Immersion Into Noise

Painting Modernist Noise

As initiated (by the students) in the studio of Gabriel-Charles Gleyre (1808–1874), Impressionist painting restored noise concentration onto the two-dimensional surface of the canvas while simultaneously suggesting an interregnum of luminous space. As such, it also played a consequential role in modelling fin-de-siècle French aesthetics. One thinks here of the ephemeral paintings of Claude Monet (1840–1926), particularly his extensive series of paintings, Haystacks (painted between 1890 and 1892) and Rouen Cathedral (painted between 1892 and 1894) and then Nymphéas, the series of 23 large paintings (19 of which were 2 by 4.30 meters (6.56 by 14 feet)) which he created late in life based on his Giverny garden's Bassin des Nymphéas. From 1915 to 1926 Monet exhibited all of these paintings in wall-to-wall installation mode, filling the three rooms of the l'Orangerie des Tuileries in Paris. But also indicative of this noise aesthetic are the paintings of Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Alfred Sisley (1839–1899) and Jean-Frédéric Bazille (1841–1871).

Post-Impressionism extended this noise momentum, for example, with Georges Seurat's (1859–1891) mammoth 1886 Pointillist canvas Un Dimanche après-midi à la Grand Jatte. Here, everything on the canvas is inexorably locked together in one flowing noise as the composition (taken as a whole) postulates an uninterrupted enveloping energy devised from the color theory of the chemist Eugène Chenoiseeul (1786–1889). We can see this continue in the Divisionist paintings of Seurat's friend Paul Signac (1863–1935), for example in his painting la Voile Jaune of 1904 which shows a ship disintegrating into its environment. Paul Cézanne likewise extends this noise tradition in such a way, that his influence on the 20^th century is hard to overstate.

As Rudolf de Lippe pointed out in his book La Géometrisation de l'Homme en Europe à L'Epoque Moderne, increasingly in the Modern era the geometricization of human vision became the general methodical condition in the West, characterized by an analytical sight which decomposes the immersive noise vision sphere into geometricized fragmented parts. This is a modern technological vision whose effectiveness lies in its tendency to isolate and decontextualise noise scope. Indeed, modern technology had an enormous social impact in the 20^th century in this, and other, respects. The automobile and electric power, for instance, radically changed both the scale and the quality of 20^th century life, promoting a process of rapid urbanization and a substantial change in lifestyle through mass production of household goods and appliances. The rapid development of the aeroplane, the cinema, and the radio made the world seem suddenly smaller and more accessible. Since 1900, the speed of travel has increased by a factor of 10 to the 2^nd power, known energy resources by 10 to the 3^rd, explosive power of weaponry by 10 to the 6^th, and speed of communication by 10 to the 7^th power. Such new ways of understanding involve a change in perspective, and that change is marked in the 20^th century by an extended propensity for immersion into noise.

“An ‘automatic’ scribble of twisting and interlacing lines permits the germ of an idea in the unconscious to express, or at least suggest itself to consciousness. From this mass of procreative shapes, full of fallacy, a feeble embryo of an idea may be selected and trained by the artist to full growth and power. By these means, may the profoundest depths of memory be drawn upon and the springs of spiritual instinct tapped”. So wrote Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) in a short essay called “Notes on Automatic Drawing” in 1916 for the British art magazine FORM. This statement recalls the noise art in the Abside in Lascaux, but who the heck is Austin Osman Spare?

Spare was a chaos noise artist replete with potentials, but who has no place in the canon of Modern Art. He is a spiritual noise artist who concentrated on transforming his libidinal energy into noise art through the use of automatism almost ten years prior to the Surrealists. In a way, he is an artist with whom I cannot be satisfied, but with whom I can be impressed in terms of the art of noise. Why impressed? Because among the many complexities that have transpired in today's society due to the delirious effects of information-communication technology—and the proliferation of visual information that has resulted from this technology—is the changing nature of artistic definition. And Spare’s use of automatic instinct in creating his noise art addresses this condition fully. As you may know, automatism, in the arts, is an act of creation which either allows chance to play a major role or which draws on the unconscious mind through free association, states of trance, or dreams. Spare was a pioneer in this noise practice specifically with his experiments in trance, which is basically self-initiated work with reflexive feedback loops—the basis of cybernetics.

He is impressive, too, in philosophical terms, as contemporary postmodern thought has been concerned with the poststructuralist deliberation on the notion of the subject in order to question (and unlasso) its traditionally privileged epistemological status. Particularly in respect to the automatic-assisted techno-artist (an artist whose discourse revolves around networks and rhizomes), there has been a sustained effort to question the role of the artist/subject as the intending and knowing autonomous creator of art—as its coherent originator. Again Spare’s automatism informs us here. In fact, for me, the semi-automatic drawings of A. O. Spare have become emblematic of this question of the rigorous scrutiny of the subject which Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) has described of as logocentrism: the once-held distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity; between public and private; between fantasy and reality, and between the unconscious and the conscious realms.

