Immersion Into Noise

Towards an Immersive Noise Consciousness

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. [11] 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. [12] 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, Genèse 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. [13]

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 artistic-philosophical 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). [14]

Unsurprisingly, the fairly recent surge in the popularity of glitch electronica [15] 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, [16] 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 [17] 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”. [18]

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”. [19] 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”. [20]

Noise is often loud, elaborate, interlaced and filigreed—but almost always gradient and highly phenomenological. [21] 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. [22] What was once noise (unacceptable) has now become noise music (acceptable and even desirable). [23] 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 [24] we can see how both notions of in and out (of the psychic edge/frame) are contained in an expanded idea of noise [25] that becomes potentially unhindered. [26] 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”. [27] 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). [28]

Given this thinking about noise’s special conundrum (particularly when depending upon the supposed filter of analogic thought, the step-by-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 [29] 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. [30]

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 self-significance 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 [31] 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, [32] 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

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) [33] 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. [34] 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. [35] 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. [36]

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. [37] It works when noise is also understood as an expanded [38] 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. [39] 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”. [40] 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 [41] and ambient for that kind of dialectic between Apollonian calmness in relation to Dionysian non-restraint. And too sublime, [42] 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 [43] of a popular recovery of the mythic precondition necessary for cultural consciousness based on, in most cases, the sublime excess of the infinite. [44]

In ancient polytheistic Greece, sacred rites were in certain cases enacted on or near sacred grove sites. One such well-recorded rite was the ecstatic Dionysian rite. The Dionysian rite was directed not at the nymphs however, but to Dionysos (also known as Dionysius, Bacchus and/or Bakchos), the God of wine, intoxication and creative ekstasis. Dionysian ecstatic festivities were based on an even earlier form of ritual, the ancient Springtime Spree which was a three-day agricultural gala which involved the uncasking and drinking of that year’s wine, the planting of seeds, and the encountering of ghosts. [45] By intoxicatingly mixing seeds with memories of their dead in the earth (which was viewed as the domain of the deceased) the ancient Greeks were able to incorporate their departed into the drinking and planting festival of the Spring Dionysia.

Subsequently the Spring Spree evolved into the even more intense rite of Dionysian ekstasis which intensified consciousness through drink and ecstatic prancing. The culmination of the Dionysian ekstasis rite was an ecstatic frenzy in which the dancers tore apart and devoured raw a sacrificial animal, such as a goat or a fawn. At the center of the rite are the mental states of ek-stasis and en-thusiasmós, states where psychological frontiers are torn down in preparation for the immersive divine dive into a world of animalistic unity.

As we will see further on, noise in art often evokes vast entropy [46] as a form of vacuole, even as entropy quantifies uncertainty in encounters with random variables. In his book, Poétique de l'espace (The Poetics of Space), Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) speaks of the French poet Charles Baudelaire's (1821–1867) frequent use of the word vast, which is, Bachelard claims, one of the most Baudelairian of words: the word that marks naturally, for this poet, the infinity of the intimate. This, at first seemingly paradoxical statement, is correct, for Baudelaire is above all celebrated as a poet and practitioner of double consciousness: incarnating two intertwined natures. Apparent polar opposites play against (and ultimately with) each other dialectically in his thinking.

In comparable ways, art noise is both decadent and sublime when it is founded on vacuole principles of debauchment and self-indulgent consternation. Of course, such a dithyrambic logic has manifested in all modes of decadent artistic periods, from the Hellenistic and Flamboyant Gothic, to the Mannerist, Rococo, and Fin-de-Siècle, as they all opposed dogmatically imposed paradigms with hyper-engendering strategies. This is precisely what art noise does today. Because of noise’s stimulation of the nerves, the decadent sublime (as safe terror) is agreeably engaging (particularly in grating harsh noise music) [47] even as this psychologically intense feeling is bound up with our sense of mortality in an existential way similar to the terms of Jean-Paul Sartre's (1904–1980) Being and Nothingness. Indeed the term sublime specifically refers to an aesthetic vacuole value in which the primary factor is the presence or suggestion of undivided vastness and immense breadth of space, which is incapable of being completely ascertained.

