Immersion Into Noise

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.