Today, we understand that these distinctions are breaking down under the pressure of our speeding and omnipresent computer communications network technologies. We are now part of an automated technologically hallucinogenic culture that functions along the lines of a dream, free from some of the strictures of time and space; free from some of our traditional earthly limits that have been broken down by the instantaneous nature of electronic communications.

The modernist existential concept of the singular individual has been supplanted by the electronic-aided individual, in a way liberating her from linear time, and vaporously placing her in a technologically stored eternity (simulacrum-hyperreality). This quality of phantasmagorical and perverse displacement has for some signified a tightening spiral which formulates a new vision of existence, a vision which Jean Baudrillard has called pornographic and which Deleuze and Guattari have called schizoid. Both these descriptions apply aptly to the drawings of A.O. Spare in a variety of ways that I will make apparent shortly. For those, and they are numerous, who are not familiar with the work of Spare, let me first provide some rudimentary background on him.

Austin Osman Spare was born the son of a London policeman. Doom loomed abundantly in Fin de Siècle England as Spare came of age, thus his development into what can now be recognized as a late-decadent, perversely ornamental, graphic dandy in the manner of Felicien Rops (1833–1898) and/or Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) can be readily contextualized.

As a young man, Spare was for a brief period of time a member of the Silver Star, Alister Crowley's (1875–1947) magical order. Spare's lifelong interest in the theory and practice of sorcery was initiated, he recounted, by his sexual relationship at a very young age with an elderly woman named Paterson. To perform sorcery, for Spare, was a practice meant to captivate, encircle and ensnare spirits. It is not quite the same thing as practicing magic, which is the art of casting spells or glamours. For Spare, as well as for Crowley, Tantricesque sex—the withholding of the orgasmic—held the means of access to their magical systems. However, it is in Spare's conception of radical and total pan-sexual freedom, consisting in the unrestricted expression of what he held to be the “inherent dream”, where we first detect the seditious and chaotic philosophy which drove a prong between himself and Crowley—and every other esoteric system but his own brand of chaos magic/art. [240]

In 1905, at the tender age of 17, Spare self-published his first collection of drawings in a book of aphorisms entitled EARTH INFERNO. In it, he lamented the death of what he called the “ubiquitous women of unconsciousness” (he believed that out of the flesh of our mothers come dreams and memories of the gods), and castigated what he called the “inferno of the normal”. For Spare, and I agree with him here, there are no levels or layers to consciousness, and no dichotomy between the conscious and the unconscious. There isn't even a clearly definable boundary between consciousness and the object of consciousness, between subject and object, between action and situation. There is only a depth or thickness of consciousness which varies in proportion to our state of self-awareness—from the thinnest film of near being, where we engage in pure desire/instinct driven towards action, to so paralyzingly thick opacity that it induces catatonia. The point of automatism is that the more spontaneously we act, the less self-conscious we are.

EARTH INFERNO disparages the world of humdrum banality in favor of an exotic pan-sexual orb which Spare began to reveal in a spate of non-automatic drawings somewhat reminiscent of the decadent artists previously mentioned. His intention was pan-sexual, transcendental, and androgynous—in that Spare claimed that he was all sex—and that what he was not, was moral thought: simulating and separating. Moreover, he wrote that when belief detaches itself from the accessories of convention, desire stands revealed as the ecstasy of the self, ungoverned by its simulated forms.

In 1907, Spare self-published a second collection of drawings in a publication named THE BOOK OF SATYRS which contained acute insights into the social order of his day. Then in 1909, Spare began work on a third book, this time of semi-automatic drawings entitled THE BOOK OF PLEASURES on which he worked for four years. This book emerged in 1913, as did another called THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY. In 1914, he held his first one-person exhibition at the Baillie Gallery in London. It included many of the semi-automatic sketches he drew while half asleep or in a self-induced masturbatory trance. Indeed, most of Spare's semi-automatic works (from 1910 onward) were produced in onanistic self-induced trances that he claimed were sometimes controlled by intrusive occult intelligences working through him. Here, through masturbatory trance, he said the “I” becomes atmospheric. This certainly reminds us of the disembodied state so often encountered in electronic environments (such as virtual reality) where the so-called self is uncoupled from the body and pseudo projected into computerized space. [241] Indeed, Spare considered his best accomplishments those which he said were produced through him by disembodied spirits rather than by him, often by the hand of the phantom spirits of William Blake (1757–1827), Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). Not bad virtual company. Spare quite wildly would declare that his was the automatic hand utilized by these deceased masters. Through his automatic and delirious technique, Spare claimed to be able to draw upon the profoundest depths of memory and to tap into the springs of instinct. These drawings can be found in a book Spare prepared but never self-published in 1925 that he called A BOOK OF AUTOMATIC DRAWINGS, a book that was posthumously published in 1972. More automatic drawings were lost when on May 10^th, 1941, during the height of the London bombings, Spare's London flat was obliterated by a bomb. [242]