Noise art (musical and visual) therefore never offers us conventions. Rather, when good, it is like a fertile seedbed which undermines the hitherto clear, false distinctions between representation (identity) and the imagination by way of negating and recombining. Here, semblances and sounds are always already connected within a crushed and dark and obscure excessive orb, as noise art negates artistic representations (and all they imply), thereby affirming a consciously divergent way of perceiving and existing. Such excessive artistic noise can therefore spawn in us a sense of affinity which communicates individuality in totality without forfeiting liberty.

I should say that several of my ideas on this subject of noise stemmed from reading Georges Bataille's Visions of Excess (which appeared in English translation in 1985) after which I began to experiment with (and analyze through my artwork) various artistic approaches towards noise and excess. [48] In the terms Bataille proposes, any “restricted economy”, any sealed arrangement (such as an image, an identity, a concept or a structure) produces more than it can account for, hence it will be inevitably fractured by its own unacknowledged excess and, in seeking to maintain itself, will, against its own rationalized logic, crave rupture, expenditure, and loss. More specifically, for Bataille, the term expenditure describes an aspect of erotic activity poised against an economy of production. [49] Yet Bataille's accomplishment transgresses disciplines and genres so repeatedly and so thoroughly that capsule accounts of his work in terms of noise are compelled to delegate themselves to abstractions. One can say with assurance that his thinking consisted of a meditation on, and fulfilment of, transgressions through excess. Thus Bataille's Visions of Excess immediately impressed me as it resonated handsomely with the overloaded nature of my palimpsest-like grey graphite drawings from the early-1980s (which were reflective of the time's concerns with the proliferation of ideology connected to the proliferation of nuclear weapons).

Figure 2

Palace of Power, 11x14” graphite on paper, 1984, Joseph Nechvatal

So via Bataille, I can say that noise art’s probing at the outer limits of recognizable representation, the excited all-over fullness and fervor of this syncretistic probe, isn't a failing of communications in the art; it is its subject. Good noise art, for me at least, is capable of nurturing a sense of polysemic uniqueness and of individuality brought about through its counter-mannerist style (circuitous, excessive and decadent); it is a style that takes me from the state of the social to the state of the secret, distinguishable I by overloading ideological representation to a point where it becomes non-representational. It is this non-representational counter-mannerist representation which breaks us out of the fascination and complicity with the mass media mode of communication. Noise art frees us, then, from accustomed coyness, platitudes, and predetermined perceptions with which we are deluged daily by the mass-pop media. It is my experience that it is in this artistic condition of privately excessive formlessness that we can ascertain the delimitation of mass-pop media ideology and the resultant implications of that cognizance.

Noisy Methodology

The method used here reflects on the insights noise suggests to the traditional western history of unified being (which indeed engenders extraordinarily deep conflicts). This will entail a review of past and present approaches towards ontology and an analysis of a variety of artistic maneuvers. I will non-teleologically synthesize these questions and examples of ontology into an interrelated theoretical model for noise art by clarifying its underlying philosophy of significance. I will thus outline an integrative noise philosophy by tracing the visual noise impetus through its various expressions so as to examine the immersive noise philosophy from all possible sides. Of principal interest will be the discussion of subject/object cognition.

Even though Otto Kernberg pointed out that the splitting of the subject from the object is “the crucial mechanism for the defensive organization of the ego” at its most basic (pre-oedipal) level, [50] the subject/object question pursued in this discussion will not appear in any stable binary positioning [51] of easy subject/object opposites as I recognize, as Stephen Talbott points out, that the subject/object set functions more along the dialectical lines of the magnet, where the north pole exists only by virtue of the south pole (as is the contrary). Like the supposed subject/object opposites, neither pole exists in isolation. [52] Hence a subject/object debate in terms of immersive perspective (a debate I do not wish to shy away from) is possible only with the radical conflation of this polarity into an omnijectivity (see below) which recognizes the mutual interpenetration that unites the apparent opposites. Then there is something of the subject in the most impenetrable object, and an objective, world-sustaining presence in the sheerest subject. As with the magnet, where if you nip off the slightest piece of one end of the magnet you will discover that it still possess both a south pole and a north pole, so the forces of subjectivity and objectivity co-exist in omnijectivity. It is as impossible to conceive of an isolated subject or an isolated object as it is to conceive an isolated north or south pole, but it is entirely imaginable to relinquish sight of their conjoint importance.

