Immersion Into Noise

Abstract

The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and re-alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of 'life.' There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the interface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomorphic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo-political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation. Immersion Into Noise Joseph NechvatalAn imprint of MPublishing -University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, 2011 Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at MPublishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP's editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Contents List of Figures 7 Preface 9The Art of Noisy Noologies 13Into Noise: Tabula PrefaceOn 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...

Before and Beyond the Bachelor Machine

“…Here the coming cyborg woman of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927, Figure 8) and Donna Haraway (Haraway 1991) are already undone by overwhelming complex disturbances they cannot contain. That immersion into visual noisy disturbance (Nechvatal 2011) is essential to theorizing pansexual bachelor machines.…”

“…That immersion into visual noisy disturbance (Nechvatal 2011) is essential to theorizing pansexual bachelor machines.…”

Value of nothing

“…[…] This noise is not analytically decomposable, as communication theory would have it, into a multiplicity of signals, information-bits, that are irrelevant or that conflict […]. (Lingis 105) Specifically on noise as the aesthetic determination of networked, non-Euclidian environments see (Nechvatal, 2011 and2009) 9 For Foucault this kind of archive is never closed, never completed, never achieving the totalizing and universal state of 'truth', and yet it is productive of a form of existence that reclaims difference from representation, a surface out of depth and singularity out of homogeneity: "[I]t dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history: it breaks the thread of transcendental teleologies; and where anthropological thought once questioned man's being or subjectivity, it now bursts open the other, and the outside." (Foucault 1989, 131) .…”

The Meaning of Indeterminacy: Noise Music as Performance

“…In Noise, however, indeterminacy celebrated as spectation invariably gives way to participation and interaction, and in fact requires an interactive listener (Collis, 2008: 38). From the view of information theory in social performance, noise is an excess of signification, presenting the greatest range of creative materials to be drawn from (LaBelle, 2006); art made of noise forgoes ‘conclusive meaning’ and instead offers ‘non-objective communication of emotional significance’ through excesses of sensation in ‘a lush, phantasmagorical clamor developed on the basis of inclusion’ (Nechtaval, 2011: 33, 35). This should be distinguished from Cascone’s (2000) characterization of ‘glitch’ music as electronic music employing subtle, operational interruptions in counterpoint.…”