It is in his highly extravagant practice of automatic openness and swank self-denial/self-pleasure that Spare's relevance to the poststructuralist/post-Internet conceptions of the noisily decentered and distributed subject is found. Specifically, Spare's heterogeneity relevance here lies in his interests in the loss of subjectivity as experienced in sexual transport and sexual fantasies, interests which now dovetail into our interests in the philosophical loss of sovereignty typical of the art of noise. Here, for example, with the loss of body consciousness specific to total-immersion within a virtual reality environment, one frequently senses a transporting dissolution moving consciousness away from self-consciousness. [243] Also there is an obvious bearing on aspects of on-line faux self-permutations—what are called avatars. By participating whole-heartedly in his insertion (and semi-fake disappearance) into the transpersonal symbolic economy of the sign through the assumed equivalence of life and death (in what perhaps can be imagined for us as digitized-stored post-existence), Spare remains truly an individual, if not altogether alone in his time. His was a radical transcendentally false egoless gesture (what a bogus collaboration!) which he fabricated in order to make semi-automatic art try to do magical things. In the process, he created an exciting conception of noise art which focuses on collective and collected selves. Undoubtedly, his is a view which counters the long-standing western-metaphysical-phallocratic-heroic portrayal of male-selfhood—a view which we all know too well. And yet, doesn't his view of a compiled self, akin to the essence of the death of the subject, offer just the sort of resistance to the structures of logocentric civilization that simulationist theory claimed was impossible?

Listen to what Spare wrote on this in a 1916 essay: “Let it not be thought that a person not an artist may by these means become one: but those artists who are hampered in expression, who feel limited by the hard conventions of the day and wish for freedom, these may find in automatic drawing a power and a liberty elsewhere undiscoverable”. [244]

Spare's quite early conception of the illusory coherence of the “I”, renders everyone and every-sex equally phantasmagorical (as disembodied fabula) akin to the way the speeding electronic-computer network can. His conception of automatic every-sex was clarified when he wrote, “In the ecstatic condition the mind elevates all sexual powers towards infinity”. And, “Speed is the criterion of the genuine automatic. Art becomes, by this velocity an ecstatic power expressing in a metaphorical language the desire for joy”. But, in effect, his pan-sexual joyful “I” existed primarily as the construct of a system of male forces which he claimed acted through him on the creation of a synergistic complex image. This synergistic compounding of the mnemonic threshold encapsulates our current post-postmodern-networked predicament in that the fabulated digital-self today may feel sublimated by the automatic system in which it operates. It may feel eclipsed—but also freed-up by—the mammoth computer-media-web as phantom information bits flow continuously around and through us in a vague endless whirl of unverifiablity. This digital-self unquestionably partakes in a data proliferation which forms, bit by bit, into an extensive aggregate somewhere deep in the abstruse recesses of our hard drives, a data proliferation that is awaiting discharge and reformation through noise art.

Perhaps by automatically stirring the viractual-self, Spare can be understood as a precursor of digital fluidity/copy-ability, working as he did, vis-à-vis onanistic actions while forestalling the actualization of his orgasm—thus maintaining an extended virtual state of self-pleasure. Certainly his remarkable sex/magical method for making noise art suggests a methodology based on obsession and longed for ecstasy which I have taken as my digital working method too—a method that plays in the area of control/non-control with an aim towards constructing a capricious alliance that associates discourses of machinic noise with organic sexuality, an association which opens up both notions to mental connections that enlarge them. The digital-noise-self here is impregnated by a sustained desire that becomes energized by the supposition that deep memory responds to chaotic longings and can relive original obsessions. In relationship to this method, Spare said, “The artist must be trained to work freely and without control within a continuous line and without afterthought—that is, the artist’s intentions should just escape consciousness. In time, shapes will be found to evolve, suggesting conceptions, forms—and ultimately style”.

To be sure, each era has its own redundancies and its own compliances. Yet Spare felt it his privilege, even his obligation, to sally forth and be inordinate in his openness to past representational techniques and structures, but not in any placating or merely plausible way, as the meager contemporary appropriatonists and samplers often do. For Spare, only chaotic excess may be magnificent. Only chaotic noise opulence that borders on the decadent can offer a full examination of the illusory digital-self—a self which today arises out of the present day climate of technological flow and informational abundance. Such a digital-self is the technologically expanded psyche which exhibits an anti-essentiality of the body. It is the noise body-in-bits that allows no privileged logos, but insists, rather, on a displacement or deferral of gender-based meanings. Here the sexual body is undone by chaotic disturbances it cannot contain. Here, only ideas of multiple selves can adequately represent the artist as social communicator. Here, only transformative and diaphanous notions of the self can accurately reflect the massive transformational effect of automated webbed high-technology.