Useful here is the concept of omnijectivity (the metaphysical concept stemming from the discoveries of quantum physics which teaches us that mind (previously considered the subjective realm) and matter (previously considered as the objective realm) are inextricably linked in reconciling the relativist ("subjective") style found here mixed with the more absolutist ("objective") style—as omnijectivity is possible only with the conflation of polarities. It is a stance which recognizes the mutual interpenetration that unites the apparent opposites of subjectivity and objectivity. More specifically, the concept of omnijectivity emerged from the theories of quantum physicist David Bohm (1917–1992)—protégé of Albert Einstein (1879–1955)—and Karl Pribram, author of the neuropsychological textbook Languages of the Brain. Pribram noted that modern theories of how the brain stores memories did not explain how memories seem to be distributed throughout the brain as a whole. Each memory a person has was believed to have a specific location somewhere in the brain cells. Pribram, however, made the discovery that memories are not localized, but are somehow spread out or distributed throughout the brain as a whole. Even when considerable damage is done to a brain, or pieces of it are removed, organisms don't lose sections of their memory. He knew of no process that could account for such a phenomenon. Finally, the process that made the most sense in metaphorically explaining this aspect of the brain was holography. Therefore Pribram offered the holographic model as an explanation of the functioning of the brain.

The term, omnijectivity, corresponds with Gene Youngblood's term extra-objective, which he used to describe the synaesthetic and psychedelic features of what he termed synaesthetic cinema, an underground cinema tendency of the late-1960s that ostensibly combined subjective, objective, and non-objective features into a syncretistic perception of the simultaneous space-time continuum. [53] This syncretistic perception was chiefly accomplished by the use of superimposition and by “reducing depth-of-field to a total field of non-focused multiplicity” after closing the span between the inside and the outside of the picture plane. [54] Youngblood derived the term synaesthetic from Anton Ehrenzweig's (1908–1966) idea of syncretistic vision, which Ehrenzweig characterized in his book, The Hidden Order of Art as a Total Vision. [55]

An immersive noise aesthetic beckons and amends the mind/body problem, the metaphysical problem of how the mind and body (and I would stress the body's ears and eyes) are related to one another, and of how consciousness relates to conjectural substantiality in immersion. Aesthetic immersive consciousness, particularly when comprehended as noisy, may be said to be in a vibratory self/non-self referential mode and thus illustrative of what Metzinger sees as the “infinitely close and at the same time infinitely distant” [56] characteristic implicit in all states of consciousness. This pre-pleonastic vibratory comprehension, which illumes Metzinger's attestation, occurs by way of the distance that the artifice of immersive noise art confers to consciousness—an artifice which lends itself to a reactive, self-attentive unification. As such, immersive artifice works to circumvent the current fragmentary view of the body/mind in the world which has been underpinned by the Cartesian/Newtonian model of optical physics.

Based on these understandings of immersive consciousness, the abstract, immersive noise theory proposed here could develop a means for achieving insight into how the agency of aural and visual thought works when we release them from their compos mentis obligations. [57] To achieve such an examination would be to overcome the tendency for aesthetic visual thought to analyze itself in terms of a presumed separation between the process of visual thinking and the content of visual thought which is its product, and this view of immersive consciousness clarifies an initial issue of immersion into noise in one grand sense. Since visual thinking is shown to be a process consisting of the transformations of nuero-physical visual-thought impulses impregnated in continuous waves, our visual thoughts are not distinct from visual thinking. Similarly, immersive visual thought, visual thinking, and visual thinker make up a reverberating, incessant, multiple, and unified continuity.

I realize that this comprehension is nothing more than visual aesthetics catching up to basic science today. As the analytical philosopher Thomas Metzinger says, “in the physical outside world there are only electro-magnetic oscillations of certain wavelengths”, and that in a scientific look at reality, “all we find are myriads of subtle electrical impulses”. [58] Taking it a step further in seeking the field of contact between the inner cognitive world and the outer penetrable world of physics (a realm which I posit is the veritable domain of art), it makes sense to see thinking, thought, self, and experienced immersion into noise as a non-localized flow of reverberating, incessant, multiple, but hyper-unified frequencies in which self-conscious manifestations occur through an awareness of the richness of noise.

