished or new versions of the
same programs are running elsewhere. At a certain point, no one is responsible
anymore, because no one, absolutely no one, wants to go in that room and unplug
a server.
[34] Nechvatal,
Joseph. Immersion Into Noise, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press
(2011) p. 32
[35] The characteristic
organization of perception into a figure that 'stands out' against an
undifferentiated background, e.g. a printed word against a background page.
What is figural at any one moment depends on patterns of sensory stimulation
and on the momentary interests of the perceiver.
[36] Aleatoricism is the
incorporation of chance into the process of creation, especially the creation
of art or media. The word derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice.
[37] Joseph Nechvatal, Immersive
Ideals / Critical Distances, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing (2009) p. 56
[38] As seen in the show Wade
Guyton: OS
at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, Fall 2012
[39] For more on this see
Schafer, R. Murray: The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of
the World,
Destiny Books (1994)
[40] Nechvatal, Joseph.
Immersion Into Noise. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press (2011) p. 31
[41] Quentin Meillassoux, After
Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier,
Continuum (2008) p. 64
[42] Some common sources of
inspiration for chaos magic include such diverse areas as science fiction,
scientific theories, ceremonial magic, shamanism, Eastern philosophy, and
individual experimentation.
[43] As an example, see/hear
Marina RosenfeldÕs Cephissus landscape (2002), an immersive noise work that undermines
the central notion of "surround-sound" technology by locating viewers
in an environment with no fixed center and numerous temporary sonic sweet spots
where short bursts of mingled electronic and acoustic sounds intersect and
decay in expanding concentric circles that suggest oscillate landscapes.
[44] See Quentin MeillassouxÕs
idea of hyper-Chaos in his compelling book After Finitude where it is defined as a
form of absolutization where nothing is impossible or unthinkable. Quentin Meillassoux, After
Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier,
London: Continuum (2008) p. 64
[45] Nechvatal, Joseph.
Immersion Into Noise. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press (2011) p. 32
[46] This is a reference to
Gilles DeleuzeÕs (1925-1995) notion of the vacuole. This concept of
noncommunication comes from DeleuzeÕs Postscript on Control Societies. DeleuzeÕs notion of control
is connected to information-communication technologyÑa concept he pulled out of
the work of William S. Burroughs (1914-1997). A vacuole is like a sac in a
cellÕs 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. Nechvatal, Joseph. Immersion Into Noise. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities
Press (2011) p. 14
[47] Panpsychism is the view that
all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified
center of experience or point of view.