So it is extremely relevant, then, to consider Spare's means of becoming courageously individual through his frenzied tranced-groupings. In effect, he achieved this through the transgression of (and by!) his artistic “masters”. In terms of the original’s unimportance to our electronic era's conception of art as simulation, Spare's claim to meta-individuality in his production (really what he claimed was a co-production achieved through automatic means) seems prophetic. If a substance-less collective history of digitized art images and the unseen labor of computer programmers lurks and reverberates internally in each technologically-aided art work today, and if in each of our computers a data-bank of visual information lingers beyond our personal propensity and (perhaps) dominates us, then an inner freedom from external authority indeed seems futile. We can only act with what authority has passed down to us. But what if the search for a digitally-assisted noise art in our contemporary context of the information society is more simply directed towards not repeating what has been learned and collected? Perhaps this possibility—as achieved through the automatic unconscious act—is what I have chiefly learned from Spare’s work and writings, as well as his exclusion from the canon of art history. By way of semi-automatic processes, art can be further problematized, cracked-open, drained and transfigured through the strange mixture Spare showed us of disinterested rapture—a generous elation where off-beat panoramas and chaotic multiple personalities have room to emerge.

To achieve this, Spare would first exhaust himself before beginning to draw in a somber candle-lit room and in a slight trance with no particular idea in mind, thereby, he believed, reaching deeper and more remote layers of chaotic memory. He did this while continuously abhorring the accepted values and maudlin conceits of his day. It has been my experience that computer programming that utilizes automatic functions can achieve similar ends. I learned this through developing in 1991–2 a real-time, operative artificial-life application based on the viral model. [245] This disruptive model, though based upon nature, makes use of automatic functions of computation to circumvent conscious control. Such a non-rational, unpredictable automation, of course, stands in stark contrast to the automation of Fordist/Taylorist production, with its legacy of instrumental rationality.

The fact that Spare was a sensual occultist should not misdirect our appreciation of his artistic and theoretical endeavor. The logic of noise facilitated by the Internet is satiated with a parallel concealment. For most, there is much mystery attached to the digital hidden codes and routing formats that expedite our tele-communications. Moreover, his drowsy semiautomatic drawings, with their multifarious and allusive search for something antithetical to the established norm—and their morbid subversion of the concept of individuality and authorship—play well on today's desire for excessive noise art that the computer tends to encourage. Spare's drawings enmesh, hinder, alter and disrupt the mundanity of elementary communications with their inexorably chimerical noise.

Today it is in the hyper-logic of the endlessly duplicable digital noise and/or sound where we can probe, much as Spare did, for a particular and personal occult expression. Also, we should remember that, within the current electronic environment of hypermedia, artistic annihilations of linear time are now possible. Thus barriers between the deceased and living become somewhat abolished. This, too, recalls Spare’s chaotic methodology. In his own fashion, he created a non-linear noise where deep-memory threatens the common order of events, thus questioning both clichéd ideas of originality and supplied social codes. Clearly, with its emphasis on origin, author and finality, his non-linear artfulness subverts the modernistic conception of production, but without merely accepting the artificial, the copy, the simulation, as the end point.

This is how the art of noise functions in our technomediacratic society—a hyper-society that deploys the effects of rhizomatic connections and trance-like repetitions. It is the artist’s task today, I feel, to disadvantage the digital reproductive technology so as to defeat its attempt at negating our art’s mystical significance. But to do this, we must abandon the Enlightenment baggage of authorizing categories and live non-linearly, while accepting nothing as flatly given. Here again, Spare inspires as he explicitly eschewed categorization and instead sought to problematize the authority of the category through hyper-logic. So Spare compels us again to take notice of the various ways artistic conventions have molded our responses and regulated our artistic denotations.

The possibilities of non-linear, complex-entangled-erotic noise configurations springing forth from the digital Id made up of mercurial symbols and pan-sexual concepts in opposition to recycled representations provides an interesting insight into the way Spare's art (with its convoluted compositions made up of vague confiscations) directs us towards the conception of the transformative possibilities of technologically-aided noise art.

Perhaps the hope that Spare's non-linear and semi-automatic noise art can show us a way to resist art history’s drive towards reification is a fragile hope indeed in our electronically-homogenized cyberage. Honestly, such a hope may be less than we deserve, but it also may be more than we usually allow ourselves to envision.