Among the more important positions in the formation of this general debate is René Descartes' (1596–1650) argument that the mind and body are quite disconnected elements that nevertheless interact with one another. Richard Rorty (1931–2007) asserts that Descartes' feat was to conceive of the human mind as an internal chasm in which both pains and clear and distinct ideas passed in examination before an inner eye. By contrast, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz asserted a theory of psycho-physical parallelism based on his theory of Monadology, his model of a system which conceived of unity in plurality and plurality in unity. Leibniz's monadological ideas have substantially influenced Gilles Deleuze, whose fertile philosophical articulations have played an important role for me.

Based on the above understanding of aspects of qualified hyper-absolutes and post-modern omnijective understandings concerning immersion into noise, my formative contention is that immersive aesthetics—when re-contextualized in a wider historical arena—can be reasonably adept in assisting us in the intrinsically hermeneutical comprehension of our existence. Such an omnijective/immersive aesthetic could be capable of heightening the relative theoretical worth of art historical scholarship in relation to the most recent developments of the information revolution, in the service of an expansive conversation concerning our aesthetic self-consciousness.

But for us to get started on the road to a fuller aesthetic self-consciousness, I wish to assert the idea of hyper-noise [59] —a notion of noise as art constructed via connected-competing vectors. [60] This anti-pure approach suggests an encircling mental ideal [61] that allows unaccustomed creative situations and sensations to connect and tolerantly co-exist. This hyper-noise idea is based on my understanding of the flat random aspects of white noise in conjuction with the all inclusiveness inherent in white light. In hyper-noise, signal-to-noise touch, run over and become akin to each other, so that self-centered human comprehension may both deepen and spread into an expansive constitution of being. This being as centered vitality might be described, as John Cage (1912–1992) suggests, as “central to a sphere without surface, [...] unimpeded, energetically broadcast [...] as transmission in all directions from the field's center”. [62]

So art as white-noise-light speaks to us both at the center and at the edges of our frame of cognition (that frame semi-forced on us by the social and psychological conditioning of empiricist/positivist philosophy). And, as such, white noise art might allow us to feel the outer limits and finer levels of our most exquisite vacuole sensibilities.

Because we will never succeed completely in understanding these feelings, white noise art is tragic. Because we never stop trying, white noise art is comic.

Towards a Noise Vision: the revolution will be visualized

Following a short discussion of Noise Music (I point the reader to Paul Hegarty’s book Noise/Music, Caleb Kelly's Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, Brandon LaBelle’s Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Salome Voegelin’s Listening to Noise and Silence, Thomas Bey William Bailey’s Micro Bionic: Radical Electronic Music And Sound Art In The 21st Century, Joanna Demers's Listening Through The Noise and Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare for a fuller audio/music-specific discussions of noise) I will exemplify my notion of visual hyper-noise with the physically contained (but optically boundless) palimpsest-esque, all-over, wall-paper-like image spread found in the Apse of Lascaux, that I experienced. Here I will speak of a kind of eye noise: a distinct visual-cognitive proclivity that addresses the multiplicitious/heterogeneous impetus within a visual aggregate. I will define this visual noise as being produced by an all-over, elaborate, spread out distribution of visual incident which calls upon the optic procedure of spatial summation—a process which unconsciously totalizes the visual excess encountered. I will refer to this noise aggregate as a summational but all-over net-condition/awareness of plurality in hyper-homogeneity, a supplementary order of diversity within orders of noise. Such creative noise, I will suggest, is capable of creating new forms of order. This creative condition will relate to what I will call hyper-cognitive noise with respect to my conclusions, conclusions that recognize that from now on things will be heard and seen only from the connected depths of a noisy and nervous inclusive density, withdrawn into itself, perhaps, adumbrated and darkened by its obscurity, but bound tightly together and inescapably grouped by the vacuole vigor that is noise. [63] I submit that such conclusions are capable of fermenting a phantasmagorical discourse that is both nervously capricious and, perhaps paradoxically, socially responsible.

Accordingly, I wish to present the idea of noise art as that art which precludes established significance by replacing the assumption of conclusive meaning with one of vital excess (a non-objective communication of emotional significance). A noisy hyper-cognitive is where 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.

