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.