What I am certain of is the need for spontaneous, pre-rational actions in the realm of art and technology so as to pursue spiritual and erotic desires, and here Spare inspires as he indicates ways in which we may escape the prison of technological logic to encounter intimate realities bound only by the next thought and driven only by the last. This is the answer to the question “how shall I be free today?” and to best express free thought through noise art without too many tainted preconceptions.

Not to dismiss Austin Osman Spare (and his concept of the collective self—which for us can be reconceived of as technological hyper-thought) as dilettante folly is to become aware of the fact that underlying everything virtual is a web of hyper-connections upon which we can exert more manipulative desire than we are normally led to believe by the society of the spectacle. But to do so, we must actively use noise art and not be content with merely consuming it. For as Félix 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.

This reinvention of the self occurs through a curious alliance between the cold impersonality of technology and the flames of personal ecstasy in the new noise art of our time.

However, modernism in architecture (and then art) rejected such late Art Nouveau noise ideals by placing emphasis on the unity and similarity of reductivist forms. This reductive urge is called orthodox Modernism, an ideal concerned with essences and abstractions. Charles Jencks takes the view that the modern movement in architecture is based on a world-view informed by the Industrial Age with great emphasis on the mass production of virtually identical goods, and with reducing the design of something to its simplest functional elements. Simultaneously, profoundly new noise concepts in art began to appear in 1905 with Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and the Fauves at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. In particular, the Cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and George Braque (1882–1963) emerged as a radical departure from the perspectivist representational tradition of the past, as Cubism aimed to restructure representation through a redefinition of realism. Analytic Cubism (1908–1912) dropped the conventions of Renaissance framing in favor of a multi-outlook exploration of many different angles and viewpoints, articulated through overlapping and interlocking planes, as we see with Picasso's 1910 canvas Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.

In opposition to point-perspective, Analytic Cubism shows that the viewer synthesizes fragmentary accumulated evidence into an assembled totality when the viewer's volume of perceptions are detected through ambient vision in motion. Analytic Cubism re-analyzes and synthesizes vision's multiple viewpoints concurrently by tenaciously folding them (simultaneously) into one sweeping but minced formation. As such, Analytic Cubist consciousness suggests an embedded hermeneutic immersion into noise. Synthetic Cubism emphasises this non-illusionistic program in a broader way through the incorporation of elements in the environment, such as fragments of wall-paper, journals and/or photographs. A good example is the 1912 legendary, Nature Morte avec Chaise Canée (Still-life with Chair Caning) by Pablo Picasso.

The early photomontages by the Dada artist Hannah Höch are particularly relevant to noise vision, for example with her amazing Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany from 1919–20.

In this work, Höch presents us with a rush of all-over and intermingled visual fragments (like in the abside of Lascaux) that exceeds any attempt at a clean, clear signal reception. As I showed in Lascaux, this form of visual noise presentational excess offers up the possibility of multiple interpreations that may be in conflict with each other. Thus the interpreative act seems to have no end here. [246]

So now we can turn fully to the immersive work of the Dadaist artist/designer/typographer/poet Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) and his Hannover Merzbau (1923–1937), as stated a large influence on the Japanese noise master Merzbow. In the early-1920s, Schwitters began working on a collage/column which he called a Schwitters-Säule which soon grew out and up over the ceiling of his apartment in Hannover. [247] Soon it grew down across the walls, and niches were made in it to contain mementos from his friends which were later covered over until the work finally grew up through the ceiling, down through the floor and onto a small projected roof. In its entirety it was called Merzbau (Merz-house). [248] This Merzbau was abandoned to the Nazis when Schwitters moved to Norway to escape them. There he began another Merzbau (the Hus am Bakken at Lysaker) which was burnt down by children in 1951. The Hanover Merzbau, too, had been destroyed in the aerial Allied bombings of 1943, but in 1947 Schwitters began work on his final piece of what he called total art [249] —his Merzbarn. This work was to be made almost entirely of plaster with found objects embedded in it. Another relevant Schwitters project from the immersive perspective was his theorization of the Merzbühne, a “total-Merz-theater”. [250] Though this project was never realized, it paralleled a number of other total theater projects that were developing in Europe during the 1930s.

In light of Schwitters' achievements, we might now consider Clarence Schmidt's 1930s noise decor/assemblage creation of a continuous chain of grottoes and corridors and caves created on O'Hayo Mountain near Woodstock, New York, that Allan Kaprow wrote about in his 1966 book Assemblages, Environments, Happenings. [251] Schmidt's collage grotto/labyrinth has been hailed by Adrian Henri as “possibly the 20^th century's finest piece of total art” [252] —a concept of environmental art Henri developed in his book Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance which, as we have seen, stems from the Wagnerian terminology Gesamtkunstwerk: a coextensive configuration which sets out to inexorably dominate, overwhelm, and flood us with sensory impressions.