The strategy of a dissonant hyper-anything includes principles of networked connections and electronic links which give multiple choices of passages to follow and continually new branching possibilities. The total-hyper-being model for a new connected noise noology [64] (especially when placing emphasis on tabulating an evasive orb) is the self-re-programmable internal function which explicitly offers a furtherance in envisioning internal, anti-hierarchical models of thought to ourselves. As such it is a procedure of epistemological symbolization. [65]

This self-connected epistemological-strategic approach is based on the premise that behind all noise art, either representational or abstract, is the hypothetical exploration of the introspective rhizomatizing world of the imagination under the influence of today's high-frequency, electronic/computerized environment. Any analogue-to-digital conversion process transfigures various physical quantities into homogeneous numbers. And numbers, it must be remembered, are abstractions that have no solid tangible actuality. Moreover, since it is difficult to make sense of today's swirling, phantasmagorical media society, the general proposition behind noise art may best be to look for a paradoxical summation of this uncertainty by taking advantage of today's superficial image saturation—a saturation so dense that it fails to communicate anything particular at all upon which we can concur, except perhaps its overall incomprehensible sense of ripe delirium as the reproduction system pulses with higher and higher, faster and faster flows of digital data to the point of near hysteria.

Perhaps the result of this ripe information abundance is that the greater the amount of information that flows, the greater the non-teleological uncertainty that is produced. Hence noise. So, the tremendous load of imagery/sound/text information digitally produced and reproduced all round us today ultimately seems to make less, not more, conventional teleological sense. Information as knowledge is myth.

This seems to be in agreement with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), as he too thought that the boundaries which make up the various territories of art historical knowledge needed to be transcended by their relation to the depth of mythic representation. [66] As a result, in my view, it is noise art's obligation to see what mythic, unconventional, paradoxical, summational sense—in terms of the rhizomatizing world of the imagination—noise might make of all this based on an appropriately decadent reading of our paradoxically material-based (yet electronically activated) social media environment.

This formulation is familiar with respect to the fantastical aspects projected into the qualities of an idealized situation (as we know from many kinds of antediluvian religious metaphysics and their artistic transcendental expressions). Salient here is that the function of the symbol is to (supposedly) intellectually transposition people momentarily to other realms of reality. Indeed one prime aspect of any noise is its ability to relocate consciousness into another aspect of the world. [67] Noise art, then, is a form of deviant encoding that precipitates inner shifts within a communicative space by use of an annoying grammar that can smash together and interfere with neighbouring discourses.

This subject of noise vision, and the rhetorical strategy needed to explore it, especially interests me in that encounters with noise art (one may assume) could create an opportunity for personal transgression and for a vertiginous ecstasy of thought. [68] As I suggested before, noise-based perception-cognition (awareness) requires a plenum consciousness where there is only the slightest difference between an intentional and an involuntary exceeding of representation. Such an explosive collapse of utilitarian consciousness (combined with the pursuit of inexactitude), I wish to suggest, may fashion an abstract intensity within our perceptual circuitry—hence exceeding the assumed determinism of the technological-based phenomenon inherent (supposedly) in our post-industrial information society.

The history of art is, of course, full of new epistemological shifts and I maintain here that the shift in perspective which noise provides is just such a shift, replete with a newness based on a long preparatory gestational development. [69] Indeed, it seems to me that as human psychic energies are stifled and/or bypassed by certain controlling aspects of mass informational technology, such a personally transgressive ecstatic phenomena will most likely increasingly break out in forms of noisy thinking—resulting in noisy art.

In closing this introduction, I just want to mention that in my view one of the most important characteristics of immersion into noise is its sense of encompassing being within a field of vibratory enshrouding: an intertwined embossed shrouding that places us at odds with the closed, cliché, visual-audio signal and resituates us within vibrancy.

The emergence of the theoretical project I have outlined above will, I hope, contribute to the surpassing of thought representations by inventing a noisy thinking/art in which what matters is no longer only uninterrupted identities, or logos, or distinctive characters, [70] but rather a lush, phantasmagorical clamour developed on the basis of inclusion. [71] Such dynamic abstract thinking (and the art forms that result) I hope will be presented to us only in an already pre-connected vivacious state of noise, already articulated in that insinuated clatter that is linking us in a vacuole discourse which is both non-teleologically oriented and intellectually responsible.