Noise is still the rhythm of the present — we’re warped by its exploding presence brought by
globalization and technology. The complex task is to read through (not against) noise and collect
the things that empower us, not exhaust and dehumanize us. What empowers us is not what ‘feels good’
but what challenges our current vision of what’s possible and illuminates an alternative — it starts
with a new way of reading noise. We need noise (information) control to function.
Alexander Kluge speaks of the task of developing the ‘dragonfly eye’. Holding many points of view
simultaneously. Nodes that interconnect unevenly. You have to continually speak ‘through’ noise to
connect with the fragmented nonlinear, multi-perspective world. Villem Flusser talks about how our
time is experienced as a pile of sand, not unlike a field of noise. In this sandpile every grain of
sand is a historical event — evidence we depend on for decision making. We construct how we see the
world based on what grains make up the pile. Its form reflects its parts. Is this sandcastle
surrounded by a moat of power or are others outside of power allowed to dismantle its failings and
determine its shape?
Noise can lead the pathway to inquiry — its obscuring power ends the automatism of perception,
slowing it down and complicating meanings, and forces the imagination to fill in the blanks,
disrupting dominant patterns of thought.
I’m thinking of the image of noise and the image of how stars appear to us in the night sky. It’s
incomprehensible as a fragmented whole, but once you start making connections between bright points
(what’s meaningful, useful) a legible picture emerges from noise.
The common thread between the artists you mention is that they resist specialization and refuse to
be pinned down by disciplinary strictures (forced to one constellation) and embrace a kind of
shape-shifting practice, jumping from constellation to constellation, putting the large field of
noise into an interconnected view. This constellation-building practice gets us closer to
understanding noise not as meaningless fragments but as pieces of a complex ‘whole’ that are
interdependent — even though in reality it remains in ‘pieces’.