The key European avant-garde movement with initial immersive art noise suggestion was Futurism. [253] I have already pointed out the crucial importance of Luigi Russolo’s work in this respect and his 1913 manifesto L'Arte dei Rumori (translated as The Art of Noises) is seminal. The noise work of Fortunato Depero is also outstanding, such as his 1915 Edificio di stile rumorista transformabile (Building of transformable noise style)—in collaboration with Giacomo Balla [254] —and his Anihccam del 3000: Canzone rumorista (Machine of 3000: Noise song) (1916–24).

The Cubist ontological embeddedness of the view into a spread of moving optical fields was amplified in Italian Futurism, as it attempted to coalesce and condense scattered/totalized ocular impressions. Umberto Boccioni's (1882–1916) 1911 painting States of Mind II: Those Who Go is an admirable example. Responding to the machine age, the Futurists, under the philosophical leadership of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), glorified speed and the machine while expressing a rejection of the past, best exemplified by a famous fist-fight in 1910 between the Futurist painters and poets and the Venetian townspeople who reacted in anger when 800,000 manifestos, entitled Against Past-Loving Venice, were scattered upon them. [255]

Cubo/Futurism achieved a syntheses of the flickering noise optics of Post-Impressionism with the spread of urban media visual production, announcing the postulate that reality is discovered through the slant of drifting involvement as opposed to static detached understanding. This dematerialized optical noise awareness suggested further supra-visual reconfigurations that are picked up by the radical avant-garde of mid-20^th century, as we will see.

But rather than coming from Cubo/Futurism, art conceived of as total experience [256] stems, according to Henri in his book Tota Art, from Dada, a reaction against the First World War of 1914–1918. [257] It is true that the Dadaists did not restrict themselves to being painters, writers, dancers, or musicians, as most of them were involved in several art forms and in breaking down the boundaries that kept the arts distinct from one another. In particular, Henri suggests that total experience stems from Max Ernst's first Köln exhibition in 1920, in which Ernst was joined by other artists who, like him, were later to become Surrealists. The exhibition was entered through a men's urinal that was opened by an adolescent girl in a First Communion dress reciting obscene verses. [258]

Freud's intrigue with the unconscious was enthusiastically taken up by the Surrealists who saw his studies of dreams as central to their own desire to disrupt the norms of conscious perception. As Henri Ellenberger's book, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, forcefully demonstrates, Freud did not “discover” the unconscious—if we can say that anyone did, it would be Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) and Pierre Janet (1859–1947), the author of De l'Angoisse à l'Extase (Of Anguish and Ecstasy)—but Freud, working with his associate Josef Breuer (1842–1925), might be said to have posited the general principles and contents of the unconscious mind that gained predominance in the 20^th century.

Henri states that the grand Surrealist exhibitions of 1936 in London and 1938 in Paris are the most direct precursors of total art. In the Paris show, under the direction of Marcel Duchamp, [259] the ceiling of the main room was hung with 1,200 coal sacks filled with paper while a gramophone played German military marches, complimented by an ornamental pool and the smell of roasting coffee-beans. For a later exhibition in 1942 at the New York Reid Mansion, entitled First Papers of Surrealism, Duchamp created an environment out of kilometers of entangled string. [260]

We must, too, acknowledge and indeed honor an immersive noise masterpiece and source of immense inspiration to the Surrealist movement itself, the Palais Idéal of Ferdinand Cheval (1836–1924) which, to my eye, appeared to be one gigantic sprawling noise grotto when I visited it, as if the stupendous mannerist grotto-façade at villa Borromeo had been left to grow untrimmed and run amok. It was constructed by Cheval alone in the Hauterives (Drôme) between the years 1879 and 1912, the result of 93,000 man hours of hard labor.

Figure 14

Exterior view of the Palais Idéal by Facteur Cheval (Hauterives, Drôme, France)

So a question: why does quietly framed pictorial art become progressively challenged by visual noise—and to a certain extent, eclipsed by it—following the Second World War? [261] Evidently there was something endemic in the barbarous conditions of 20^th century modern warfare that facilitated this noise development at its onset, rather than any more laudable human aspirations towards the expanding of aesthetic perceptual consciousness. We can find examples of cultural visual noise previous to the war on occasion, as we have seen, but after it there is an explosion.

I have deduced that something in the consciousness of society was altered following the war and have further deduced that the bombing of civilian centers in the course of the war (that is, Köln, London, Tokyo) culminating with the American atomic bombings of the civilian Japanese cities, Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 (circa 140,000 victims) and Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945 (circa 70,000 victims), changed the world's sense of space radically.

The Allies' strategic air offensive against Germany began to attain its maximum effectiveness in the opening months of 1944. Both the U.S. air forces concerned, namely the 8th in England and the 15th in Italy, were increased in numbers and improved in technical proficiency. By the end of 1943, the 8th Bomber Command alone could mount attacks of 700 planes and, early in 1944, regular 1,000 bomber plane missions became possible. Even more important was the arrival in Europe of effective long-range fighters, chief of which was the P-51 Mustang.

However, Paul Virilio, in his esteemed Bunker Archaeology, indirectly suggested the initial date of this spatial consciousness transition as 1943, with the Nazi preparation for the first operational launching of the V-2 ballistic missile. Ballistic missiles are rocket-propelled weapons that travel by momentum in a high, arcing trajectory after they have been launched into flight by a brief burst of power. Although experiments had been undertaken before World War II on crude prototypes of the cruise and ballistic missiles, modern weapons are generally considered to have their true origins in the V-1 and V-2 missiles launched by Germany in 1944 and 1945. Both of those Vergeltungswaffen (Vengeance Weapons) defined the problems of propulsion and guidance that have continued ever since to shape cruise and ballistic missile development. Indeed strategic missiles represent a logical step in the attempt to attack enemy forces at a distance. As such, they can be seen as extensions of either artillery (in the case of ballistic missiles) or manned aircraft (in the case of cruise missiles).

In 1944, at the Peenemünde base on the island of Usedom in the Baltic, Wernher von Braun and his team created the V-2. The V-2 was 14.1 meters long (47 feet) and its payload was about 900 kg of high explosives. The horizontal range was about 350 kilometers (220 miles), and the peak altitude usually reached was about 100 kilometers (62 miles). It was first fired against Paris on September 6^th, 1944. Two days later, the first of more than 1,300 V-2s was fired against Great Britain (the last on March 27^th, 1945). Belgium was bombarded almost as heavily with them. Reaching a height of more than 160 kilometers (100 miles), the V-2 marked the beginning of the space age. After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union captured large numbers of V-2s and used them in research that led to the development of their missile programs.

Nevertheless, Pablo Picasso's 1937 monumental 3.51 by 7.52 meter (11.5 by 24.6 feet) painting Guernica presented into art consciousness an earlier (the first) civilian air-bombardment of innocent people at home in their city of Guernica Y Luno during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Here 1,654 Basque people were killed, at the bequest of Francisco Franco Bahamonde (1892–1975), and 889 were wounded, including the elderly, women, and children by Adolf Hitler's (1889–1945) Junker 52 and Heinkel 51 warplanes in the service of Spanish fascism.

Previously, there existed a separation between military and habitational space but, with the bombing of Guernica Y Luno, the swathed immersive space of the tellurian domain was suddenly deemed defunct as previous earth/covering frontiers became increasingly porous to airborne invasions. This sense of airborne vulnerability soon extended itself further and further outwards with the launching of spy and then military-communications satellites (Sputnik in 1957), the first manned space flight of the Soviet military-pilot Yuri Gagarine (1934–1968) on April 12th, 1961 (the first man in space), and then the first manned trip to the moon of the American Apollo Mission in 1969 which featured Neil Armstrong's televised trek on the moon. Rocket technology enabled military forces to put nuclear weapons on intercontinental missiles, due largely to the former work of Russian rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) (whose visionary ideals came from Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1828–1903)), the American Robert H. Goddard (1882–1945) and the German Hermann Oberth (1894–1989). With rocket technology, the space of military interaction clearly expanded and, mirror-like, entered the inner dimensions of the human psyche. Virilio verifies this shift in consciousness in his book, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, where he traces the colonization of the unhurried gaze by military technologies and the introduction of military intelligence into the indoctrination of the non-combatant's perceptions. This "rational" scopic extension of vision is accomplished precisely at the loss of another sort of vision, the ambient/holonogic, as it involves a heightened ordering and sighting of linear perspectives and a consequent geometrization of both external space and the inner human. This new sense of threatening external space perhaps is most strongly, and most fearfully, exemplified by what has become known as C3I (pronounced as see cubed eye), the electronic military intelligence spatial fusion of control, command, communication and intelligence that developed as the electronic/digital system of strategic command over the U.S. military's nuclear arsenal. Herbert York, in his essay “Nuclear Deterrence and the Military Uses of Space”, provides a fine short overview of this trend towards militarizing and sighting outer (and hence inner) space where he outlines the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program of the 1980s and its ensuing militarization of outer space. Indeed, York makes the point that, “from the beginning”, the use of the space program has been “primarily of a military, not civilian or scientific nature”. [262] In 1983, as part of the SDI program, President Ronald Reagan put forth his “vision” of what became pejoratively called Star Wars, perhaps the archetype of this oppressive spatial consciousness.

Certainly, it is true that, hidden in the computer, there is something so strong, so repetitious, so ominous, and so pregnant with the darkness of infinite noise that it excites and frightens us. This is why the innumerable ramifications of mechanical desire help us to utilize our unconscious mind. And this is the real answer to why computers are interesting in art. We admire their inhuman beauty. They return us to the experimental, to a state of sexual desire and noisy restlessness. The neural processes they mimic are our own deepest desires and meticulous obsessions. Their repetitions are the fusion repetitions of our sexual acts with their duplication of eggs, sperm and blood. [263]

Of course, nuclear weapons derive their enormous explosive force from either the fission or fusion of atomic nuclei. Their significance may best be appreciated by the coining of the words kiloton (1,000 tons) and megaton (one million tons) to describe their blast effect in equivalent weights of TNT. For example, the first nuclear fission bomb, the one dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, released energy equalling 15,000 tons (15 kilotons) of chemical explosive from less than 130 pounds (60 kilograms) of uranium. Fusion bombs, on the other hand, have given yields of up to almost 60 megatons.

Figure 15

Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb, 1945

The first nuclear weapons were bombs delivered by aircraft. Warheads for strategic ballistic missiles, however, have become by far the most important nuclear weapons. The U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons, which included the hydrogen bomb that was first test exploded in 1952, reached its peak in 1967 with more than 32,000 warheads of 30 different types. The Soviet stockpile reached its peak of about 33,000 warheads in 1988. Throughout the ballistic missile arms race, the United States tended to streamline its weapons, seeking greater accuracy and lower explosive power, or yield. Most U.S. systems carried warheads of less than one megaton, with the largest being the nine-megaton Titan II, in service from 1963 through 1987. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, perhaps to make up for its difficulties in solving guidance problems, concentrated on larger missiles and higher yields. The Soviet warheads often exceeded five megatons, with the largest being a 20 to 25-megaton warhead deployed on the SS-7 Saddler from 1961 to 1980 and a 25-megaton warhead on the SS-9 Scarp, deployed from 1967 to 1982. Hence at mid-20^th century, space became the range of both humanity's greatest fears (nuclear extinction of life on the planet) and its boldest aspirations (co-operative peaceful space exploration).

What I am proposing here, in agreement with Virilio, is that the sense of human-enfolded space was radically transformed in 1943 when the German rocket-launched bombs began to fall on London without warning, shattering the common sense of civilized, non-combatant, protected space, and that this remade human feelings towards external space thoroughly. As a consequence, I maintain, a consciousness of civilian aerial bombing, of atomic weapons, of military rocketry and of the eventual militarization of outer-space has greatly engendered the abandonment of the horizontal line in art, which for thousands of years had been the basis of aesthetics and proportion. Of course accompanying this new sense of noise space was a general post-war urge to position one's artistic activities and ideas outside of previous contexts; in western art and philosophy's case, outside of Surrealism and Existentialism.

In terms of a transformation of our sense of internal space, I find it amazing that Dr. Albert Hofmann (a biochemist at the Sandoz pharmaceutical firm in Basel, Switzerland) accidentally discovered LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate) the same year that rocket-launched bombs began to drop from the sky: 1943. LSD was first synthesized in 1938 by Hofmann but he did not know what he had synthesized until 1943 when he accidentally absorbed a small amount of LSD (which is colorless, odorless, and tasteless) and thus discovered its visionary properties. With this ingestion, Hoffman, after surveying the room he was in, realized that he now formed a nice noise continuum with everything in sight. The room seemed to shimmer in the sunlight, and he became aware of the atomic substructure that underlay the visible world of the senses.

The problems of LSD's experiential description are notorious, and the typology of its effects vary, but the central experience is one where a new level of consciousness emerges. As this cultural phenomenon did much to change the art of the 1960s to the 1980s, I shall attempt to describe LSD's salient properties as they apply to the art noise experience. Foremost in this regard is that, when experiencing the chemical, the awareness of individual identity somewhat evaporates and subject/object relationships tend to dissolve. The world seems as if it is simply a fluid, shifting extension of mind and it shimmers as if it were charged with a high-voltage electricity. Additionally, the subject often feels melted into the environment and somehow contiguous with it and there is an acute awareness of the atomic substructure of reality which makes it seem that one could pass through a wall or another person. Most importantly, the subject is somehow united with a sense of unified ground of being, and that urge, as we have seen, has driven the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal since the beginning of time.

As Bohm and others have shown us, everything in the universe is made up of, and seen as, part of the seamless unified ground of the holographic total-fabric, and LSD seems to make this visible. Furthermore, this unified ground paradigm began forcefully entering Western consciousness just following World War II's brutal demonstration of nuclear destructive power on Japan and, as we will soon see here, began to be reflected forcefully in vanguard art of the post-war period.